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Finally, a carmaker is trying to promote diesel in a meaningful way. BMW said this week that the company will offer $4,500 in “eco credits” for anyone who buys a 335d or X5 diesel. Eco credit is basically a euphemism for a rebate since a customer can use it like cash towards a purchase of the diesel Bimmer. European automakers have been selling diesel cars in the U.S. for quite some time. But they haven’t marketed them really aggressively. But with new tougher fuel economy rules, called Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFÉ, set to kick in starting in 2011, they’ll need a play to meet them, especially BMW and Mercedes. European luxury carmakers have long seen CAFE fines as a cost of doing business since they don’t sell enough small cars to balance out the lower fuel economy of their big sporty vehicles and suvs. In BMW’s case, the company has paid some $90 million in fines since 2000, according to documents from the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration. Mini’s rise in r

Super high-resolution spy satellites have been imaging sea ice at the poles for the last decade on behalf of earth scientists. But the images has been kept from the public and nearly all scientists, too. Over the last 10 years, a tiny group of scientists with security clearance was able to see some of the images, but couldn’t use them publicly. Now, mere hours after a National Academy of Sciences committee recommended that the intelligence community “should release and disseminate all Arctic sea ice” imagery that can be created from the classified satellite data, the United States Geological Service has published the set of high-res images. The new data provides what NAS committee member Thorsten Markus called “a dramatic improvement” in what we can see. The previously off-limits sea ice data has a resolution of one meter. The previous scientific standard sea ice images from the Landsat program have a resolution of 15 meters. Markus saw some of the sea ice images last December when the

Unless there is some major glitch, there might finally be a search and online advertising deal struck between Yahoo and Microsoft at long last. Top executives at Microsoft–including SVP of the Online Audience Business Group Yusuf Mehdi, search head Satya Nadella and top digital exec Qi Lu, as well as others–have all flown down to Silicon Valley from their Redmond, Wash., HQ today to iron out the remaining issues, which seem to have to do with the deployment of technology. “It is an entourage,” joked one exec. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is also deeply involved in the talks, although he is not with the group. If all goes well, the deal could be announced within the next week, sources at both companies said. The most recent talks have been unusually close to the vest at both companies, and spokespeople for both Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) declined to comment on the issue. And, of course, they should not, since there is no certainty any deal will be struck at all, especially since

While it’s too early to tell exactly what this means, Facebook engineer Blake Ross today posted a “test” tweet from a Twitter application called “Penguin FB” that resides on Facebook development servers. One interesting possibility: Facebook is working on a new, more native Twitter integration that would let users publish updates to Twitter automatically from Facebook. If that is indeed the case, it would be an interesting move by Facebook. Allowing users to more easily link their Facebook updates with other services like Twitter could potentially make Facebook one of the largest Twitter applications. If only a few million Facebook users were to publish their status updates to Twitter, Facebook could become the largest source of tweets - an interesting inversion of the way Twitter is used as a Facebook application by many users today. Of course, all of this is still speculation. When contacted, Facebook said it doesn’t have any comment on the “Penguin FB” project. (Update: Ross has si