Before a crowd of 400, with music blaring and bright lights pulsing, four entrepreneur finalists, screened for their business plans, competed in a speed round of area code numbers for high-tech centers from west to east.

FORBES: Funds And Games

This, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the high-tech corridor to the west of Chicago, and Northwestern University in nearby Evanston, together attract scientists from all over the world and, it is hoped, will help make the city a centre for nano- and other kinds of technology.

ECONOMIST: To natural assets add art, learning and fun

Where once the West relied on China's lack of environmental enforcement to tamp down rare-earth prices and implicitly subsidize high-tech goods, in the future the nature of the subsidy will change so that China's cheap(er) labor will subsidize Western mid-tech goods.

WSJ: Business Asia: Postcards From the Rare-Earth Front