Two big batteries stand side by side at the General Motors testing lab in Warren, Mich. One is an artifact, built a dozen years ago. Weighing 1,200 pounds, it could fill the back of a large pickup truck. Standing on one end, it towers over GM’s Robert A. Kruse, executive director of global vehicle engineering for hybrids and electric vehicles. The other battery is new and produces the same amount of energy but is a relatively trim 400 pounds. It comes up just past Kruse’s shoulder, and it will squeeze into the body of the compact Chevy Volt that GM plans to start producing next year. “You can see the direction the technology is driving us,” Kruse said. But while battery technology has traveled far from the big clunkers in the late 1990s, the costs and limits of current batteries remain the biggest obstacles to mass marketing plug-in vehicles. Although nearly every major auto company is moving ahead with electric-car plans, the batteries still cost about $8,000 or more each, experts estimate, and that could make electric cars money-losers. Moreover, electric carmakers warn, the industry’s manufacturing capacity is limited, and few factories are in the United States.Solving these problems could become more critical as President Obama pushes to toughen fuel-efficiency standards. Automakers are lobbying Congress for help establishing a battery industry in the United States. In the House version of the big economic stimulus package, at least $2 billion — half in spending and half in federal loan guarantees — would go to promoting advanced battery technologies and manufacturing.
On Jan. 23, the entire Michigan congressional delegation sent a letter to President Obama urging him to support renewable-energy industries and electric-car batteries in particular. Lawmakers from the state have also implored the Energy Department to speed the release of money earmarked for fuel-efficiency research. “We cannot move from a dependency on foreign oil to a dependency on foreign-made technology,” the letter said.
The issue for some is not whether battery development is needed, but whether it is the most cost-efficient means of reducing the nation’s dependency on oil. “You can heavily subsidize small volumes of electric cars and lightly subsidize high volumes, but you cannot heavily subsidize high volumes,” said Menahem Anderman, chief executive of Total Battery Consulting. “The environment and energy security will benefit more if we had a million hybrids in the United States than 10,000 [electric vehicles], and technologically and economically this is more realistic.”
For now, batteries represent the greatest obstacle to an electric car, said J.B. Straubel, chief technical officer at Tesla Motors, a small, Silicon Valley-based maker of all-electric luxury sports cars. “There is no question that we can make 10 million cars. The motors are not a problem. Power electronics the same. But with batteries, you’re beyond the existing manufacturing base. You need to build a whole new industry to make the batteries, as big as the industry that is making the cars themselves.” According to Lux Research, a consulting firm specializing in emerging technologies, the electric-car battery market is projected to grow sixfold by 2013. About 70 percent of it will be lithium-ion batteries. Similar technology could become widespread in storing wind and solar energy for utilities, too.
So far, Asian battery makers have a leg up. General Motors this month announced that it had passed over U.S. battery firms and chosen LG Chem, a Korean firm, to make the lithium-ion battery cells for the Chevy Volt. (GM plans to assemble the cells at a $30-million plant it wants to build in Michigan.) “The point is LG Chem, thanks to years and years in the prismatic lithium-ion cell business and also thanks to massive financial technological support from Korea Incorporated, has a several-year head start,” said Bob Lutz, GM’s vice president for global product development. “This is why we say if we’re serious about electrification of the automobile, we do need, as part of a national energy policy, … These are the?government support for advanced battery development. sort of things I’m hoping the Obama administration will understand.”
A123 Systems of Watertown, Mass., was one company that lost out in the competition to become the battery maker of choice for General Motors. Founded in 2001, it licensed technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Today the company has more than 400,000 square feet of manufacturing space, mostly in China and Korea as well as Massachusetts. But it has yet to land a passenger-vehicle deal (or show a profit) and is burning through cash as it strives to expand. It sells batteries for machine tools to Black & Decker, which accounted for 63 percent of A123’s total revenue from inception through Sept. 30 last year. A123 campaigned hard for the GM contract. GM’s Lutz said that the A123 batteries were “good for power tools,” but that “LG Chem is just farther along” on the batteries GM was seeking.
Other American companies, EnerDel and Altairnano, are also still looking to capture pieces of the electric-car-battery market. Now the U.S. firms are turning to the federal government to help them rev up production, and there are few voices fretting about the perils of industrial policy, especially when the economy needs a boost. Both sides of the aisle in Congress have backed government support. A123 has applied for a $1.84-billion low-interest loan from the Energy Department under the advanced-vehicle-technology program created by energy legislation in 2007 to build manufacturing facilities in the United States. EnerDel has asked for $480 million to expand facilities in
e st="on">Indiana. (Both of the state’s senators, GOP Sen. Richard G. Lugar and Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh have urged Obama to increase support for battery technology.) The Energy Department has received about 75 applications for about $38 billion in loans; the program is authorized to issue $25 billion.
Fourteen companies have banded together in a National Alliance for Advanced Transportation Battery Cell Manufacture seeking $1 billion to $2 billion in investment over the next five years. They say it is the only way to compete with Asian manufacturers. For carmakers, the choice of battery is a matter of strategy as well as technology. Three-quarters of American motorists drive 40 miles or less a day, so carmakers are trying to decide how much range an electric car battery should have. GM plans on a battery pack big enough to last 40 miles, at which point a small gasoline engine will take over. Some rival companies are considering a smaller battery pack that might go only 20 miles, still enough to serve the needs of many local commuters without adding as much weight and cost.
One company is making all-electric cars, albeit in tiny volumes. Tesla Motors has sold just more than 100 cars for about $100,000 each. Tesla has had its share of production problems, with parts coming from at least three foreign countries. But boosting battery production to serve an entire industry would be a problem of a different magnitude. If you commandeered all the lithium-ion battery manufacturing capacity in the world, you would be able to make about 1 million plug-in cars a year, said Tesla’s Straubel. Moreover, he noted, there is virtually no spare capacity sitting idle. “If you’re talking about tens of millions of cars,” he said. “You’re talking about building new companies.”
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in Seoul on Thursday, on the third leg of a week-long Asia tour. Earlier, during the flight to South Korea from Indonesia, Clinton told reporters that North Korea’s leadership situation was uncertain and that the United States was worried the Stalinist country may soon face a succession crisis to replace dictator Kim Jong Il. Clinton said the Obama administration was deeply concerned that a potential change in Pyongyang’s ruling structure could raise already heightened tensions between North Korea and its neighbors as potential successors to Kim jockey for position and power. Her comments were a rare, if not unprecedented public acknowledgment from a senior U.S. official that the secretive nation may be preparing for a leadership change following reports that Kim suffered a stroke last year. Clinton said the South Koreans are particularly worried “about what’s up in North Korea, what the succession could be, what it means for them, and they are looking for us to use our best efforts to try to get the agenda of denuclearization and nonproliferation back in gear.” “Everybody is trying to sort of read the tea leaves as to what is happening and what is likely to occur, and there is a lot of guessing going on,” Clinton said, referring to talks between Chinese, South Korean, Japanese and U.S. officials about the situation in the North. “But there is also an increasing amount of pressure because if there is a succession, even if it’s a peaceful succession, that creates more uncertainty and it may also encourage behaviors that are even more provocative as a way to consolidate power within the society,” she said. Clinton’s remarks came as North Korea stepped up belligerent rhetoric towards the United States and South Korea amid signs the North is planning to test fire what intelligence analysts believe is a long-range missile. Just hours before Clinton arrived in Seoul, the North Korean military stepped up its war rhetoric Thursday, issuing a statement in which it accused South Korean president Lee Myung-bak of misusing “nonexistent nuclear and missile threats” as a pretext to invade. It also warned it was prepared for an “all-out confrontation.” The strident statement carried on state-run media comes amid reports that the North is preparing to test-fire a long-range missile. Visiting Tokyo earlier this week, Clinton warned Pyongyang against conducting the missile tests. “The possible missile launch that North Korea is talking about would be very unhelpful in moving our relationship forward,” she said. Analysts say North Korea is using the threats and missile test preparations to win President Obama’s attention at a time when nuclear negotiations with the U.S., South Korea and three other nations stand at a deadlock and tensions with the South are at their highest level in a decade. North Korea, however, said Monday it “has no need to draw anyone’s attention” and has defended its right to use missiles as part of its space program. Kim, 67, inherited leadership from his father, North Korea founder Kim Il Sung, in 1994, creating the world’s first communist dynasty. He rules the nation of 23 million people with brutal authority, allowing no opposition or dissent. His failure to show up last September for a military parade marking the country’s 60th anniversary spurred questions about the health of a man believed to have diabetes, heart disease and other chronic ailments. Citing intelligence, South Korean and U.S. officials later said Kim suffered a stroke and underwent brain surgery in August. North Korean officials have steadfastly denied Kim was ever ill.
However, state-run media made no mention of Kim’s public appearances for weeks last fall, feeding fears that his sudden death without naming a successor could spark a power vacuum, internal struggle in the nuclear-armed nation or send scores of hungry North Koreans fleeing to China. Clinton, who will visit China over the weekend, said she would be seeking advice in Seoul and Beijing about how to resume stalled six-nation disarmament talks given questions about Kim’s health and who is now or may soon be in charge in Pyongyang. Clinton is to meet with Lee on Friday and said she would speak to him and others about how to defuse tensions between the two Koreas. Relations between the two Koreas have been tense since Lee took office a year ago taking a harder line toward the North than his liberal predecessors. The North’s military, in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, called the Lee administration a “group of traitors” and warned it “should never forget that the (North) Korean People’s Army is fully ready for an all-out confrontation.” The North’s Radio Pyongyang said tensions are so high that armed skirmishes could break out near their disputed sea border at any time, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, which monitors the broadcasts from Seoul. The South Korean military is prepared to repel any North Korean provocation, Gen. Kim Tae-young, chairman of the country’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly told lawmakers. Officials at the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the parliament could not immediately confirm the comment. KCNA also cited joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises as proof Thursday that Washington and Seoul are preparing to attack the North. The report warned the
y would pay “a high price” for such a move. The U.S. and South Korea insist the joint exercises are purely defensive.
Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women in the United States, but many women are not aware of that. Health experts say informing women about the risk of developing the disease is the first step in preventing it. Women today are more likely than ever to suffer from heart disease, says cardiologist Matthew Budoff. “They are actually at increased risk of heart disease, partly because they live longer,” he says. “And so, as they get older, they are more likely to develop high blood pressure, diabetes, and their cholesterol goes up. A lot of these issues are not discussed with their primary care physicians as diligently as men.” The first step toward fighting the disease among women, Budoff says, is dispelling the misconceptions about it — such as that heart disease only affects men. “The heart attack rate actually now is higher in women than in men in the United States,” he says. “More women die of heart attack, more women die of stroke, and more women die of heart failure than men every year in the United States. It’s really a female-predominant disease at this point.” Another misconception, he says, is that breast cancer is women’s No 1. health concern. “Breast cancer is a very important disease for women and a big health concern,” he says. “But approximately 5-to-1 of those women will die of heart disease rather than breast cancer. So heart disease is a much bigger killer of women in our society than breast cancer.” Separating facts from fiction, Budoff says, can help women make better health decisions. “Women have to make sure that they are not only getting their mammograms and self breast exams, but that they’re also finding out about their heart health,” he says. “I highly recommend that women know their numbers, know their blood pressure and their cholesterol, and after menopause, consider a heart scan to see if they have any plaque building up in their coronary arteries.” “Breast cancer is a very important disease for women and a big health concern,” he says. “But approximately 5-to-1 of those women will die of heart disease rather than breast cancer. So heart disease is a much bigger killer of women in our society than breast cancer.”
Separating facts from fiction, Budoff says, can help women make better health decisions. “Women have to make sure that they are not only getting their mammograms and self breast exams, but that they’re also finding out about their heart health,” he says. “I highly recommend that women know their numbers, know their blood pressure and their cholesterol, and after menopause, consider a heart scan to see if they have any plaque building up in their coronary arteries.” To help prevent heart disease, registered dietitian Keri Glassman encourages women to re-examine their lifestyle and take baby steps to make it healthier. “We’re really focusing on women making small changes and building on them to improve their overall lifestyle,” she says. “We can modify many things to our daily lifestyle. We can improve our weight. We can reduce the amount of sodium we’re consuming. We can incorporate more fiber and more omega-3s into our diet.”
Healthier living could prevent about a third of the most common cancers in rich countries and about a quarter in poorer ones, international researchers said on Thursday. Better diets, more exercise and controlling weight could also prevent more than 40 percent of colon and breast cancer cases in some countries, according to the study which urged governments and individuals to do more to cut the number of global cancer deaths each year. “At the time of publication, roughly 11 million people worldwide are diagnosed with cancer and nearly eight million people die from cancer each year,” said Michael Marmot, who led the study from the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research. “However, cancer is mostly preventable.”The study involved 23 experts who analysed both the incidence of 12 common cancers across the world and data on diet, exercise and weight to see how these factors contributed to kidney, mouth, lung, gallbladder and the other cancers. The researchers found that healthier living would prevent 43 percent of colon cancer cases and 42 percent of breast cancer cases in Britain, and 45 percent of bowel cancer and 38 percent of breast cancer cases in the United States. The findings follow the same groups’ study in 2007 that showed how quickly people grow and what they eat are both significant causes of cancer. They recommended – in line with what health experts, including governments and the UN World Health Organisation, have long been advising – that people follow diets based on fruits, vegetables and whole grains and go easy on red meats, dairy products and fats.
The team also looked at China and Brazil as representatives of low- and middle-income countries, respectively. Overall improving diet, exercise and weight would in the United States prevent more than a third of the 12 most common cancers — which also included stomach, womb (uterus), prostate, pancreas and oesophagus tumours. This amounted to 39 percent of the cancers in Britain, 30 percent in Brazil and 27 percent in China. “This report shows that by making relatively straightforward changes, we could significantly reduce the number of cancer cases around the world,” Marmot said in a statement. “On a global level every year, there are millions of cancer cases that could have been prevented and this is why we need to act now before the situation gets even worse.” – Reuters
For the first time, leading medical groups are advising millions of healthy men to consider taking a drug to prevent prostate cancer if they regularly get tested for signs of the disease. The advice stops short of saying men should take the drug finasteride, sold in generic form and as Proscar. It has risks and benefits each man must weigh, they say. That’s bound to be confusing, doctors admit. The drug can cut the odds of being diagnosed with prostate cancer by about 25 percent. Earlier worries that it might spur aggressive tumors have largely faded with further study, making doctors more willing to recommend it now. “If a man is interested enough in being screened, then at least he ought to have the benefits of a discussion” about taking the drug, said Dr. Barnett Kramer, a National Institutes of Health scientist and one of the authors of the new guidelines. They were published in two medical journals and discussed in a news briefing Tuesday in connection with a cancer conference in Florida. They were written by doctors with American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Urological Association. Cost could be a big issue for many men. Finasteride, which must be taken daily, costs $2 to $3 a pill and insurers may not cover it for cancer prevention. Also, to prevent a single additional case of cancer, 71 men would have to take the drug for seven years — another reason this is an individual decision, doctors say. “There probably would be millions of different attitudes about taking a pill a day to prevent a condition that may or may not occur,” said the University of Michigan’s Dr. Howard Sandler. About 186,000 American men this year will be told they have cancer of the prostate. The disease often is diagnosed from a biopsy after a suspicious PSA blood test, which measures a protein. PSA can be high for many reasons, and there’s no proof that screening saves lives — the reason no major cancer groups recommend it. Most men over 55 get the test anyway, then face a dilemma if cancer is found. It usually grows so slowly it is not life-threatening, but it can prove fatal.
Treatments often cause sexual or bladder control problems. “We still don’t know if screening and aggressive treatment is a good thing,” but if men are getting PSA tests, taking finasteride is reasonable, said the American Cancer Society’s chief medical officer, Dr. Otis Brawley. Finasteride shrinks the prostate and curbs testosterone, a hormone that helps cancer grow. The drug already is used for urinary problems from prostate enlargement as men age. At a lower dose, it’s sold as the baldness drug Propecia. A similar drug, dutasteride, sold as Avodart, is being tested to see if it, too, prevents prostate cancer. The guideline covers the whole class of drugs but for now, doctors are focused on finasteride. That’s because it’s the only one shown to prevent cancer so far. A landmark study in 2003 found fewer men who took it got prostate cancer than those on dummy pills. However, that study also raised a concern: Those on the drug who did get cancer seemed to have more aggressive tumors.
More study found that that wasn’t the case. It was just that the tumors were more easy to detect among men taking the drug because it helped reduce prostate size. The new advice to consider finasteride “is long overdue,” said Dr. Eric Klein, prostate cancer chief at the Cleveland Clinic. When men are given a full picture of the drug’s effects, “it’s not a tough sell,” he said. Finasteride has been linked to lower sexual desire and difficulty having an erection. However, in a study of older men, those were problems for most who weren’t taking the drug as well. Finasteride also gave benefits: fewer urinary problems and less incontinence. “The overall quality of life was identical,” and most side effects go away after a few weeks of use, Kramer said. Three of the 15 guideline writers have consulted for Merck & Co., which makes Proscar, or GlaxoSmithKline PLC, which makes Avodart. The advice is “aimed at people like me 10 years ago,” said Stewart Justman, a 60-year-old literature professor at University of Montana. He is in his third battle with prostate cancer and he represented patients on the guidelines panel.
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Two big batteries stand side by side at the General Motors testing lab in 
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in 
Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women in the 
Healthier living could prevent about a third of the most common cancers in rich countries and about a quarter in poorer ones, international researchers said on Thursday. Better diets, more exercise and controlling weight could also prevent more than 40 percent of colon and breast cancer cases in some countries, according to the study which urged governments and individuals to do more to cut the number of global cancer deaths each year. “At the time of publication, roughly 11 million people worldwide are diagnosed with cancer and nearly eight million people die from cancer each year,” said Michael Marmot, who led the study from the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research. “However, cancer is mostly preventable.”
For the first time, leading medical groups are advising millions of healthy men to consider taking a drug to prevent prostate cancer if they regularly get tested for signs of the disease. The advice stops short of saying men should take the drug finasteride, sold in generic form and as Proscar. It has risks and benefits each man must weigh, they say.