• The High-Tech Future of U.S. Manufacturing? On Friday, President Obama visited Carnegie Mellon University to talk about the need to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., this time making robots and nanotechnology instead of cars and appliances. "We have not run out of stuff to make, we've just got to reinvigorate our manufacturing sector so that it leads the world the way it always has, from paper and steel and cars to new products we haven't even dreamed up yet," Obama said at Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Center. At the same stop, he announced a half-billion-dollar investment program call the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP), which includes six universities and 11 companies -- from Ford to P&G to Dow -- that will work on everything from energy efficiency, advanced materials and robotics.

• Planning for an EV Traffic Jam: There has been a flood of news lately about electric vehicles -- and, more importantly, actual products hitting the market. While this trend largely bodes well for the planet, it's got public utilities rightly concerned. From an article in Governing magazine: "If public utilities do nothing and a million electric vehicles flood the market by 2015 -- a target that President Obama has espoused -- then the grid could become overloaded, possibly knocking out power to a home or even a neighborhood." The article looks at what Austin and Los Angeles' public utilities are doing to get out ahead of EVs' coming rush hour.

• Speaking of Traffic... If you've ever driven someplace in the U.S. and felt like the roads were designed to make drivers crazy, you're (probably) off the mark. If you've had the same feeling lately in a European city, well, you may actually be right. The Times has an in-depth look at how European cities are intentionally "creating environments openly hostile to cars," while encouraging alternative modes of transportation.

• IKEA's Bikes Hit the Road, with or Without Workers: Last December, IKEA gave each of its 12,000 U.S. employees a bicycle as a thank-you for "hard work," and to encourage different ways to get to work. Six months later, the company has some interesting news: Most of those bikes are being regifted to local charities. That is not exactly how IKEA is presenting the news, but what it amounts to is that most of those bikes are not exactly doing the commute rounds. Of course, an 8 percent increase in bike-commuters, which is what one IKEA stpre saw, is nothing to sneer at, so consider this item more a look at how incremental progress happens than a look at finding the silver lining in what might otherwise be considered a less-than-successful experiment.

• Incremental Progress, or Bureaucratic Sneakiness? New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been using what amounts to a bureaucratic weasel word to implement a number of green changes in the Big Apple. The mayor has launched a number of pilot programs -- including green-painted bike lanes and pedestrian-only plazas in Times Square and Herald Square -- that have as a possibly unintended effect the ability to push change more quickly than if he followed traditional channels. Because these are labeled "pilot" programs, the procedural requirements are minimal, and the administration has been able to move quickly to implement them, later deciding whether or not the efforts were successful enough to make them permanent.

• Our Half-Trillion-Dollar Weather Bill: A study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research looked at how much our increasingly crazy weather is costing the U.S. economy, and finds that hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires and earthquakes, among other Ming the Merciless-like weather events, are costing $485 billion per year, as much as 3.4 percent of the GDP.

_{Cylon (guarding the SpaceX rocket ship) photo CC-licensed by Steve Jurvetson.}