Top articles shared by Wis. State Journal journalists

It's a project that's been in the works for 15 years, but Madison-based Orbital Technologies Corp., or Orbitec, is only now going public with news about its VR-3A Vision flight rocket engine. Vision is designed to send satellites into space, "and this engine has the propulsion to do that," Orbitec business director Paul Zamprelli said.

It can be wonderful to share an office! Isolation is one thing that is very hard for people who work at home alone. The chance to enjoy some collaboration, to have some help with your work, or just to laugh together once in awhile can make the work-at-home experience much [...]

Posted by Jonathan Miller - Tuesday, July 31, 2012, 9:01 PM We published our inaugural report on the Fort Lauderdale, Florida sales market for 2Q 2012. This is part of an evolving market report series I've been writing for Douglas Elliman since 1994.

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New foreclosures continued to rise in June locally and throughout Wisconsin, while setting a new record high for Dane County. There were 129 filings in June in Dane County, compared with 122 in June 2011, for a 5.7 percent increase, according to circuit court cases analyzed at DaneCountyMarket.com.

A modest mini-surge in home building is under way and gaining strength as Dane County posted the highest June housing starts of the past five years. And though totals remain historically weak, this year's positive trend in new housing is being steadily cemented.

A spate of hoax lawsuits filed late last month in federal courts around the country - including Madison - against former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky appears to have been the work of a serial litigant who has filed thousands of specious federal lawsuits.

As U.S. cities are experiencing some of the warmest temperatures on record, it's easy to take for granted the ability to feel almost instant relief from oppressive heat with the push of a button or the flip of a switch. Today about 87 percent of U.S. households have an air conditioning unit.

Instead of waking him from a nap, a UW Hospital resident told the wife and son of a southern Wisconsin man in 2010 that he had AIDS and left it to them to give him the news, according to a lawsuit filed against the hospital Friday.

Foreigners are buying more and more American houses. They spent $82.5 billion, about 10 percent of the home sales market, in 2011 alone. According to a survey from the National Association of Realtors, that's a 25 percent increase from 2010. Arizona, California, Florida and Texas are the most popular states for home-buying foreigners.

The sustainability story is as big as Wal-Mart and as a local as a neighborhood coffee shop. So, where do you begin? This basics package is your guide for coverage tips and story ideas. | More Beat Basics Author Maria Perez is director of news operations at ProfNet, a free service that helps journalists find sources.

Bolstered by strong crop prices and record-low interest rates, agricultural land values are soaring across the Upper Midwest. On average, Wisconsin farmland prices rose 13 percent in the first quarter, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, compared to January through March of 2011.

After housing prices soared in the first half of last decade, they came down with a crash in the second half. That's what many bubbles do, eventually. So what's to stop the same thing from happening to rapidly rising farmland prices? Is this another unsustainable bubble, waiting to pop?

a cascading facade with alternating tones of black and white subtly exposes the interior program of the residence to the neighborhood. read more Read the original ... NRM architects office: house in kusatsu

Want to be a billionaire? If you follow our World's Billionaires list, you know there's no single way to get the job done-you can get rich on energy drinks or yoga pants just as well as hedge funds.

In a knowledge economy, we are often told the smartest cities and nations do the best. But economists typically measure smart cities by education level, calculating the cities or metros with the largest percentage of college grads or the largest shares of adults with advanced degrees.

Read the rest of VillaLola: Stunning Home Perched Above a Fjord Mirrors the Icelandic Landscape Permalink | Add to del.icio.us | digg Post tags: arkis , eco friendly architecture , green design , larch-wood design , low-cost building , natural architecture , Sustainable Building , VillaLola Read the original ...

No one will ever confuse Fond du Lac County with the Dells, Door County or any of Wisconsin's other tourism magnets. But it was this county, about an hour northwest of Milwaukee, that last year posted the largest increase in Wisconsin travel spending.

Terry McAuliffe, Deepak Chopra, Dick Gephardt, Dr. Oz, and a team of scientists from Columbia University walk into a luxury Manhattan apartment building ... Sounds like the setup to a joke. Actually, it's Delos, the organization behind an ultrapricey futuristic condominium development in Greenwich Village that will be completed by the end of this year.

The Milwaukee Art Museum has proposed a new building - a glassy atrium - that would give the museum a new entrance on a prime spot of lakefront that isn't used much now.