Nokia sees cellphone, gear market falling in 2009

HELSINKI (Reuters) – Top handset maker Nokia Oyj said on Friday the world's mobile phone market would fall in the fourth quarter and next year as an economic slowdown crimps consumer demand around the world.

It forecast 1.24 billion phones would be sold worldwide this year, down from a previous estimate of 1.26 billion, and said handset market volumes and the overall telecommunications equipment market was expected to fall next year.

"The warning dovetails well with Qualcomm and Intel -- rapid recent deterioration of consumer electronics demand," said analyst Tero Kuittinen at Global Crown Capital.

The worst financial crisis in 80 years has weakened economies around the world and official data on Friday showed the economy of the 15-nation euro zone shrank for the second quarter in a row.

"In the last few weeks, the global economic slowdown, combined with unprecedented currency volatility, has resulted in a sharp pull back in global consumer spending," Nokia said in a statement.

The strengthening U.S. dollar and yen are pushing up component prices for handset manufacturers, while weakening currencies in emerging markets are hurting the purchasing power of consumers in Nokia's key markets.

"Developed markets will fare worse and developing markets will fare better," Nokia Chief Financial Officer Rick Simonson told an investor call.

Nokia said the increasingly limited availability of credit was also hurting, something analysts agreed with.

"We have been hearing about operators and distributors reducing their handset stock to an absolute minimum due to a credit shortage for the past few weeks," said analyst Neil Mawston of Strategy Analytics.

Nokia shares fell more than 7 percent to 9.56 euros on Thursday, their lowest since August 2004, but later recovered and closed down 3.7 percent at 9.95 euros in Helsinki. In New York, Nokia's ADRs closed 11.02 percent lower at $12.59.

Kulbinder Garcha, an analyst with CSFB, said companies heavily exposed to the North American and Western European markets -- such as Motorola Inc and Sony Ericsson -- faced tough times.

"The one segment of the market that will grow in 2009 is smartphones, so in the industry, Apple, HTC and RIM will outpace the others," Garcha said.

BLACK CHRISTMAS

Nokia now expects fourth-quarter industry volumes to be around 330 million mobile devices, down from a year ago, and well below the 346 million average forecast in a Reuters poll earlier this month.

"As the dominant handset vendor, Nokia's warning bodes poorly for the entire handset industry and the supply chain as a whole," analyst Mark Sue from RBC Capital Markets, said in a research note.

Nokia's forecasts sent wireless stocks lower in Europe and North America, with Alcatel-LucentMotorola down 10.9 percent, RIM losing 8.5 percent and Apple off 6.4 percent. falling 3.4 percent,

Nokia expected its market share in the fourth quarter to be around 38 percent or slightly higher, but sales and profitability for key devices and services would be hurt. Reaching a 20 percent operating profit margin at the unit was not on the horizon and it would take decisive action to reduce its cost base significantly.

"You absolutely have to be brutal about prioritizing what you are going to continue to invest (at) the right pace and that means you have to cut some things off the bottom that would be nice to do, but they aren't necessary to do. We are absolutely going through that process," said Simonson.

Nokia's network gear making venture, Nokia Siemens Networks, said earlier this week it would cut 1,820 jobs, most in Finland and Germany. Nokia said earlier this month it would cut some 600 jobs in marketing and research.

Darwin's mockingbirds featured in London exhibit

LONDON – Two dead birds, one big idea.

Mockingbirds collected by Charles Darwin on the Galapagos Islands may not be the most visually exciting part of an exhibition that opened Friday at the Natural History Museum, but they stimulated the thinking that led to the theory of evolution.

The specimens have never before been on public display.

Darwin found that the mockingbirds he saw in the Galapagos Islands in September and October of 1835 were different from the ones he had seen all over South America.

"It struck him immediately that is was a very different bird: it's bigger, it has this dark chest, the bill is quite long," said Jo Cooper, the museum's curator of birds.

Darwin noted greater variations in the birds from different islands in the Galapagos than he had seen on the continent, "and that really made him start thinking," Cooper said.

It set Darwin on a course that challenged the prevailing idea that each species was distinct and unchanged — or stable — since the moment it was created.

"When I see these Islands in sight of each other and possessed of but a scanty stock of animals, tenanted by these birds but slightly different in structure and filling the same place in Nature, I must suspect they are only varieties," he wrote, adding: "If there is the slightest foundation for these remarks, the zoology of archipelagoes will be well worth examining; for such facts would undermine the stability of species."

The museum's exhibition includes live specimens of the green iguana and a horned frog, animals Darwin saw; the first known sketch by Darwin of an evolutionary tree of life; and a recreation of Darwin's study at his home in Kent in southeastern England.

There are also some hairs, believed to be from Darwin's beard, which were kept by his daughter Etty.

While serving as a naturalist aboard the Beagle from 1831 to 1836, Darwin collected six mockingbirds in South America and four from the Galapagos, one from each of the largest islands.

The type he found on Floreana island became extinct there later in the 19th century, but a few more than a hundred Floreana mockingbirds now survive on two nearby small islands, Champion and Gardner.

In May, the Floreana mockingbird was listed as critically endangered, the highest threat category of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Mockingbirds on two other large islands of the Galapagos are listed as endangered.

The two birds on display, and two others in the museum collection, are doing their bit to save the Floreana mockingbird.

Bits of the footpads snipped from each bird are being analyzed to establish a DNA profile to assist in breeding and selecting birds to establish a new population on Floreana. Karen James, a molecular biologist at the museum, said results have been encouraging.

"It's really important when you're examining DNA from old specimens that you don't get contamination from other specimens in the same drawer or laboratory," James said.

"Preliminary results are looking promising. It looks like not only have we got usable DNA from the footpads, but they also share genetic markers with the surviving birds on the satellite islands."

The Charles Darwin Foundation, which maintains a research station in the Galapagos, is heading a 10-year project which includes eradicating nonnative species on Floreana, establishing a captive breeding program and finally reintroducing birds to the wild.

The Darwin exhibition leads into next year's celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth on Feb. 12, and the 150th anniversary of "On the Origin of Species" on Nov. 24.

Which Came First? Eggs Before Chickens, Scientists Now Say

A rare fossilized dinosaur nest helps answer the conundrum of which came first, the chicken or the egg, two paleontologists say.

The small carnivorous dinosaur sat over her nest of eggs some 77 million years ago, along a sandy river beach. When water levels rose, Mom seems to have fled, leaving the unhatched offspring.

Researchers have now studied the fossil nest and at least five partial eggs. The nest is a mound of sand that extends about 1.6 feet (half a meter) across and weighs as much as a small person, or about 110 pounds (50 kg).

"Some characteristics of the nest are shared with birds, and our analysis can tell us how far back in time these features, such as brooding, nest building, and eggs with a pointed end, evolved - partial answers to the old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg," said researcher Francois Therrien, curator of dinosaur paleoecology at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada.

The answer?

Well, it's still unclear whether chicken eggs or chickens came first (the intended question in the original riddle), said Darla Zelenitsky, a paleontologist of the University of Calgary in Alberta who was the first scientist to closely analyze the dinosaur nest.

But interpreted literally, the answer to the riddle is clear. Dinosaurs were forming bird-like nests and laying bird-like eggs long before birds (including chickens) evolved from dinosaurs.

"The egg came before the chicken," Zelenitsky said. "Chickens evolved well after the meat-eating dinosaurs that laid these eggs."

So the original riddle might now be rephrased: Which came first, the dinosaur or the egg? Meanwhile, the new nest provides some of the strongest evidence in North America in favor of the bird-like egg over the chicken.

Rare dino nests

The fossil nest was collected in the 1990s and kept at Canada Fossils Limited in Calgary, Alberta. That's where Zelenitsky first spotted the remains, which were labeled at first as belonging to a duck-billed dinosaur, an herbivore. (In 2007, the fossil was acquired by the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta.)

Zelenitsky realized that the nest and eggs actually belonged to a small theropod, a meat-eating dinosaur. In particular, the egg-layer was likely a maniraptoran, the group of theropods that paleontologists think birds derived from some 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period.

"Nests of small theropods are rare in North America and only those of the dinosaur Troodon have been identified previously," said Zelenitsky. "Based on characteristics of the eggs and nest, we know that the nest belonged to either a caenagnathid [a family of maniraptorans] or a small raptor, both small meat-eating dinosaurs closely related to birds."

She added, "Either way, it is the first nest known for these small dinosaurs."

The only other egg clutch identified to date from a maniraptoran in North America belonged to Troodon formosus.

Egg-laying behaviors

The analysis of the nest, detailed in the latest issue of the journal Palaeontology, provides paleontologists with information about egg-laying in this particular dinosaur and others, along with the evolution of various egg-laying behaviors, Therrien said.

"Our research tells us a lot about the dinosaur that laid the eggs and how it built its nest," he said.

For instance, the position and spacing of the eggs suggest the original clutch contained at least 12 eggs arranged in a ring around the mound's flat top, where the theropod would have sat and brooded its clutch. The eggs were about 5 inches (12 cm) long and, like bird eggs, they were pointed at one end.

The analysis also suggests the dinosaur laid its eggs two at a time on the sloping sides of the mound. That's unlike, say, crocodiles, which lay all their eggs at once, and more like birds, which lay one egg at a time. (The ancestors of crocodiles gave rise to dinosaurs and later on, birds.)

As if figuring out the chicken-egg puzzle weren't enough, the researchers also have another objective: "To find the same kind of nest with babies inside," Zelenitsky told LiveScience. "There are dinosaur eggs from North America with baby bones preserved inside of them. It's entirely possible, but again these types of nests (from small meat-eating dinosaurs) are fairly rare."

The research was funded by Richard and Donna Strong, the Alberta Ingenuity Fellowship Fund and the Killam Fellowship Fund.

• Avian Ancestors: Dinosaurs That Learned to Fly
• Birds of Prey: Spot Today's Dinosaurs
• Dino Quiz: Test Your Smarts

• Original Story: Which Came First? Eggs Before Chickens, Scientists Now Say

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Endeavour astronauts board ISS

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Astronauts aboard space shuttle Endeavour and the International Space Station have opened a hatch between their two vessels and met amid handshakes and hugs 223 miles (360 kilometers) above the South Pacific Ocean.

The hatch sprung open at 7:16 pm (0016 pm Monday), two hours after Endeavour docked at the ISS and almost 48 hours into its 15-day mission to expand the living quarters of the orbiting space station.

"Welcome Endeavour ... we understand that this house is in need of an extreme makeover and that you are the crew to do it. We're really glad to see you ... Welcome to space," ISS commander Mike Fincke told the seven arriving Endeavour astronauts in a welcoming ceremony.

Before the two crafts linked up, the Endeavour, piloted by commander Chris Ferguson, performed a backflip so astronauts aboard the station could photograph its heat shield for closer analysis.

On Saturday, crew members used the shuttle's robotic arm and an attached boom extension to check the spacecraft's underside, nose cap and leading edges of the wings as well as hard to reach surfaces.

The five-hour examination revealed that a 30 by 45 centimeter (12 by 18 inch) piece of thermal blanket on the rear top of the orbiter apparently ripped off during launch, according to NASA engineers back on Earth who viewed the images sent by the shuttle.

The gap in the heat shield, however, was considered "of no great concern since it is not an area that experiences high heat during reentry," NASA said in a statement.

The task of the Endeavour will be to repair the station's power-generating solar arrays and expand its living quarters to accommodate bigger crews.

"This mission is all about home improvement," Ferguson said this week during launch preparations. "Home improvement inside and outside the station."

It will be the most extreme home makeover ever attempted by NASA astronauts. The additions will include two new sleeping quarters, exercise equipment, a second toilet, two new ovens to heat food, a refrigerator for food and drinks, a freezer and an oven for scientific experiments.

Endeavour is carrying 14.5 tonnes of material and equipment to the Italian module Leonardo, allowing for the ISS crew to expand from three to six in 2009.

As one NASA expert described earlier this week, the upgrades will effectively turn the ISS into "a five-bedroom two-bath house with a kitchen, and support six residents on a continuing basis."

The astronauts also will be installing a system that can turn urine back into drinking water. The 250-million-dollar upgrade will allow enough recycling for a six-person ISS crew to sharply reduce the amount of water that has to be flown up from Earth.

Four planned spacewalks during the mission will focus on servicing the station's solar wings, mainly the large joints that allow the apparatus to rotate to track the sun.

The first spacewalk begins on the fifth day of the mission.

The 27th shuttle flight to the orbiting space station and the fourth and final shuttle mission for 2008 consists of a crew of five men and two women, all Americans.

While docked to the ISS, the Endeavour astronauts and the three-man ISS crew will mark the 10th anniversary of the ISS, a multi-billion-dollar collaborative effort between the space agencies of Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia and the United States.

Endeavour's crew includes commander Ferguson, 47, co-pilot Eric Boe, 44, and five other mission specialists including Sandra Magnus, 44.

She will replace compatriot Greg Chamitoff as ISS Expedition 18 flight engineer. Chamitoff is scheduled to return to Earth on Endeavour in late November while Magnus is to stay on through February 2009.

Endeavour's mission is scheduled to end November 29, though NASA has said the flight could well be extended a day.

Indonesia quake kills 2, buildings collapse

JAKARTA, Indonesia – A powerful earthquake jolted eastern Indonesia on Monday, killing at least two people, crumpling homes and briefly triggering a region-wide tsunami warning, officials said as they surveyed the damage.

The 7.5-magnitude quake struck off the coast of Sulawesi island in the middle of the night, sending thousands fleeing homes, hotels and even hospitals.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake struck 85 miles from the nearest city, Gorantalo, on Sulawesi island. It was centered 16 miles beneath the sea and was followed by two strong aftershocks.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center initially warned the temblor had the potential to generate a destructive tsunami along coasts within 600 miles. But even after local officials lifted the tsunami alert, frightened Sulawesi residents refused to go back indoors.

In December 2004, a massive earthquake off Indonesia's Sumatra island triggered a tsunami that battered much of the Indian Ocean coastline and killed more than 230,000 people — 131,000 of them in Indonesia's Aceh province alone. A tsunami off Java island last year killed nearly 5,000.

By morning, officials were starting to get a better sense of the damage.

Rustam Pakaya, the head of the Health Ministry's Crisis Center, said at least two people died, 37 were injured and more than 200 homes were damaged, some of them completely crumpled.

Robert Bano, a resident in the provincial capital, said the massive quake shook his house for more than two minutes, knocking paintings from the wall. He grabbed his crying children and, along with many others, ran outside

Some fled to high ground, others gathered in the streets.

A few guests streaming from Paradiso Hotel were so afraid they fainted, the official news agency Antara reported.

A witness in the city of Poso said patients from at least one hospital were evacuated.

Indonesia is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.

NASA turns to open-source problem-tracking databases (CNET)

When the Space Shuttle Endeavour launches Friday afternoon, assuming it is not delayed, the astronauts onboard and the technicians on the ground at mission control will have at their disposal new software that could streamline the process of problem reporting and analysis.

The software, called the Problem Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action (PRACA) system, was created by the Human-Computer Interaction Group at NASA's Ames Research Center, and is designed to give a wide cross-section of people in the Space Shuttle ecosystem access to a single database package for tracking problems with the Shuttle and its associated infrastructure.

According to Alonso Vera, the lead of the Ames Human-Computer Interaction Group, the single, universally accessible PRACA package is replacing a set of more than 40 different database systems that had been used over the past 30 years by the many different parts of that Shuttle ecosystem.

And, like a related database system known as Items for Investigation (IFI) that is used for tracking International Space Station issues, the new PRACA was written using open-source Bugzilla tools that will save NASA considerable amounts of time and money.

Vera wouldn't say exactly how much the new systems cost to build, but he said they were an order of magnitude cheaper than what was being used before, closer to $100,000 than the $1 million it would have cost in the past.

More to the point, Vera explained, by using open-source Bugzilla tools, technicians will be able to make changes to either PRACA or IFI more or less on the fly, rather than having to submit any proposed changes to the publishers of proprietary software, steps that often took weeks to achieve.

The PRACA system is used, Vera said, to help anyone trying to diagnose problems with the Shuttle find reports of similar issues from the past to see how they were resolved. The IFI system, by contrast, is used by those involved with the Space Station to report new problems for later analysis.

Already, the new PRACA systems are being used in NASA's Constellation program, which will replace the Space Shuttle after 2010. But Friday's launch will be the first live test of the system, given that Constellation has yet to go into space. However, since it's only a test, the existing PRACA system will also be used.

Similarly, the Space Station program has now phased out its older IFI system and turned on the new version.

Vera said that the Space Shuttle program has yet to commit fully to the new PRACA system, though the Space Station program will do a full switchover in March 2009.

Gadget survey finds many bugs can't be fixed (AP)

NEW YORK - Gadget makers love to sell us on all the things their devices can do, whether it's letting us chat with distant friends at any time or watch movies on our commute. But can anyone fix this stuff when it breaks?

That's a question raised by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which discovered in a survey released Sunday that 15 percent of people who had some piece of technology break down in the previous year were never able to get it repaired.

The figure was even higher for certain products. Almost a quarter of cell phone users said they never managed to get their device fixed. And among those who did resolve an issue, a higher percentage either corrected the problem themselves or sought help from friends or relatives rather than call customer service.

"That 15 percent of technology users are sort of throwing up their hands was surprising for us," said John Horrigan, the author of the study. "You're talking about close to one in four cell phone users and one in five computer users saying, `Hey I can't cope with this any longer, I'm done.'"

The survey covered computers, Internet service, music players, cell phones and their higher-end siblings known as "smart" phones. And while the results are no conclusive verdict on the state of customer care in the digital age, analysts say the figures indicate the growing complexity of technology.

Zachary McGeary, an analyst with Jupiter Research, noted that gadgetry now involves an "increasingly integrated ecosystem of devices." In other words, it isn't enough anymore for cell phones and computers to simply work on their own. They also have to get along with each other, and swap video and pictures.

As providing technical support becomes more complicated, some companies have started tapping online communities to offer help, taking advantage of tech-savvy customers who enjoy trading tips online. This method can be best for solving problems that involve multiple devices made by different companies, said Lyle Fong, chief executive of Lithium Technologies Inc., which sets up such customer forums for businesses.

For example, imagine you're trying to get one manufacturer's laptop to work with another company's printer. "Which company do you call for issues like this?" Fong said.

However, for all the talk about online communities, the Pew survey showed only about 2 percent of people solved their technology problem online.

About 38 percent of respondents called customer service, 28 percent fixed the problem themselves and 15 percent got help from friends or relatives.

The rest — about 15 percent — gave up.

Horrigan said that reflected a common thread in the survey: that most people still don't understand the technology they use in their daily lives. For instance, about half of adults who use cell phones or the Internet usually needed someone to show them how to use it or set it up.

Once they were up and running, not all was fine: Nearly 40 percent of computer users said their machine stopped working properly at some point in the past year. Almost 30 percent of cell phone users said the same.

Horrigan argues these statistics should sway technology providers to focus harder on making their products more user-friendly.

Ask Avery Griffin, who switched to an Apple Inc. computer a few years ago for its audio recording software. The 24-year-old musician said his new machine wouldn't stop freezing up and crashing. But he said all he heard from Apple was, "At least it's not a PC."

The PC he uses now works just fine, he said.

In shift, Microsoft sells software online (AFP)

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Microsoft, which has made billions of dollars selling packaged software, has opened its first online store in the United States offering its ubiquitous programs for downloading.

In a possible death knell for the practice of selling software on computer discs which buyers install on their machines, the Redmond, Washington-based software giant has opened a Microsoft Store on the Internet.

The online store, which also offers hardware such as Xbox 360 consoles and Zune MP3 music players, launched on Thursday with no more fanfare than an announcement in a blog posting by a senior program manager, Trevin Chow.

Noting that Microsoft already operates online stores in Britain, Germany and South Korea, Chow said: "With this launch, our customers in the US are able to buy first-party software and hardware directly from Microsoft offered in a comprehensive online catalog.

"In addition to shipping fully packaged products to your doorstep, we offer the additional advantage by making available many Microsoft products to buy and download," Chow said.

"You pay for an (EDS, Electronic Software Distribution) product just like you would for one that would be physically shipped to you," he added.

"The big difference is that after your payment is confirmed, you can immediately download the product to your computer and install it right away."

Microsoft Store offers the full gamut of Microsoft products, from Windows Vista to Microsoft Office. It also offers Xbox 360 games but for shipping on DVD, not for download at the moment.

Microsoft's fortune has been built on creating and selling packaged software such as its Windows operating systems that people install on their machines or come pre-installed on computers.

But the company has been coming under increasing pressure from firms such as arch-rival Google which have rolled out free Web-based applications that compete with text, spreadsheet, calendar and other software from Microsoft.

Microsoft also announced recently that it will release on online version of Office, essentially taking the software into the "computing cloud" as a service available on the Internet.

Web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote programs will be available online at Office Live by subscription or licensing deals, according to Microsoft.

Last month, Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie unveiled a platform known as Azure for offering programs as hosted services on the Internet.

Faster Internet networks and more powerful computing devices have given birth to cloud computing, a trend in which programs are hosted online as services with software maintained on machines operated by technology companies.

Microsoft originally responded to the trend with a "software plus services" strategy that combined its original tactic of selling packaged programs while providing cloud-based features and support.

The Azure platform lets developers build online services and websites to operate on machines updated, maintained and protected by Microsoft.

"Windows Azure is not software you run on your own servers, but rather it is a service running on a vast number of machines housed in Microsoft's own data centers, first in the US and then worldwide," Ozzie said.

Britain in talks with financier over possible rival bid for HBOS

LONDON (AFP) – Britain confirmed Saturday it is in talks with a Scottish businessman over a possible rival bid for HBOS, the British banking group hit hard by the subprime crisis.

The announcement came a day after Business Secretary Peter Mandelson cleared the takeover of HBOS -- parent of Bank of Scotland and the Halifax bank -- by rival Lloyds TSB despite competition concerns.

Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy said Saturday he would be meeting with Jim Spowart, creator of HBOS-owned online bank Intelligent Finance, on the matter and had raised the idea of a new bid with the Treasury.

"I have spoken to the Treasury and if there is a second serious bid then the Treasury would be happy to talk to them," he said. The Treasury declined to comment.

The British government has a stake in HBOS, which has its corporate headquarters in the Scottish capital Edinburgh, after it balied out the bank last month.

Earlier, Spowart told the Scotsman newspaper there was "a possibility that a financial services organisation has expressed an interest in making an approach" to HBOS.

"This came as a result of a merchant banker approaching me and I thought, given what I had learnt, I should alert the government," he told the Edinburgh newspaper.

Spowart said the talks were "at a very early stage", but later told the BBC: "This is a genuine, genuine interest."

He said the new bid "would keep the bank more or less intact".

"I can't guarantee the situation on jobs but I don't think there would be job cull at the same level as what is currently estimated or anticipated by Lloyds TSB," he said.

Lloyds TSB agreed to buy HBOS in September as the banking group faced collapse owing to massive write-downs caused by the US subprime mortgage crisis and the ensuing global financial crisis.

The deal, agreed with the support of the British government, was worth 9.8 billion pounds (12.5 billion euros, 15.8 billion dollars) -- about 187 pence per HBOS share.

On Friday, Lord Mandelson said he would not refer the deal to competition watchdogs because "the possible anti-competitive effects ... are outweighed by the public interest in preserving the stability of the UK financial system".

Boeing factories set to resume work after strike

SEATTLE – Factories at Boeing Co. are due to start humming again Sunday after Machinists union members voted to end a costly eight-week strike that clipped profits and stalled deliveries by the world's No. 2 commercial airplane maker.

Workers are expected to return Sunday night to Boeing's commercial airplane factories, which have been closed since the Sept. 6 walkout. The strike cost an estimated $100 million a day in deferred revenue and production delays on the company's highly anticipated next-generation passenger jet.

Machinists union members ended their walkout on Saturday by ratifying a new contract with Boeing. Members of the union, which represents about 27,000 workers at plants in Washington state, Oregon and Kansas, voted about 74 percent in favor of the proposal five days after the two sides tentatively agreed to the deal and union leaders recommended its approval.

"This contract gives the workers at Boeing an opportunity to share in the extraordinary success this company has achieved over the past several years," Mark Blondin, the union's aerospace coordinator and chief negotiator, said in a union news release.

"It also recognizes the need to act with foresight to protect the next generation of aerospace jobs. These members helped make Boeing the company it is today, and they have every right to be a part of its future," he said.

The union has said the contract protects more than 5,000 factory jobs, prevents the outsourcing of certain positions and preserves health care benefits. It also promises pay increases over four years rather than three, as outlined in earlier offers.

The union members, including electricians, painters, mechanics and other production workers, have lost an average of about $7,000 in base pay since the strike began. They had rejected earlier proposals by the company, headquartered in Chicago.

It was the union's fourth strike against Boeing in two decades and its longest since 1995. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers staged strikes against Boeing for 24 days in 2005, 69 days in 1995 and 48 days in 1989.

"We're looking forward to having our team back together to resume the work of building airplanes for our customers," Scott Carson, Boeing Commercial Airplanes president and chief executive, said in a statement. "This new contract addresses the union's job security issues while enabling Boeing to retain the flexibility needed to run the business ... and allows us to remain competitive."

The walkout came amid surging demand for Boeing's commercial jetliners, which include 737s, 747s, 767s and 777s.

Chicago-based Boeing, which ranks as the world's second-largest commercial airplane maker after Europe's Airbus, has said its order backlog has swollen to a record $349 billion in value.

The strike also further postponed the delivery of Boeing's long-awaited 787 jetliner, which has already been delayed three times, and other commercial planes.

It remains unclear how long it would take Boeing's commercial aircraft business to return to pre-strike production levels, but the company's chief financial officer, James Bell, has said Boeing hopes it would take less than two months.

The walkout started as the global economy began sinking into turmoil. Boeing executives have said only 10 percent of the company's orders come from domestic carriers, while the rest are placed by customers in other parts of the world, particularly Asia.

As the Machinists strike wore on, Boeing began talks with another union in hopes of avoiding a second strike by 21,000 scientists, engineers, manual writers, technicians and other hourly workers.

Boeing officials and representatives of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, which struck for 40 days in 2000, moved into the final phase of contract talks Wednesday. The union's two current contracts expire Dec. 1.

Negotiators at a hotel outside Seattle say they hope to present a proposal to that union's membership by mid-November.

___

Associated Press writers Tim Klass in Seattle and Daniel Lovering in Pittsburgh contributed to this report.

___

On the Net:

International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers: http://www.iam751.org/contract08.htm

Boeing Co.: http://www.boeing.com/2008negotiations/

No big sellers in sight to save troubled Chrysler

DETROIT – In crises past, Chrysler has somehow managed to stamp out a blockbuster hit vehicle to pull itself away from the cliff's edge. But as it faces a possible sale to another automaker and what may be the most serious problems in its 83-year history, industry analysts say there's nothing in the current product portfolio that looks like a savior.

Chrysler's U.S. sales are down 25 percent through September, the worst decline of any major automaker. Losses are mounting: well over $1 billion for the first half of the year. Things are so bad that Chrysler LLC wants to shed a quarter of its salaried work force, and its owner, Cerberus Capital Management LP, is talking with General Motors Corp. and others about a sale.

Of Chrysler's 26 models on sale in both 2007 and 2008, only four have sold more this year than last, and three of those are small-volume niche vehicles such as the Dodge Viper. The company's market share has dwindled from 16.2 percent in 1996 to 11 percent this year, according to Ward's AutoInfoBank.

Analysts say there are no cutting-edge designs or potential big sellers in sight to rescue the maker of the Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep brands.

The smallest of Detroit's three automakers, once-brash Chrysler took risks and gained big rewards for vehicles like the 300 full-size sedan in 2005. The company invented the minivan when it introduced the Plymouth Voyager and Dodge Caravan in 1984. The Plymouth ReliantDodge Aries "K-car" sedans of 1982 helped earn the money to repay $1.5 billion in government-guaranteed loans that saved Chrysler from going under in 1980. and

"If Chrysler has another hit on the way, I am unaware of it," said David Lewis, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, who followed the auto industry and taught business history for 43 years until retiring earlier this year. "Oh, for the days when the minivan was an instant homerun, and Chrysler owned that highly profitable market segment."

With little in its product pipeline, a chilly economy and the worst U.S. auto sales slump in 15 years, analysts say Chrysler may not make it on its own, and that's why Cerberus is shopping the company to GM and others. Chrysler also has a lineup tilted toward trucks and sport utility vehicles when customers are buying mainly fuel-efficient cars.

"In many ways this really looks like the end of the road for Chrysler in the way that we know it," said Aaron Bragman, an auto analyst with the consulting company IHS Global Insight. "They are going to face a change in ownership, that is a certainty. From what we hear, product development is on hold because of the uncertainty."

Chrysler's lackluster products, said Bragman, can be traced to the nine years it was owned by Germany's Daimler, which approved chintzy interiors and cars with more noise and vibration than the competition.

"The truth is Daimler did them no favors," said Jim Hall, managing director of 2953 Analytics of Birmingham, Mich. "They approved products that previous Chrysler management wouldn't have approved if they were completely drunk and beaten crazy."

Under Cerberus, which bought 80.1 percent of Chrysler from Daimler AG in August of last year, the Auburn Hills-based automaker has tried to improve its products. Its latest vehicles have far nicer interiors, especially the new version of the Ram pickup.

But quality concerns still haunt Chrysler. Nearly two-thirds of its model lineup were below average in Consumer Reports' annual vehicle reliability rankings this year. The Chrysler Sebring sedan was the worst-rated car.

Through the first nine months of this year, Chrysler sold 1.18 million vehicles in the U.S. — 395,304 less than the same period last year.

Chrysler's leaders say they have made cuts to stem negative cash flow and have slashed factory production so the company isn't producing more vehicles than it sells. Despite the large losses, they say Chrysler is meeting its internal goals.

The company is banking on the new Ram to pull it out of sales doldrums, but its release this fall coincided with one of the worst pickup markets in years. Chrysler also says it is making big strides on quality and plans to bring out seven new products in 2010, including a subcompact made by Nissan Motor Co.

In September, Chrysler surprised the industry by showing off three electric vehicle prototypes and promising to put one in showrooms by 2010.

Hall says there are good products coming, and that in a normal auto sales market, Chrysler could survive on its own. But now, like GM and Ford Motor Co., it's all about having enough money to survive until the economy recovers and auto sales are revived, he said.

Bragman, however, has less faith.

"I do not believe that it is a healthy company and everything's on track and all they simply need to do is wait it out," he said. "Healthy companies that are on track don't slash one-quarter of their white-collar work force."

Fearsome T-Rex was one nosy dinosaur

PARIS (AFP) – Tyrannosaurus Rex could sniff out distant prey even at night, yet another reason the flesh-ripping predator reigned supreme as king of the dinosaurs, according to a study published on Wednesday.
Earlier research had shown that the towering T-rex could see better than an eagle and would have been able to run down the fastest of humans.
The new study now unveils a previously unheralded weapon in the fearsome theropod's arsenal: a dangerously keen sense of smell.
Any trace of the brains of dinosaurs, which roamed Earth for tens of millions of years up to the end of the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago, has long since disappeared.
But a trio of scientists led by Darla Zelenitsky at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada found a novel way to gage the sniffing prowess of T-rex and a couple dozen other meat-eating dinosaurs and primitive birds.
By examining fossil skull bones, the researchers were able to measure the size of indentations made by olfactory bulbs, the part of the brain associated with the sense of smell.
"Living birds and mammals that rely heavily on smell to find meat have large olfactory bulbs," Zelenitisky said in a statement.
The same animals also tend to prowl for prey at night, and cover vast areas, he added.
Of all the dinosaurs examined, the T-rex had the largest olfactory bulb relative to its overall size.
The study, published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, also found that primitive birds had high-performance odor detectors, challenging a long-held assumption about the evolution of winged vertebrates.
"It has been previously suggested that smell had become less important than eye sight in the ancestors of birds, but we have shown that this wasn't so," said Zelenitsky.
Archaeopteryx, for example, which took to the skies during the Jurassic Period some 150 million years ago, had a sense of smell comparable to meat-eating dinosaurs along with excellent eye sight, the study said.
Somewhere along the way birds began to lose their sense of smell, but the decline probably happened far later than previously thought, the study concludes.

Mexico City's 'water monster' nears extinction

MEXICO CITY – Beneath the tourist gondolas in the remains of a great Aztec lake lives a creature that resembles a monster — and a Muppet — with its slimy tail, plumage-like gills and mouth that curls into an odd smile.
The axolotl, also known as the "water monster" and the "Mexican walking fish," was a key part of Aztec legend and diet. Against all odds, it survived until now amid Mexico City's urban sprawl in the polluted canals of Lake Xochimilco, now a Venice-style destination for revelers poled along by Mexican gondoliers, or trajineros, in brightly painted party boats.
But scientists are racing to save the foot-long salamander from extinction, a victim of the draining of its lake habitat and deteriorating water quality. In what may be the final blow, nonnative fish introduced into the canals are eating its lunch — and its babies.
The long-standing International Union for Conservation of Nature includes the axolotl on its annual Red List of threatened species, while researchers say it could disappear in just five years. Some are pushing for a series of axolotl sanctuaries in canals cleared of invasive species, while others are considering repopulating Xochimilco with axolotls bred in captivity.
"If the axolotl disappears, it would not only be a great loss to biodiversity but to Mexican culture, and would reflect the degeneration of a once-great lake system," says Luis Zambrano, a biologist at the Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM.
The number of axolotls (pronounced ACK-suh-LAH-tuhl) in the wild is not known. But the population has dropped from roughly 1,500 per square mile in 1998 to a mere 25 per square mile this year, according to a survey by Zambrano's scientists using casting nets.
It has been a steep fall from grace for the salamander with a feathery mane of gills and a visage reminiscent of a 1970s Smiley Face that inspired American poet Ogden Nash to pen the witticism: "I've never met an axolotl, But Harvard has one in a bottle."
Millions once lived in the giant lakes of Xochimilco and Chalco on which Mexico City was built. Using four stubby legs to drag themselves along lake bottoms or their thick tails to swim like mini-alligators, they hunted plentiful aquatic insects, small fish and crustaceans.
Legend has it that Xolotl — the dog-headed Aztec god of death, lightning and monstrosities — feared he was about to be banished or killed by other gods and changed into an axolotl to flee into Lake Xochimilco.
The axolotl's decline began when Spanish conquerors started draining the lakes, which were further emptied over time to slake the thirst of one of the world's largest and fastest-growing cities. In the 1970s, Lake Chalco was completely drained to prevent flooding. In the 1980s, Mexico City began pumping its wastewater into the few canals and lagoons that remained of Xochimilco.
About 20 years ago, African tilapia were introduced into Xochimilco in a misguided effort to create fisheries. They joined with Asian carp to dominate the ecosystem and eat the axolotl's eggs and compete with it for food. The axolotl is also threatened by agrochemical runoff from nearby farms and treated wastewater from a Mexico City sewage plant, researchers say.
Local fisherman Roberto Altamira, 32, recalls when he was a boy, and the axolotl was still part of the local diet.
"I used to love axolotl tamales," he says, rubbing his stomach and laughing.
But he says people no longer eat axolotls, mainly because fishermen almost never find them.
"The last one I caught was about six months ago," says Altamira, a wiry gondolier with rope-like muscles from years of poling through Xochimilco's narrow waterways.
Meanwhile, the axolotl population is burgeoning in laboratories, where scientists study its amazing traits, including the ability to completely re-grow lost limbs. Axolotls have played key roles in research on regeneration, embryology, fertilization and evolution.
The salamander has the rare trait of retaining its larval features throughout its adult life, a phenomenon called neoteny. It lives all its life in the water but can breathe both under water with gills or by taking gulps of air from the surface.
On a 9-foot-wide canal covered by a green carpet of "lentejilla" — an aquatic plant that resembles green lentils — Zambrano's researchers test water quality and search for axolotls. The air smells of sulfur and sewage.
A team member suddenly points to the trademark water ripple of an axolotl, and the crew hurls its net. But they only come up with two tilapia in a sopping-wet mass of lentejilla.
So far, scientists disagree on how to save the creature. But a pilot sanctuary is expected to open in the next three to six months in the waters around Island of the Dolls, so-called because the owner hangs dolls he finds in the canals to ward off evil spirits.
Zambrano proposes up to 15 axolotl sanctuaries in Xochimilco's canals, where scientists would insert some kind of barrier and clear the area of nonnative species.
Without carp, the water would clear, and plants the axolotl needs to breed could flourish again, said Bob Johnson, the curator of amphibians and reptiles at the Toronto Zoo.
"If you take the insults away, the lake has an amazing latent potential to heal itself," he said.
Veterinarian Erika Servin, who runs the Mexico City government's axolotl program at Chapultepec Zoo, is studying the possibility of introducing axolotls from the lab into the canals. But more study is needed to make sure the process doesn't lead to diseases and genetic problems from inbreeding.
Xochimilco residents could be another source of resistance.
Hundreds of people make a living pulling tilapia from canals or growing flowers, lettuce and vegetables on nearby land. Efforts to remove the fish or shut down polluting farms could face stiff opposition.
But while the debate goes on, time is running out.
Given its role in research alone, Johnson says, "We owe it to the axolotl to help it survive."