Ford plans to sell Jaguar, Land Rover to Tata Motors

Ford Motor (F) is about to hand the keys for Jaguar and Land Rover to India-based Tata Motors. The sale is expected to be announced Wednesday, according to a source briefed on the negotiations who did not want to be named because the deal had not yet been made public. Tata is to pay about $2 billion and has agreed to continue to build the vehicles in their British plants. The complicated deal will also cover continued supply of Ford-made components and deal with labor issues. Ford has been working with Tata on details of the sale for several months.

"This represents a first, with an Indian company really stepping outside as an investor with a significant couple of brands," says David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research. "And it enables Ford to convert what has been a pretty extensive part of the company into some needed cash. This is really a pretty big step." Tata Motors, a maker of light and heavy trucks and family cars, is attempting to broaden its global automotive presence.

For struggling Ford, the move sheds two more European luxury brands that had become a drag on cash. Particularly draining was Jaguar, in which Ford sank nearly $10 billion trying to revive the brand after spending $2.5 billion to buy it in a deal that closed in 1990.
Source : http://www.usatoday.com/

Robots fly into Antarctic skies

A pair of lightweight, robotic planes have made the first unmanned flights over Antarctica's icy expanses.

Driven by propeller, the machines made 20 low-altitude sorties, including four over the Weddell Sea. The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were launched by catapult but flew autonomously until landing. During some of the test flights the machines were fitted with miniaturised instruments to collect data for use in predictive climate models. "One of the biggest uncertainties in those models is the physics of sea-ice - how it freezes and how it melts," said Dr Phil Anderson of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), one of the team that carried out the tests.

"A lot of this happens during the Antarctic winter - the nine-month period when we can't get ships and aircraft to the bases - so we decided to see if we could [collect this data] by robot aircraft."
Source : http://news.bbc.co.uk

Samsung F400 (SGH-F400) for optimum music playback

Is the Samsung F400 just another glossy looking Samsung slider phone? Not exactly, because the Samsung SGH-F400 incorporates technology from Bang & Olufsen and has a dual-slide arrangement that reveals a loudspeaker for optimum music playback.

There's a lot more to the F400 than its musical capabilities, but as they set the handset apart then it will be worth looking at them first. One immediately obvious feature is the large stereo speaker that slides up from the top of the handset, in a similar manner to the Samsung Serenata and the Samsung i450. This means that the SGH-F400 should be loud enough to actually hear your music tracks or the FM radio properly.

The sound system uses Bang & Olufsen's ICEpower amplification system, it also comes with music recognition, a comprehensive audio library function, Samsung's Digital Natural Sound Engine and other music related goodies. The SGH-F400 takes a standard 3.5mm headphone plug, and it also comes with an FM radio with RDS.