(12-13) 09:19 PST LISBON, Portugal (AP) —

European Union leaders signed a new treaty on Thursday that would give the 27-nation bloc a long-term president and streamline its decision-making process.

The treaty Д a slimmed-down version of an abortive European Constitution Д would provide for a more powerful foreign policy official who will lead EU strategy, and scrap the rotating six-month presidency in favor of a maximum five-year term for a president elected by the members.

More decisions would be taken by majority vote, eliminating the need for unanimous endorsement, which in the past has stymied the bloc’s efforts to present a united front.

The Lisbon Treaty was endorsed by the EU’s 27 leaders two months ago and will come into force after it is ratified by all member states. The aim is to complete that process by 2009.

Unlike the failed constitution proposal, which was derailed by the ‘no’ votes of French and Dutch voters two years ago, the treaty will not go to referendums in 26 of the member states. Only Ireland will give the citizens a chance to vote on it.

The leaders’ refusal to hold referendums has brought Europe-wide protests. The others say they will ratify the document in their parliaments.

The agreement follows years of unease among European Union citizens about how much sovereignty they should surrender to centralized rule. The treaty’s detractors claim EU governments dare not put the document to a vote because they fear a majority of their people do not want it.

“Europe was blocked, not knowing how to move forward, and we found the solution with this treaty,” said Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates, the ceremony’s host. His country holds the current six-month presidency.

Under the treaty, the number of European commissioners in the EU executive office is to be cut from 27 to 17 on a rotating basis, part of an attempt to make the EU less unwieldy after its expansion to include Eastern European countries.

In an effort to stress the EU’s democratic credentials, the European Parliament is given more power, and can modify or reject proposed EU legislation.

“By resolving its institutional matters, Europe is readying itself to address global problems,” European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said.

The leaders and their foreign ministers signed the treaty, in the bloc’s 23 official languages, while a choir sang Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in an ornate 16th-century riverside monastery.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, sharply criticized at home over his refusal to hold a referendum, skipped the televised ceremony and signed the treaty later at a private lunch with other leaders. He has insisted that treaty opt-outs he negotiated allow Britain to keep its sovereignty in key areas such as justice, home and foreign affairs, and security.

After lunch the delegations were to fly to Brussels, where a regular summit meeting is to be held Friday.

Environmentalists questioned the need for the two-hour Lisbon ceremony, which they say will leave a heavy carbon footprint and casts doubt on Europe’s commitment to slowing down climate change.

To deflect criticism, some leaders are traveling together.

And Portugal has pledged to plant more than 1,000 trees to compensate for what it calculates is the 564 U.S. tons of CO2 related to the event.

(12-13) 09:38 PST Palo Alto, Calif. (AP) —

In a push for a more diverse faculty, Stanford University has embarked on a five-year plan to hire ten young scholars whose research focuses on the study of ethnicity and race.

The Faculty Development Initiative, according to the university, is a result of the Stanford provost’s commitment to create new faculty positions in the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

The center began its goal of enhancing diversity at the elite university in September by seeking ways to increase the fields of study at the school while also looking at the faculty’s gender, sexual orientation and racial makeup.

Stanford is seeking top talent from advanced graduate students who are finishing doctoral dissertations to assistant or newly-tenured professors. The initiative is funded by a $2.5 million gift as well as another $2 million grant from the Hewlett Foundation.

(09-04) 06:19 PDT Austin, Texas (AP) —

Millions of inventions pass quietly through the U.S. patent office each year. Patent No. 7,033,406 did, too, until energy insiders spotted six words in the filing that sounded like a death knell for the internal combustion engine.

An Austin-based startup called EEStor promised “technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries,” meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 500 miles roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline.

By contrast, some plug-in hybrids on the horizon would require motorists to charge their cars in a wall outlet overnight and promise only 50 miles of gasoline-free commute. And the popular hybrids on the road today still depend heavily on fossil fuels.

“It’s a paradigm shift,” said Ian Clifford, chief executive of Toronto-based ZENN Motor Co., which has licensed EEStor’s invention. “The Achilles’ heel to the electric car industry has been energy storage. By all rights, this would make internal combustion engines unnecessary.”

Clifford’s company bought rights to EEStor’s technology in August 2005 and expects EEStor to start shipping the battery replacement later this year for use in ZENN Motor’s short-range, low-speed vehicles.

The technology also could help invigorate the renewable-energy sector by providing efficient, lightning-fast storage for solar power, or, on a small scale, a flash-charge for cell phones and laptops.

Skeptics, though, fear the claims stretch the bounds of existing technology to the point of alchemy.

“We’ve been trying to make this type of thing for 20 years and no one has been able to do it,” said Robert Hebner, director of the University of Texas Center for Electromechanics. “Depending on who you believe, they’re at or beyond the limit of what is possible.”

EEStor’s secret ingredient is a material sandwiched between thousands of wafer-thin metal sheets, like a series of foil-and-paper gum wrappers stacked on top of each other. Charged particles stick to the metal sheets and move quickly across EEStor’s proprietary material.

The result is an ultracapacitor, a battery-like device that stores and releases energy quickly.

Batteries rely on chemical reactions to store energy but can take hours to charge and release energy. The simplest capacitors found in computers and radios hold less energy but can charge or discharge instantly. Ultracapacitors take the best of both, stacking capacitors to increase capacity while maintaining the speed of simple capacitors.

Hebner said vehicles require bursts of energy to accelerate, a task better suited for capacitors than batteries.

“The idea of getting rid of the batteries and putting in capacitors is to get more power back and get it back faster,” Hebner said.

But he said nothing close to EEStor’s claim exists today.

For years, EEStor has tried to fly beneath the radar in the competitive industry for alternative energy, content with a phone-book listing and a handful of cryptic press releases.

Yet the speculation and skepticism have continued, fueled by the company’s original assertion of making batteries obsolete Д a claim that still resonates loudly for a company that rarely speaks, including declining an interview with The Associated Press.

The deal with ZENN Motor and a $3 million investment by the venture capital group Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which made big-payoff early bets on companies like Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., hint that EEStor may be on the edge of a breakthrough technology, a “game changer” as Clifford put it.

ZENN Motor’s public reports show that it so far has invested $3.8 million in and has promised another $1.2 million if the ultracapacitor company meets a third-party testing standard and then delivers a product.

Clifford said his company consulted experts and did a “tremendous amount of due diligence” on EEStor’s innovation.

EEStor’s founders have a track record. Richard D. Weir and Carl Nelson worked on disk-storage technology at IBM Corp. in the 1990s before forming EEStor in 2001. The two have acquired dozens of patents over two decades.

Neil Dikeman of Jane Capital Partners, an investor in clean technologies, said the nearly $7 million investment in EEStor pales compared with other energy storage endeavors, where investment has averaged $50 million to $100 million.

Yet curiosity is unusually high, Dikeman said, thanks to the investment by a prominent venture capital group and EEStor’s secretive nature.

“The EEStor claims are around a process that would be quite revolutionary if they can make it work,” Dikeman said.

Previous attempts to improve ultracapacitors have focused on improving the metal sheets by increasing the surface area where charges can attach.

EEStor is instead creating better nonconductive material for use between the metal sheets, using a chemical compound called barium titanate. The question is whether the company can mass-produce it.

ZENN Motor pays EEStor for passing milestones in the production process, and chemical researchers say the strength and functionality of this material is the only thing standing between EEStor and the holy grail of energy-storage technology.

Joseph Perry and the other researchers he oversees at Georgia Tech have used the same material to double the amount of energy a capacitor can hold. Perry says EEstor seems to be claiming an improvement of more than 400-fold, yet increasing a capacitor’s retention ability often results in decreased strength of the materials.

“They’re not saying a lot about how they’re making these things,” Perry said. “With these materials (described in the patent), that is a challenging process to carry out in a defect-free fashion.”

Perry is not alone in his doubts. An ultracapacitor industry leader, Maxwell Technologies Inc., has kept a wary eye on EEStor’s claims and offers a laundry list of things that could go wrong.

Among other things, the ultracapacitors described in EEStor’s patent operate at extremely high voltage, 10 times greater than those Maxwell manufactures, and won’t work with regular wall outlets, said Maxwell spokesman Mike Sund. He said capacitors could crack while bouncing down the road, or slowly discharge after a dayslong stint in the airport parking lot, leaving the driver stranded.

Until EEStor produces a final product, Perry said he joins energy professionals and enthusiasts alike in waiting to see if the company can own up to its six-word promise and banish the battery to recycling bins around the world.

“I am skeptical but I’d be very happy to be proved wrong,” Perry said.