engineers

Solar company Stirling Energy Systems has filed for bankruptcy, another casualty of a brutal global price war that is favoring commodity photovoltaic panels.

The Scottsdale, Arizona-based company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy late last week. The utility-scale solar company's largest investor is renewable energy developer NTR of Dublin, Ireland.

Founded in 1996, Stirling Energy Systems makes a large, 38-foot-high reflective dish which concentrates sunlight onto a Stirling engine to generate electricity. The 25-kilowatt SunCatcher dishes are designed to be used as building blocks for utility-scale solar farms in desert areas with sufficient sunlight.

After decades of development including a … Read more

Bing is now trying to direct you toward specific actions with a new search feature appropriately dubbed Action Buttons.

Designed to appear among certain types of search results, the Action Buttons can link you to pages where you can complete a specific task. For example, searching for airline flights may pop up a result for an airline with Action Buttons that you can click on to book a flight, view a flight status, and check in with the airline. Searching for hotel rooms may display different hotels with links to find their locations and reserve a room.

The goal, as … Read more

E-commerce firm Rearden Commerce is looking to expand both the company and its Deem platform through a round of funding and a new acquisition.

The e-commerce developer announced today that it has picked up $133 million in financing from its current partners American Express and JPMorgan Chase and from new investor Citi. The company is looking to spend the influx of cash on paying off debt, generating working capital, and setting up some acquisitions.

In line with that third goal, Rearden also said that it has bought social-buying service HomeRun.com and its OfferEngine platform, an acquisition that will be … Read more

Altair ProductDesign announced a partnership with Studio X-Gene to develop a new electric concept vehicle, the Avant GT.

The Avant GT is the brainchild of Taiwan-based Studio X-Gene along with partners Delta Electronics, Wistron, and Qisda.

Altair ProductDesign joined the project to offer engineering development of the vehicle. "Altair was given responsibility for providing a simulation driven design approach for the vehicle's crash, durability, vibration, vehicle dynamics, and computational fluid dynamics drag evaluation along with supporting Studio X-Gene during the architectural design phase," an Altair spokesman said in a press release.

The Avant GT, described as "… Read more

General Motors just opened a new $200 million, diesel engine plant in Rayong, Thailand.

The new engine plant, which is adjacent to the GM's vehicle manufacturing plant, will employ 500 workers and have the capability to manufacture about 120,000 engines per year.

GM expects to source $94 million worth of Thai-built components for the production of engines at its Rayong facility by 2012, the company said in a press release.

The first engines to be manufactured at the facility are for the new Chevy Colorado pickup. GM revealed the Colorado Show pickup at the Bangkok International Motor Show … Read more

Recognizing that it's no longer the only search engine in town, Google recently shed some light on how it keeps tweaking its algorithms to improve its search results.

Last year, Google made more than 500 improvements to its search algorithms. In a blog published yesterday, Google Fellow Amit Singhal explained how each new change may be based on a clever idea. But if it doesn't pass the company's rigorous testing, it doesn't get added to the mix.

A video posted with the blog and displayed below tapped into comments from Google engineers, each offering their thoughts … Read more

Mazda Motor Corp. has canceled production of its RX-8 rotary engine sports car, citing falling sales and stringent global emissions standards.

Production in Hiroshima, Japan, ended in early July and global sales of the car will conclude later this year.

The RX-8 and the three generations of the RX-7 that preceded it have long been the foundation the brand's fun-to-drive aura. The car's high-revving 1.3-liter, twin-rotor rotary engine produces 232 hp at 8,500 rpm -- a big punch in a relatively small package.

But Mazda sold just 1,134 RX-8s last year, a 49 percent decline … Read more

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and any business concerned with its bottom line takes this to heart in the form of preventative maintenance. Whether you're using computers, vehicles, or other kinds of machinery, following a regular maintenance schedule can prevent future problems and save serious money. PM Master is an easy-to-use program that helps schedule and assign maintenance tasks, ensuring that these important jobs get done when they're supposed to.

The program's interface is utilitarian and easy to navigate, with clearly labeled buttons and menus across the top. The program supports the … Read more

VANCOUVER--You can't say Mazda's new Skyactiv technology lacks ambition. The comprehensive engineering effort looks to set a new standard for performance and fuel efficiency in a consumer-accessible combustion engine.

While Toyota, Honda, Ford, and other automakers spent billions of dollars researching, developing, and building hybrids and electric cars, Mazda directed the bulk of its new engineering into new car designs that provide reliability and performance while serving up a magic number of 40 mpg in highway driving.

In a special media event in downtown Vancouver, Mazda debuted the new Skyactiv-G (a high-efficiency, direct-injection gasoline engine with the world's highest compression ratio of 14.0:1) and Skyactiv-D (a clean diesel engine with that same prime compression ratio). Journalists had an opportunity to drive last year's, pre-Skyactiv Mazda models and new prototype test cars with both engines to prove how much quicker and more efficient each 2012 model-to-be is. … Read more