Product Development

It's not even 10 inches tall, it's just one-third of an inch thick, and it costs nearly $500. But Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle DX, unveiled Wednesday, has already been assigned a huge job: reversing the fortunes of the struggling newspaper industry. After announcing the features of the new device, which include a bigger-than-ever screen and a PDF reader, the Seattle company also revealed a partnership with Washington Post Co. and New York Times Co.

It's a kitchen degreaser. It's a window cleaner. It kills athlete's foot. Oh, and you can drink it. Sounds like the old "Saturday Night Live" gag for Shimmer, the faux floor polish plugged by Gilda Radner. But the elixir is real. It has been approved by U.S. regulators. And it's starting to replace the toxic chemicals Americans use at home and on the job. The stuff is a simple mixture of table salt and tap water whose ions have been scrambled with an electric current.

With the iPod getting to be old hat, Apple Inc. has frantically piled on extras in an attempt to make the player seem fresh again. The new version of the iPod Nano, unveiled this week at a company event, crams into the little player a video camera, FM radio, microphone, speaker and even a pedometer. Is this a sign of desperation? Well, if it is, bring it on. The new Nano is an astonishing triumph of engineering and design that has managed to pack all these new features -- along with the old ones -- into a sleek, elegant device that's a pleasure to use. None of the new features -- with the exception of the dorky pedometer -- seem like gratuitous add-ons.

This is a nation addicted to speed. And to ride Japan's super Shinkansen, or bullet train, is to zip into the future at speeds reaching 186 miles per hour. From Nagoya to Tokyo, the scenery whizzes past in a dizzying blur as the sleek engine with its bullet-like nose floats the cars along elevated tracks -- without the clickety-clack of the lumbering U.S. trains that make you feel as though you're chugging along like cattle to market.

More than a decade ago, Palm Inc. rose to prominence on the strength of its Palm Pilot, a small device that put computing power literally into customers' hands. In its stock's first day of trading nine years ago, the shares nearly tripled from their initial offering price. But the technology market bust, lowered demand and the rise of smart phones, where Palm's Treo was once a major player, took their toll.

Amgen Inc. paid $50 million Tuesday for the rights to develop and sell an experimental drug that treats heart failure. The drug, known as CK-1827452, is being developed to reactivate the heart's beating during heart failure by prompting muscle fibers to contract, said Mary Klem, a spokeswoman for Amgen. The hope is that Amgen of Irvine and Cytokinetics Inc. of San Francisco can develop the drug for the mass market, she said.

Forty years after the crew of Apollo 11 landed on the moon, the business of space has yet to experience the renaissance many once thought possible. "It's 2009, and we thought we'd be going to the moon on PanAm by now," said John Pike, an analyst who follows the industry at think tank GlobalSecurity.org. "We thought the number of rockets that would be launched each year would be more and more and it would get cheaper and cheaper, but it didn't happen that way."

A new book on advertising reminds me of a joke William Shatner once told on "Saturday Night Live": "Star Trek" is really popular in Japan, where it's known as "Sulu, Master of Navigation." That same self-glorying attitude is on display in "Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses that Market Themselves" by Alex Bogusky and John Winsor. Running at a mere 150 pages of big type, the book is the ad guys' parochial perspective on why advertising and marketing so often fall flat.

On Friday, only days after NASA tested its next big-ticket rocket, a ragtag group of space junkies in the Mojave Desert flew a bargain-basement rocket ship that could be the real future of spaceflight in the 21st century. Masten Space Systems sent its 10-foot-tall Xoie (pronounced Zoey) rocket soaring over a patch of scrub desert that stood in for the moon, a move that appeared to vault the company into the lead in the $2-million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. The contest is sponsored by NASA as part of its long-range effort to give a boost to private companies in the hope that they will someday take on such routine space tasks as delivering cargo to the International Space Station.

In a lab in Caltech, Harry Atwater holds up a plastic panel, a fraction of a millimeter thick. Even in the brightly lit room, the surface's panel remains jet-black -- absorbing all the light that hits it. The high-tech material is 10 times more efficient at absorbing light than the regular silicon cells that some homeowners install on their roofs to harvest the energy of the sun. It is one of several projects that Atwater's team at Caltech...