The Pearl – Qatar is one of the most ambitious development projects taking place in the Middle East. The video documentary examines this massive offshore residential development which offers freehold accommodation on a reclaimed island over 900 acres in size.

Below is part of a recent 60 minutes report on Qatar.

watch the full episode HERE.

This is a cockpit view landing approach of a commercial airliner at Los Angeles airport (30 minutes compressed into 3 minutes, which is 10 X faster than normal speed.)

A very colorful and unique perspective of the city lights from the cockpit of a commercial jet as it makes some final turns before landing at LAX. The song is Los Angeles by Sugarcult.

The Sadde Six Arrival is from the northwest into Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). The downwind leg is entered over the Santa Monica (SMO) VOR and roughly follows the 10 freeway. The base leg turn is made along the 710, and final approach into runway 24R parallels the 105. Initial altitude is 10,000 feet and the runway elevation is approximately 125 feet.

Sweet, Huh?!

Someone’s gotta say it…. NASA scientists are doing their best to tell us where this plummeting six-ton satellite will fall later this week. Right now, it’s seems like they have NO IDEA!

For now, scientists predict the earliest it will hit is Thursday U.S. time, the latest Saturday. The strike zone covers most of Earth.

Not that citizens need to take cover. The satellite will break into pieces, and NASA put the chances that somebody somewhere will get hurt at just 1-in-3,200. Hey, if you had those odds on winning the lottery you’d most likely win. So this honestly doesn’t look good folks, no matter what NASA is saying.

They say falling space debris has never injured anyone, although maybe someone in the middle of no-where has been injured, but it’s never been reported in the western world. Nor has significant property damage been reported – again hear say. They say this because most of the planet is covered in water and there are vast regions of empty land.

If you do come across what you suspect is a satellite piece (haha) NASA doesn’t want you to pick it up. The space agency says there are no toxic chemicals present, but there could be sharp edges. Also, it’s government property. It’s against the law to keep it as a souvenir or sell it on eBay. NASA’s advice is to report it to the police.

The 20-year-old research satellite is expected to break into more than 100 pieces as it enters the atmosphere, most of it burning up. Twenty-six of the heaviest metal parts are expected to reach Earth, the biggest chunk weighing about 300 pounds (136 kilograms). The debris could be scattered over an area about 500 miles (800 kilometers) long. That doesn’t sound good right?

Apparently there’s stuff that falls out of the sky almost every year. This year two massive Russian rocket stages have taken the plunge.

All told, 1,200 pounds (544 kilograms) of wreckage is expected to smack down — the heaviest pieces made of titanium, stainless steel or beryllium. That represents just one-tenth the mass of the satellite, which stretches 35 feet (10.7 meters) long and 15 feet (4.6 meters) in diameter.

Russia’s old Mir station came down over the Pacific, in a controlled re-entry, in 2001. But one of its predecessors, Salyut 7, fell uncontrolled through the atmosphere in 1991. The most recent uncontrolled return of a large NASA satellite was in 2002.

The most sensational case of all was Skylab, the early U.S. space station whose impending demise three decades ago alarmed people around the world and touched off a guessing game as to where it might land. It plummeted harmlessly into the Indian Ocean and onto remote parts of Australia in July 1979.

Predicting where this satellite will strike is a little like predicting the weather several days out, says NASA orbital debris scientist Mark Matney.

Experts expect to have a good idea by Thursday of when and where UARS might fall, Matney says. They won’t be able to pinpoint the exact time, but they should be able to narrow it to a few hours.

Given the spacecraft’s orbital speed of 17,500 mph (28,162 kph), or 5 miles (8 kilometers) per second, a prediction that is off by just a few minutes could mean a 1,000-mile (1,609-kilometer) error. It probably won’t be clear where it fell until afterward. HaHa you guys are hilarious! You really have no idea. Does this mean anyone can now work for NASA?

Space junk in general is on the rise, much of it destroyed or broken satellites and chunks of used rockets. More than 20,000 manmade objects at least 4 inches (10.2 centimeters) in diameter are being tracked in orbit.

Build Your Dream Car Company or BYD. BYD is a Chinese company that originally built batteries for cell phones and decided to build electric and hybrid cars that will be also be available in Europe and the US. Warren Buffet and Berkshire Hathaway bought a equity stake 10% in BYD for $230 million a few years back.

Warren Buffett is famous for his rules of investing: When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is usually the reputation of the business that remains intact. You should invest in a business that even a fool can run, because someday a fool will. And perhaps most famously, Never invest in a business you cannot understand.

So when Buffett’s friend and longtime partner in Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB), Charlie Munger, suggested early last year that they invest in BYD, an obscure Chinese battery, mobile phone, and electric car company, one might have predicted Buffett would cite rule No. 3 above. He is, after all, a man who shunned the booming U.S. tech industry during the 1990s.

But Buffett, who is 78, was intrigued by Munger’s description of the entrepreneur behind BYD, a man named Wang Chuan-Fu, whom he had met through a mutual friend. “This guy,” Munger tells Fortune, “is a combination of Thomas Edison and Jack Welch – something like Edison in solving technical problems, and something like Welch in getting done what he needs to do. I have never seen anything like it.”

Coming from Munger, that meant a lot. Munger, the 85-year-old vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, is a curmudgeon who frowns on most investment ideas. “When I call Charlie with an idea,” Buffett tells me, “and he says, ‘That is really a dumb idea,’ that means we should put 100% of our net worth into it. If he says, ‘That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,’ then you should put 50% of your net worth into it. Only if he says, ‘I’m going to have you committed,’ does it mean he really doesn’t like the idea.”

This time Buffett asked another trusted partner, David Sokol, chairman of a Berkshire-owned utility company called MidAmerican Energy, to travel to China and take a closer look at BYD.

Wang Chuan-Fu started BYD (the letters are the initials of the company’s Chinese name) in 1995 in Shenzhen, China. A chemist and government researcher, Wang raised some $300,000 from relatives, rented about 2,000 square meters of space, and set out to manufacture rechargeable batteries to compete with imports from Sony and Sanyo. By about 2000, BYD had become one of the world’s largest manufacturers of cellphone batteries. The company went on to design and manufacture mobile-phone handsets and parts for Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung.

Wang entered the automobile business in 2003 by buying a Chinese state-owned car company that was all but defunct. He knew very little about making cars but proved to be a quick study. In October a BYD sedan called the F3 became the bestselling sedan in China, topping well-known brands like the Volkswagen Jetta and Toyota (TM) Corolla.

BYD has also begun selling a plug-in electric car with a backup gasoline engine, a move putting it ahead of GM, Nissan, and Toyota. BYD’s plug-in, called the F3DM (for “dual mode”), goes farther on a single charge – 62 miles – than other electric vehicles and sells for about $22,000, less than the plug-in Prius and much-hyped Chevy Volt are expected to cost when they hit the market in late 2010. Put simply, this little-known upstart has accelerated ahead of its much bigger rivals in the race to build an affordable electric car. Today BYD employs 130,000 people in 11 factories, eight in China and one each in India, Hungary, and Romania.

Its U.S. operations are small – about 20 people work in a sales and marketing outpost in Elk Grove Village, Ill., near Motorola, and another 20 or so work in San Francisco, not far from Apple. BYD makes about 80% of Motorola’s RAZR handsets, as well as batteries for iPods and iPhones and low-cost computers, including the model distributed by Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child nonprofit based in Cambridge, Mass. Revenues, which have grown by about 45% annually during the past five years, reached $4 billion in 2008.

In acquiring a stake in BYD, Buffett broke a couple of his own rules. “I don’t know a thing about cellphones or batteries,” he admits. “And I don’t know how cars work.” But, he adds, “Charlie Munger and Dave Sokol are smart guys, and they do understand it. And there’s no question that what’s been accomplished since 1995 at BYD is extraordinary.”

One more thing reassured him. Berkshire Hathaway first tried to buy 25% of BYD, but Wang turned down the offer. He wanted to be in business with Buffett – to enhance his brand and open doors in the U.S., he says – but he would not let go of more than 10% of BYD’s stock. “This was a man who didn’t want to sell his company,” Buffett says. “That was a good sign.”

Wang is also focused on building a stronger executive team to drive the company forward. “The good news is, he’s 42 years old,” Sokol says. “The bad news is that he’s clearly the brains behind the organization, and the drive. He has to develop a team faster, but I think he knows that.” Last winter it was Sokol’s turn to lead Wang on a tour of his home country. They started in Detroit, where BYD’s cars generated buzz at the North American Auto Show, and wound up on the West Coast, where Wang met for the first time with Charlie Munger. In between, they stopped in Omaha.

“How did BYD get so far ahead?” Warren Buffett asked Wang, speaking through a translator. “Our company is built on technological know-how,” Wang answered. Wary as always of a technology play, Buffett asked how BYD would sustain its lead. “We’ll never, never rest,” Wang replied.

Buffett may not understand batteries or cars, or Mandarin for that matter. Drive, however, is something that needs no translation. Click HERE to read the full very interesting bio on Wang Chuan-Fu.

An early criticism of the federal government’s investment in electric car infrastructure was that it focused too narrowly on a few locations. But yesterday the US Department of Energy announced 16 projects to support EV adoption in 24 states and the District of Columbia in an effort to encourage adoption more broadly across the US.

The Department of Energy’s Clean Cities Initiative Awards, totaling $8.5 million, were provided to communities ranging in experience—from those with extensive electric car charging plans in the works, to those just getting started.

With these funds, one-year projects will help communities address specific needs, such as updating permitting processes, revising codes, training municipal personnel, promoting public awareness, and developing incentives. Community-specific plans will be created and be made publicly available, allowing all stakeholders to learn best practices.

• California’s South Coast Air Quality Management District was awarded $1 million to create a unified statewide approach to planning and implementation of plug-in electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
• The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority was granted $994,500 to develop a plan for a network of electric vehicle charging stations throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.
• In Texas, $1 million will be spent to develop a plan for plug-in electric vehicle charging infrastructure for the Texas Triangle cities of Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston/Galveston, and Austin/San Antonio. Additional planning work is being conducted in Houston and Austin.
• EV readiness and deployment strategies will also be created for Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Kansas, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia. Each of the Clean Cities approved projects will receive at least $300,000.

These latest grants are dwarfed by the D.O.E.’s $114.8 million of funding for The EV Project, designed to deploy and evaluate private and public charging in California, Oregon, Washington Arizona, Tennessee and Texas. Those funds were made possible by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and were matched by another $115 million in private investment.

The funding was in line with the Obama administration’s larger goal of stimulating green jobs-creating infrastructure development, but like some other projects, it’s been slow to get off the ground. The EV Project has come under fire in states like Oregon, where it installed its first charger in June—despite having initially promised 1100 chargers by that time. According to Ecotality, the problem with the planned timetable for the EV Project was that it outstripped actual electric vehicle deliveries.

One of the benefits of the Clean Cities Initiative’s community-specific funding model is that money (and chargers) can go where they’re needed, when they’re needed—without the risk of overbuilding some areas at the expense of others in an attempt to meet deadlines.

(By Zach McDonald via PlugIn cars)

Video footage of a young girl driving a car along a busy motorway has been posted on the internet. Guess you could say it’s Mini Driver, although not to be confused with the British actress Minnie Driver. Boom Boom!

The tiny motorist gripping the wheel as she negotiates the traffic is believed to be just four years old. Her parents apparently allowed her to drive along the road in Jinal, Shandong Province, China, filming her from the back seat of the car.

In the video, posted on YouTube by user wangdazhi712, the child called Jia Zheng by a man in the vehicle believed to be her father, can be seen calmly overtaking other cars.

After a couple of minutes the man is heard apparently saying: “Jia Zheng, stop the car. Let daddy drive.” Once the car is pulled over, the man gets out, walks around to the driver’s side and gets behind the wheel as the girl moves onto the back seat.

He is seen removing some sort of implement from the driver’s footwell that appears to have been used by the girl to operate the pedals.

Kate Winslet escapes inferno at Sir Richard Branson’s home

KATE Winslet was forced to flee Sir Richard Branson‘s Caribbean home last night after a fire ripped through the house burning it to the ground. The Oscar-winning actress had been holidaying at The Great House on the Virgin boss’ Necker Island with her children.

Sir Richard’s 90-year-old mother, Eve, and his 29-year-old daughter, Holly, also managed to escape the building unhurt.

Sir Richard, who was staying in another property around 100 yards away with his wife, Joan, and son, Sam, 25, said: “Around 20 people were in the house and they all managed to get out and they are all fine.”
The 60-year-old bought Necker Island in the early 1980s and began building the eight-bedroom Great House in 1982.

He added: “We had a really bad tropical storm with winds up to 90mph. A big lightning storm came around 4am and hit the house.

Escaped … Kate Winslet was staying in Sir Richard Branson’s holiday home

“My son Sam rushed to the house and helped get everyone out. Kate Winslet, her boyfriend and her family were there and Holly and some of her friends were also staying. My mother was there and they managed to get her out and she is fine.

“The main house is completely destroyed and the fire is not yet completely out. My office was based in the house and I have lost thousands of photographs which is very sad.”

He added: “It’s very much the Dunkirk Spirit here. We want to rebuild the house as soon as we can.

“There’s a lot of damage and we won’t be able to stick it back together again right away. It was a beautiful house.”

Richard Branson even posted a video from the tragedy on his official blog (see below)

FACTS:

Winslet, 35, who won an Oscar for her role in the 2008 movie The Reader, has a daughter Mia, ten, from her first marriage to Jim Threapleton, and a son, Joe, seven, by second husband, director Sam Mendes, from whom she is separated.

The Great House was expected to be the venue for the marriage later this year of Holly Branson and shipbroker Freddie Andrews.

Part of the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, Necker is a private island owned by Sir Richard.

It is used by the Branson family as well as friends, and can also be hired.

Each of the bedrooms has its own balcony, four-poster bed and en-suite bathroom. A staff of 70 look after guests.

The 9/11 Memorial has taken about six years to complete. Construction has entailed pitched battles between competing interests and desires.

To understand more about the 9/11 Memorial, one may look to the person who designed it. Ten years ago, Michael Arad was a young, idealistic architect designing police stations for the New York Housing Authority — the kind of buildings that most people pass by and never really notice. But the World Trade Center terrorist attacks would soon stir a vision in Arad that will forever be part of America and its history.

The presentation of the victims’ names are cut into bronze panels that hang at the waterfall edges. The 9/11 Memorial Foundation worked with all of the victims’ families to place names in meaningful clusters or “adjacencies,” so that one victim’s name may be placed near a best friend who also perished, or neighbors who rode into work together every day are in close proximity.

“It’s hard to come to terms with something like close to 3,000 dead in an attack,” Arad says. “But when you hear a personal story, everyone can relate to that, to what it might be like to lose a family member, to lose a friend. I thought it was important to maintain that in the design, to find a way to amplify the nature of this collective loss through these stories of individual loss. That’s what the memorial is about, individual loss and a communal loss that we all experienced together.”

Very interesting news today. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic will use its SpaceShipTwo-class reusable spaceplanes for a little more than just joyrides into zero-g, as NASA’s new contract with the independent space company is a milestone for the entire space business. Just shows that Richard Branson’s wackiest venture pay actually pay-off. Virgin notes, “this arrangement marks the first time that NASA has contracted with a commercial partner to provide flights into space on a suboribtal spacecraft.”

This is technically a further step in a program that’s already seen NASA technology flights on low-altitude rockets. You can see why NASA’s made the decision: Inside the 3.7 by 2.3 meter cabin of a SpaceShipTwo, plenty of scientific payloads can be hauled up Earth’s gravity well to gain a precious few moments in the zero gravity of space–and there’s room for flight specialists too, who can monitor and tweak the experiments in a way that wouldn’t be possible on an automated low-altitude rocket.

Since the flights only last a couple of hours it’s possible to fly an experiment, do the research, wait for the ship to land, tweak it or load in a modified payload, and fly it again. Which opens up whole new vistas of academic and engineering research.

Virgin Galactic, the press release notes, is often considered a “space tourism company,” and it’s collected some $55 million in deposits from future space tourists, but it’s taking its role as a scientific lab assistant pretty seriously and has garnered assistance from the Southwest Research Institute, NanoRacks (who are already expert in sending small-scale experiments to the ISS) and a number of other spaceflight and payload integration specialists.

NASA’s hands were really tied. In the new era of the space business, with its trademark Shuttle grounded forever and only limited access to the ISS via European, Russian and (in several years) commercial rockets, NASA has to look for other ways to access microgravity. And though other commercial space companies make a lot of noise about their future, Virgin Galactic is the only one with a space vehicle in advanced flight test phases.

Christian Schallert turns a complete dive into a compact cozy modern living space. He was inspired by the designs of Japanese homes plus hidden storage units.

His bed conveniently slides underneath the balcony. The dining room table folds up into the wall, and everything else fits behind cabinet doors. There is even a small room for the restroom and a glass cube shower.

Check this video out: