Geneva

Toyota's latest gas-sipper has hit the European market, but American buyers will have to wait a bit longer. First unveiled at the 2008 Geneva motor show, the iQ is a small city car which will compete with the similarly priced, but less roomy smart fortwo (the latter only seats two while the iQ can seat three adults and a child).

From Nature:Creative ideas are not always solo strokes of genius, argues Ed Catmull, the computer-scientist president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review. Frequently, he says, the best ideas emerge when talented people from different disciplines work together.

From Nature:Creative ideas are not always solo strokes of genius, argues Ed Catmull, the computer-scientist president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review. Frequently, he says, the best ideas emerge when talented people from different disciplines work together.

Scientists are getting ready to flip the switch on the largest science experiment ever conducted on Earth -- the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.

The LHC is a 27-kilometer ring located in the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, around which high-energy protons will be smashed together in two counter-rotating beams. More than 1,000 magnets will keep the beams -- each containing millions of protons -- on a circular path around the collider, while hundreds more keep the beams focused. The beams will travel at almost the speed of light.

Lest you think a U.N. meeting to discuss the future of the Internet would be a ponderous, low-key affair, consider this remarkable tale. Back in 2003, when the U.N. held just such an event in Geneva, the delegates unexpectedly decided to close the meeting to nongovernmental officials and to eject a handful of attendees. One of them was Paul Twomey -- president of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names & Numbers [ICANN], a private, nonprofit company that oversees technical aspects of the Internet's address system -- who was escorted by guards to the exit.

South Africa has lodged an appeal against the decision to make Microsoft Corp.'s Open XML format an internationally recognized standard for electronic documents, officials said Wednesday.

The South African Bureau of Standards sent a letter of protest to two Geneva-based organizations that held a worldwide ballot on Microsoft's application last month, complaining that the process was poorly conducted and rushed.

SABS Chief Executive Martin Kuscus sent the letter to the International Standards Organization and the International Electrotechnical Commission. The letter is dated May 22.

The Middle East isn't known as a hotbed of technological achievement. But in the seventh annual Global Information Technology Report released on Apr. 9 by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum [WEF] and French management school INSEAD, the region demonstrated the most improvement in its tech-readiness and expertise of any in the world.

There's no doubt...diesels are better. Producing more power per gram of CO2 released, new advanced diesel engines can return similar mileage gains as hybrid cars without the pesky dual drivetrain.