TELECOM ALLIANCES Finland’s Nokia and Germany’s Siemens are merging their telephone network equipment divisions. Their jointly owned company will be in Finland, and its board will be controlled by Nokia representatives. News of the combination followed the announcement two months earlier that Lucent, a descendant of the U.S. Bell Telephone system that develops and designs telecom equipment, would be folded into Alcatel. There is wide speculation as to which telecom company will next be absorbed.

PHOTO: AIRBUS

AIRBUS SHAKE-UP Both the head of Airbus and a cochief executive of the company that owns Airbus stepped down at the beginning of July. The resignation of Airbus’s Gustav Humbert and EADS’s Noël Forgeard followed the embarrassing announcement two weeks previously that production of the giant

A380 [below] would be delayed by six months, a disclosure that caused EADS’s stock to plummet by more than 25 percent in one day. Boeing has had some troubles readying its new midsize plane for production, but orders for it are vigorous.

CHIP ON ICE Researchers at IBM and the Georgia Institute of Technology have reported a silicon-germanium chip that, when cooled to –268.5 °C, switches at a record 500 gigahertz—more than twice as fast as commercial semiconductor devices made from those materials. The results were reported in July in IEEE Electron Device Letters.

APOLOGIES TO TESLA Zagreb’s city council has issued a posthumous apology to Nikola Tesla, an ethnic Serb born in Croatia, for having failed, 114 years ago, to have him install electric street lighting. The occasion for Tesla’s rehabilitation was the 150th anniversary of his birth.