A New Start

Thermogenesis

Brown Fat: Making Heat

When you are first born, your body does not have much white fat to help insulate and retain body heat; although there are white fat cells, there is not much fat stored in them. Brown fat cells are somewhat smaller than white, are composed of several smaller fat droplets and are loaded with mitochondria, which can generate heat. A newborn baby produces heat (a process called thermogenesis) primarily by breaking down fat molecules into fatty acids in brown fat cells. Instead of those fatty acids leaving the brown fat cell, as happens in white fat cells, they get further broken down in the mitochondria and their energy is released directly as heat. This same process occurs in hibernating animals, which have more brown fat than humans. Once the newborn baby starts eating more, developing layers of white fat, the brown fat goes away. Adult humans have little or no brown fat.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/fat-cell.htm/printable

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermogenesis

http://store.discovery.com/detail.php?p=85735&v=animal-planet&pa=discoveryxml

FT; Room to Read helps educate Laotian women

Room to Read helps educate Laotian women

By David Pilling

Published: December 5 2009 00:21 | Last updated: December 5 2009 00:21

Somphet Phongphachanh with pupils

It is 7.30am and Somphet Phongphachanh is already in tears. The trigger for her emotion is a reminder of the previous day’s encounter with a girl forced to live far away from home so she can attend school. The girl, Mome, had herself broken down as she explained how her family could not afford her daily transport costs to a distant school, obliging her to leave home to continue her education.

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Mome, 15, who now attends a boarding school for ethnic Laotians, is the beneficiary of a scholarship from Room to Read, an educational charity that the FT is supporting in this year’s seasonal appeal. Though Mome’s circumstances are not ideal, she is flourishing at the school, which caters to girls from groups with a high risk of dropping out. Her ambition is to be a doctor.

That may sound far-fetched. But Somphet, now Room to Read’s country director, achieved exactly that. The daughter of an illiterate mother, she became a doctor after winning a scholarship to study medicine in neighbouring Vietnam. She returned to Laos in the 1990s but her real love, born of the opportunities she had received, was education. She gave up medicine to work for a Japanese educational charity before moving to Room to Read, whose operations in Laos she helped establish.

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The Laotian education system is so thinly spread that some schools are designated “complete” to distinguish them from the thousands of others that cannot offer a full complement of classes. Many “incomplete” schools teach children in multi-grade classes, where pupils from different age groups are taught together. “Some schools hardly have any textbooks. They say: ‘Somphet, this is the only textbook we have,’” she says.

Somphet, like all local Room to Read staff a native of the country she works in, was attracted to the organisation by its low overheads and insistence that it work only with committed communities. “We want our libraries to be run by the communities themselves,” she says.

In just five years, her organisation will have established nearly 700 libraries, built 140 schools and put more than 800 girls on long-term scholarships. At one school, where Room to Read worked with villagers to build new classrooms and a library, Somphet’s visit prompts a small religious festival. A priest chants over a floral display lit with candles and the villagers tie dozens of lucky threads around Somphet’s arms. She is then presented with sliced-up chicken and banana spirit. When the ceremony is over, Somphet stands and gives an impassioned speech, talking for a good 10 minutes. The women mop their reddened eyes.

When it is over, she turns to the FT and translates. “They want me to be president,” she says with a shrug of the shoulders. “But I tell them: ‘Somphet is too busy.’” It goes almost without saying that she is in tears.

David Pilling is the FT’s Asia editor

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Holy Warriors

Holy Warriors

Review by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Published: December 12 2009 00:16 | Last updated: December 12 2009 00:16

Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades
By Jonathan Phillips
The Bodley Head £20 448 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

The crusades have everything a historian could want: slaughter, conquest, hubris, faith, folly, greed, heroes and villains. But histories of the crusades have usually reflected the era in which they were written.

At their height, the crusades were seen as the noblest enterprise of their time; after their downfall, the crusaders seemed to represent everything that was rotten about the papacy and barony. By the time of the Enlightenment, the crusaders were no more than murderous freebooters. Walter Scott’s novels restored their glamour and they enjoyed a renaissance as dashing Christian soldiers, a view shared by the French and British statesmen and soldiers who reconquered the Middle East in 1917-1918. Sir Steven Runciman’s history (1951-1954) treated the story as a colourful drama. To al-Qaeda and enemies of Israel, the Israelis are merely new crusaders. After 9/11 and George W Bush’s clumsy reference to the war on terror as a crusade, the Americans became fused with crusaders, whose reputation again hit rock bottom as ignorant, greedy western colonialists.

The best academic historians have always eschewed these absurd distortions. In Holy Warriors, Jonathan Phillips delivers a history that brings the concept of the crusades up to the present, with both academic analysis and elegant storytelling.

All historians now regard the crusades as much more than just the conquest of Palestine and the downfall of the crusader kingdoms: they have to be seen in the wider context of the reconquest of Spain and Sicily from the Muslims, and later the savage campaigns against the heretical Cathars in France and the pagan Lithuanians in the north, as well as wars against the pope’s rivals in Europe. But what is most striking about the first crusade is that the ideology was new. Phillips shows how Islam had possessed a concept of holy war from the beginning, while Christianity only invented its own version in the late 11th century with the first crusade. The modern myth that the entire crusades were an aggrandising plunder expedition is disproved by the obvious fact that vast fortunes were sunk and lost in the Middle East without any payback. The crusade was a blend of religion, chivalry, honour, baronial power and adventure that is impossible to understand without acknowledging how seriously the Europeans took their faith.

An 1841 oil painting by Jean Victor Schnetz show crusaders processing around Jerusalem, 1099

Equally misleading is the modern myth that the Islamic world was highly cultured compared to the oafish crusaders. There had, indeed, been a period of sophisticated Arab culture, with translations of the Greek scientific and philosophic classics being made while the Christian west stumbled blearily out of the dark ages. But by 1099, the Arab world had fragmented into a perpetual civil war, divided into fiefdoms ruled by coarse Turkish warlords – a situation not dissimilar to that of the crusaders themselves. In both cultures, high artistry and elegant literature coexisted with astonishing brutality and religious rigidity.

In 1099, the crusaders finally reached Jerusalem, encouraged along the way by visions and miracles, and slaughtered much of the population. Godfrey de Bouillon became advocate of the Holy Sepulchre, followed by his brother Baldwin, who became king of Jerusalem. Phillips tells how at first the Islamic leadership scarcely reacted to the fall of Jerusalem: it took almost half a century for the success of the crusader kingdoms to produce the political necessity of an Islamic holy war. Its creator was a Turkish warlord named Zengi who slaughtered whole cities, scalped, crucified and tortured at every opportunity.

By the late 1170s, that fascinating figure Saladin, who was brutal in his rise to power but an unusually attractive ruler once he got there, had united Syria and Egypt against Jerusalem. Even he, however, considered slaughtering the Christians, only dissuaded by the crusader threat to destroy the Dome of the Rock. Richard the Lionheart almost won back Jerusalem but, while he was a soldier of genius fighting a statesman of genius, both he and Saladin were stretched to extremes by a war that neither could win. Once Jerusalem had fallen and Saladin had died, his heirs wound down their holy war, fighting off a series of aggressive crusade attacks on Egypt and even negotiating a division of Jerusalem itself with the extraordinary Arab-speaking cosmopolitan Emperor Frederick II. But the result was the fall of the Saladin dynasty and the rise of a series of even more blood-spattered warlords of jihad. Sultan Baibars, born a slave, rose to become king of the Mamluk empire and scourge of the crusaders, another fearsome sadistic conqueror like Zengi before him and very far from the Walter Scott image of chivalrous Saladin with his scimitar.

Phillips delivers an excellent, compelling, flamboyant and refreshing history of the crusades with wonderful character sketches, the thunder of knights charging and the flash of broadswords in the Syrian sun, but also the analysis and perspective of the best academic history at its most readable. While not allowing modern history to distort the 12th century, he shows how the peace deal that Saladin and Richard Lionheart tried to negotiate was amazingly similar to the negotiations over Jerusalem today.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is writing a history of Jerusalem

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

FT: Man in the News: Burt Rutan, rocket man

Man in the News: Burt Rutan, rocket man

By Matthew Garrahan

Published: December 11 2009 23:17 | Last updated: December 11 2009 23:17

On a freezing evening in the Mojave desert this week, 800 people huddled under a swaying plastic tent to see the man hailed as the pre-eminent genius of the aerospace industry unveil his latest creation.

As storm clouds darkened the sky, howling winds battered the tent, to the obvious alarm of some guests. But Burt Rutan, the engineering brains behind the Virgin Space Ship Enterprise, the craft Sir Richard Branson hopes will soon be taking paying passengers into space, barely noticed.

Mr Rutan has lived for many years in Mojave, 100 miles north of Los Angeles. His ruddy, craggy face is familiar with the punishing gales that pummel the desert, while his impressive pair of bushy, mutton chop-sized sideburns lend the 66-year-old the air of an eccentric scientist.

He may be eccentric – he lives in a pyramid-shaped house in the desert and owned a parrot able to mimic a dog and a cat – but his achievements leave rival aerospace engineers in the shade. He designed Voyager, which in 1986 completed the first non-stop round the world flight on a single tank of fuel. His next project, SpaceShipOne, was funded by Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, and won the $10m Ansari X-Prize when in 2004 it became the first privately-financed craft to complete – and repeat – a sub-orbital flight.

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“He is beyond legendary,” says Tig Krekel, the former chief executive of Hughes Space and Communications, and a friend of Mr Rutan’s for the past 15 years. “He’s up there with the Wright brothers.”

The Enterprise, the successor to the SpaceShipOne programme, is Mr Rutan’s most ambitious project. With Sir Richard now on board, the aim is to turn manned, sub-orbital flights into a commercial reality. Enterprise can carry six passengers, each of whom will have paid $200,000 for a two-hour journey to sub-orbital space and back. Sir Richard’s Virgin Galactic group hopes to begin regular manned flights within two years, yet without Mr Rutan the prospects for commercial space-flights would be considerably dimmer.

Like the detachable craft used in SpaceShipOne, Enterprise has wings that pivot to the earth, allowing it to drop at great speed upon re-entering the atmosphere. He took his inspiration for the design from a badminton shuttlecock and the way its feathers create drag, slowing its fall. Although he has been in thrall to space travel for most of his life, an early inspiration was Wernher von Braun, the pioneering German rocket scientist, whom he saw in a film with Walt Disney in the 1950s.

Born in Oregon, Mr Rutan was raised in Dinuba, a town in California’s Central Valley. His father was a dentist but he also had a pilot’s licence and owned a small plane. Burt and his brother, Dick, would both become accomplished pilots but it was Burt who developed a fascination with aerodynamic design and engineering.

As a young boy, he would ask his mother to drive the family car faster so he could test the effects of the rushing air on his latest model plane as he held it out of the window. Later, when studying at California State Polytechnic University, he constructed his own miniature wind tunnel which he fixed to the roof of his 1966 Dodge Dart to fine-tune his designs.

He uses his engineering nous to solve problems. In the 1980s he built a three-storey, pyramid shaped home in Mojave. “He designed it himself,” says Doug Shane, vice president of Scaled Composites, the group founded by Mr Rutan – and a test pilot for SpaceShipOne. “He wanted a more energy-efficient house.”

Mr Rutan has also applied analytical thinking to the golf course to improve his ability on the greens. “He is a horrible putter,” says Mr Krekel, who often plays golf with him. “So he designed a uniquely shaped composite putter. It didn’t make him any better but he thought it did. Burt takes an analytical approach to golf just as he does with engineering. He has an ability to come at problems from different directions, which is why three of his aircraft are hanging in the Smithsonian.”

He has been married four times – a friend told a 2004 New Yorker interview that his current wife was “the best one he’s ever had” – and he tends to start each day with a rousing rendition of James Brown’s “I Feel Good”.

“Burt is plain-talking, direct and he has a great sense of humour,” says Robert Weiss, president of the X-Prize Foundation. “He can also be very charming – and he looks a lot like Wolverine’s dad.”

Like the X-Men character he resembles, he has an intensity that manifests itself in his political views. A libertarian, he has no patience with government meddling in private enterprise and is dismayed at the waste in America’s official space programme. “He understands space projects need to be regulated but doesn’t think governments should regulate every aspect of life,” says Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic.

Climate change is another source of contention. While he has built an energy efficient house and was one of the first to drive an electric car, he is unconvinced by the link between global warming and man-made emissions. “He’s not a climate-change denier, he just doesn’t think the science is necessarily right,” says another friend. “He’s big on conspiracy theories.”

Yet he takes great pride in America. “When a military jet flies overhead and makes a lot of noise, Burt will look up and say: ‘That’s the sound of freedom’,” says Mr Krekel.

His life has not been without tragedy. In 2007, three employees were killed and three seriously injured at an accident at his test facility in Mojave. For the safety-conscious Mr Rutan, the incident was hard to take. He also suffered health problems, having open heart surgery last year. Yet he still gave a spirited performance on stage in Mojave this week, appearing alongside Sir Richard, Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California, and Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico.

His passion for commercial space travel still burns, friends say. “One of the seminal moments for me was shortly after he won the X-Prize,” says Sir Richard. “We were at Burt’s pyramid house for dinner with Paul Allen and Will Whitehorn and he laid out his vision for Space Ship Two. And then he laid out his vision for getting to Mars before any government.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

Fortune: No Free Lunch

The Fortune, July 20th 2009 No Free Lunch

Futurist Stewart Brand was first to say “information wants to be free.” People forget he also said it “Wants to be expensive.” By Richard Siklos

RARELY A DAY GOES BY in media and tech business circles without somebody crying “Information wants to be free!” as a justification for distributing or copying someone else’s content—and as an explanation for why so many traditional information purveyors are in peril.

So I thought I’d ring the man who coined the phrase: Silicon Valley futurist Stewart Brand. This year, after all, marks the 25th anniversary of the event where the words were first uttered—the fist Hackers Conference, which Brand helped organized, n 1984.

According to a transcript of the event, Brand first said “Information wants to be free” in response to a point made by Apple co-founder (and recent Dancing With the Stars contestant) Steve Wozniak. Wozniak told the 125 programmers gathered in Sausalito, Calif., that it was a shame companies wouldn’t give engineers the rights to products they developed if the company decided not to market them.

Brand followed up by saying, “On the one hand, information want to be expensive, because it’s valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. “On the other hand,” he went on, “information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

Wozniak replied, “Information should be free, but your time should not.”

The exchange presages what’s happening in the music industry: Artists are making less and less from selling their music, but they are making more and more from touring. “That leaves the music companies somewhat out of the middle, but so what,“ says Brand, who is now 70.

“My original points is that because the technology keeps moving, it keeps the tension alive between free and expensive, so it never stabilized. In a sense, this rewards the innovative and punishes those who can’t innovate or charge rapidly.” Brand says his trademark phrase often is misinterpreted in the current debate—even by smarty-pants people like Google executives.

The big issues in the corporate world seem to be whether content should be supported by advertising, subscriptions, or micropayments—not whether such material should truly be completely free (though intellectual-property protection remains as important an issue as ever).

But Brand also motes that untethered information in the form of electronic distribution isn’t to blame for the rapid deterioration in the finances of the newspaper industry. “Free is not the main event there,” he says. His view is that newspapers need to embrace a world of two-way social interaction and information immediacy (e.g. Twitter stuff).

He also thinks the industry missed a chance to take classified ads online. In the early 1990s, Brand advised the Washington Post to do so. “Of course the editorial people thought the classified ads were the low-rent thing that went next to the high-value thing, the editorial stuff,” he recalls. “They basically said to me, “Thank you for your time, and where do we send the check?’” Every day, it seems, there are fresh examples of Brand’s famous paradox. “How much did we all pay for the video of the woman being killed in Tehran the other day? Nobody paid anything,” Brand says. “It’s not only free of money: It’s free of credit for [the person] who shot the video.” Will people still be chanting “Information wants to be free” in another 25 years? Brand isn’t sure, but alas, he says he has no brilliant new catch phrase to supersede the old one.

photo

Quote

"I am easily satisfied with the very best."

  --  Winston Churchill

Time: 10 Questions for Jane Goodall

ENLARGE PHOTO+

Jane Goodall

Attila Kisbenedek / AFP / Getty

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1921622,00.html#ixzz0ZLmr9MG8

Thursday, Sep. 10, 2009

10 Questions for Jane Goodall

By Jane Goodall

What characteristics make chimpanzees seem most like human beings? Chip Clark, ST. JOHN'S, NFLD.

There are so many. Biologically, they're so close to us. Their brain is almost identical. We have fascinating similarities in social behavior: kissing, embracing, holding hands, shaking the fist. These things are done in the same context that we do them and clearly mean the same kinds of thing.

How can you be so empathetic with chimps? Kantesh Guttal, PUNE, INDIA

We are all part of the animal kingdom. The kind of empathy that I feel for people is the kind of empathy I feel for chimpanzees. Do they have a dark, brutal side to their nature? Yes. So do people.

How do you work with so many animals and not get overly attached to them? Specialist McKinzie Baker CAMP TAJI, IRAQ

I've always been very attached to the animals I work with, and although a scientist is supposed to be subjective and lack empathy, I've always thought this is wrong. It's the empathy you feel with a living, individual being that really helps you understand. Then you can use your scientific training to find out if your intuition is correct.

Which do you like better, chimps or humans? Michael Boshears PALMER, ALASKA

I like some chimpanzees much better than some humans and some humans much better than some chimpanzees.

What's your position on people who have chimps as pets? Siobhan Laurino, LYNN, MASS.

When they are little, they are cute, but by the time they reach early adolescence, they are already as strong as a human, and you cannot predict what will trigger a sudden anger or rage. The Jane Goodall Institute is fighting very hard for legislation that will prohibit people from owning other primates as pets. Very rarely can they give them a good life.

I'm conflicted about the use of primates in research for human illnesses. What's your opinion? Idalia Roberts, ATLANTA

The more that we learn about these animals, the more we realize that from the animals' point of view, such experiments amount to torture. In many instances, it's immoral to be thinking about animals as living test tubes. So let's get our brilliant brains together and come up with alternatives as quickly as we can.

Why don't you approve of zoos? Don't they educate the public about the environment and endangered species? Hari Venkatesh CHENNAI, INDIA

Some zoos are O.K. The problem is, there are so many zoos where animals don't have a proper social group. They don't have things to do, and an animal like that can't educate anyone, because it's not behaving normally at all. You might just as well look at a photo or a stuffed example in a museum, because you won't see any natural behavior.

I would like to work with orangutans when I grow up. Any tips about how to get started? Lauren Webb, LAYTON, UTAH

I would urge you to look up our Roots and Shoots programs for young people who have the same kind of passion as you. If we don't protect these orangutans, there won't be any left for you to study.

Do you feel that in your lifetime you will have achieved what is necessary for the permanent protection of chimpanzees? Dan Quigley HOPKINTON, MASS.

Unfortunately not. We've got an awful long way to go.

Do you think there is still hope for this planet despite all the bad things we have done to our environment? Elsie Wong, HONG KONG

When I was doing the research for this book, I met so many extraordinary people who rescued species from the brink of extinction when everybody else laughed at them. One example is the California condor. At one time, there were just 12 of these birds left in the wild and one in captivity. Now there are 300. This bird would have gone but for a small group of people who would not give up. As long as we have people like that, there's hope for the future.

VIDEO AT TIME.COM To watch a video interview with Jane Goodall and to subscribe to the 10 Questions podcast on iTunes, go to time.com/10questions

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Nissan EPORO Robot Car

http://www.nissan-global.com/EN/NEWS/2009/_STORY/091001-01-e.html

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October 1, 2009

Nissan EPORO Robot Car "Goes to School" on
Collision-free Driving by Mimicking Fish Behavior
- Advanced Robotic Concept Debuts at CEATEC JAPAN 2009 -

YOKOHAMA (Oct. 1, 2009) - In 2008, it was the flight of the bumblebee that inspired Nissan's Biomimetic Car Robot Drive "BR23C" concept. In 2009, fish-inspired technology takes center stage in Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.'s new Nissan "EPORO*1" robot car concept, which is designed to travel in a group of like-vehicles, mimicking the behavioral patterns of a school of fish in avoiding obstacles without colliding with each other.

Nissan will demonstrate this breakthrough technology with a group of six EPOROs when they make their world debut at the CEATEC JAPAN 2009, October 6 - 10 at the Makuhari Messe.

EPORO robot car

CEATEC JAPAN is an annual exhibition showcasing cutting-edge electronic and information technologies. Nissan is the only auto manufacturer that has been a participant in this exhibition since 2006. In addition to displaying the futuristic EPORO, Nissan Senior Vice President Minoru Shinohara will deliver a keynote speech, titled "The Future of the Automobile with Electric Vehicles and Car Robotics Evolution," and participate in a panel discussion on "EV leads to a society of 'All Electrification' and 'All Mobilization.'" Nissan will also exhibit the new Skyline Crossover's*2 current collision prevention technologies and provide test drives of an eco-drive diagnosis system utilizing an iPhone®*3 application.

EPORO Robot Car So what do a bumblebee and a school of fish have in common? Both demonstrate extraordinary "anti-collision" abilities, navigating instinctively and intelligently through challenging terrain by detecting and avoiding obstacles - just as future Nissan safety vehicles may have the capability to do. But where bees - and the BR23C robot car - are likely to travel alone, the schooling behavior of fish, or a group of vehicles, presents a far greater challenge in terms of collision avoidance. In developing EPORO, three rules of fish behavior were applied to its driving control.

School of fish swimming

Generically, fish recognize the surroundings based on lateral-line sense and sense of sight and form schools based on three behavior rules. A laser range finder*4 is used for lateral-line sense, while UWB*5 communications technology is utilized for the sense of sight.

Fish Behavior Rules AREA 1: Collision Avoidance Change traveling direction without colliding with other fish. AREA 2: Traveling Side-by-Side Travel side-by-side with other fish while keeping a certain distance between each fish (to match the speed). AREA 3: Approaching Gain closer proximity to other fish that are at a distance from them.

"We, in a motorized world, have a lot to learn from the behavior of a school of fish in terms of each fish's degree of freedom and safety within a school and high migration efficiency of a school itself. In EPORO, we recreated the behavior of a school of fish making full use of cutting-edge electronic technologies," said Toshiyuki Andou, Manager of Nissan's Mobility Laboratory and principal engineer of the robot car project. "By sharing the surrounding information received within the group via communication, the group of EPOROs can travel safely, changing its shape as needed."

This is the world's first development of a robot car that can travel in a group by sharing the position and information of others within a group via communication technologies.

While Nissan's ongoing research aims at creating collision-free vehicles based on its safety concept "Safety Shield*6," new technologies used in EPORO also aim to improve migration efficiency of a group of vehicles and contribute to an environmentally friendly and traffic jam-free driving environment.

[Keynote Speech]
Minoru Shinohara, Senior Vice President in charge of Research & Development, will make a presentation on "The Future of the Automobile with Electric Vehicles and Car Robotics Evolution," talking about an impact of EV on society and a safer automotive society in the future with collision-free vehicles.

Time and Date: 11:00 - 12:00, Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Venue: Convention Hall B, International Conference Hall

[Panel Discussion]
The trend toward the prevention of global warming and reduced dependence on oil are expected to create new industrial fields. Combined with new technologies, they will help contribute to a sustainable society. In this session, titled "EV Leads to a Society of 'All Electrification' and 'All Mobilization,'" executives from leading companies of related industries and local government officials will discuss business opportunities and challenges for this new energy revolution.

Time and Date: 14:00-16:00, Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Venue: Convention Hall B, International Conference Hall

* For details, please refer to the official web site.

[Other Presentations and Exhibits]
□Exhibition of Advanced Technologies for Collision-free Vehicles
Nissan will exhibit current cutting-edge autonomous safety technologies including Distance Control Assist System, Lane Departure Prevention and Around View Monitor with Parking Guide as well as cooperative technologies like Intelligent Transport Systems. Nissan's latest model Skyline Crossover, which was released in Japan in July 2009, will also be displayed.

□Test Drive Event for Eco Drive Check with iPhone®
In September 2009, Nissan and Yokohama City began a cooperative project called "E1 Grand-Prix," in which drivers compete in a fuel efficiency challenge. Aiming to encourage more people to participate in the project, Nissan will conduct a trial test ride event with an eco-drive diagnosis system. Utilizing an iPhone®*3 application on the roads around Makuhari Messe, participants will drive on a two-to-three-kilometer public road course and check how close they can come to the benchmark fuel-efficiency target.

* CEATEC JAPAN: Cutting-edge IT & Electronics Comprehensive Exhibition.
Official website: http://www.ceatec.com

1. *1: EPORO: Abbreviation of EPisode O (Zero) Robot (Episode aiming to be CO2-free and accident-free).
2. *2: Skyline Crossover: Infiniti EX outside Japan.
3. *3: iPhone® is a registered trademark of Apple Inc.
4. *4: Laser range finder: Ranging sensor which measures the distance to an obstacle with reflection of laser light.
5. *5: UWB: Ultra Wide Band: Short-distance radio communications technology that measures the position of the target and the distance to it through calculation of the time lag from transmission to reflection of the pulse signal.
6. *6: Safety Shield: Nissan's advanced and active safety concept based on the idea the vehicle that always helps protect the people from normal driving situation to after the collision. It focuses on supporting drivers not to let them face the risk.

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