Of all the things that have changed in China over the past 30 years, transportation has undergone one of the most obvious of transformations. Where city streets once swarmed with bicycles, they are now full of automobiles. Cars clog intersection and expressways. Their exhaust clouds the sky and the air is full of the sound of horns. But zipping through the congestion is the vanguard of another transportation revolution: vehicles that use no gas, emit no exhaust and are ...

Dyson Inc.'s new bladeless electric fan resembles anything but a fan. The company calls it an "air multiplier." To the average sci-fi enthusiast, it looks like a miniature replica of a stargate — but alas, this gadget does not create a wormhole that teleports people to distant worlds. When introduced recently to students in a cafeteria at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the ring-shaped contraption immediately drew curious onlookers. "It's clearly a fan," said engineering student ...

My condition began when I read of a couple in New York City who had vowed to live a whole year without toilet paper. They were conducting an experiment in environmentally low-impact living as research for a book, they said. For a year they would eschew transportation that emits carbon dioxide, shun foods wrapped in plastic packaging and, most dramatically, conduct the elimination of their waste without the aid of wasteful paper products. I mull the logistics of paperless hygiene as ...

I hate gas grills. Perhaps hate is too strong a word. No, hate is the word. While I love gas ranges, and only wish I still had one instead of the electric coils beneath ceramic glass in my new apartment, when it comes to outdoor meat cookery, gas is a perversion and a corruption, effete and decadent. It justifies every jeer we heard from behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War: voices that said that America ...

For a businessman in Trenton who wants to call the Western Electric Co. in Manhattan—but doesn't know the number—it is about as easy as falling off a logarithm: first he dials 2125551212 , then 2125712345 for Western Electric. If he is lucky he won't have to give an extension number for the man he wants to talk to; if he is luckier, he can still remember why he was calling in the first place.This numerologicl nightmare is only a foretaste ...

Shai Agassi, the founder of Better Place, the most sophisticated electric-car enterprise in the world, projects the ebullient confidence of a man facing a giant wave of money. "Within less than this decade the No. 1–selling car in the world will be the electric car," he says. "It's the biggest financial opportunity the world has ever seen. We're seeing a $10 trillion shift in an industry in less than a decade. It's the Internet, and add another ...

Retiree Robert Shively spends his days on the golf course. For many, that would be a dream come true, but not quite in the way Shively does it. The 68-year-old is the cart mechanic at the Niagara Falls Country Club. Two and a half decades ago, his then employer, Occidental Petroleum Corp., cut its traditional defined pension plan in favor of a 401-type system. So instead of getting a guaranteed pension check of $1,308 a month for his ...

The milling picket lines, the fire hoses, the club-wielding police were all reminiscent of the bloody strikes of the 1930s. When the International Union of Electrical Workers struck General Electric last week, the company vowed it would keep its plants open for all employees who wanted to work. Both sides knew the vow could lead to violence. It was not long in coming. Outside G.E.'s big River Works plant in Lynn, Mass., 200 pickets tried to block cars of nonstrikers from ...

The news from Japan continues to be grim. While the world's attention remains fixed on the catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and on the brave efforts to stop radiation from leaking into the air, sea and land, the toll from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami continues to rise. As I write this column, the official count is 11,232 dead and 16,361 missing, making the disaster the worst natural calamity that a rich nation has suffered in many ...

The prospective decision by Japan's government to take control of the Tokyo Electric Power Company may seem belated to the rest of the world, given the confusing way the firm has managed the Fukishima nuclear reactor crisis. But it seems to reflect official recognition of the relatively quiet but deep public frustration with TEPCO. Indeed, while a large part of the rationale for potentially taking up to 50% of TEPCO may be to prevent Asia's largest ...