Toyota Scales Back Production of Big Vehicles

DETROIT — Toyota acknowledged Thursday that, like its rival automakers in Detroit, it misjudged the drastic swing in the American market away from larger vehicles.

With sales of pickups and big S.U.V.’s tumbling, Toyota said it would shut down truck production at two United States plants for three months and consolidate its pickups into one factory next year.

The Japanese automaker also said it would begin making its Prius gas-electric hybrids in a new plant in Mississippi by late 2010 to meet demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles.

“It shows that Toyota is just as fallible as anybody else,” said Joseph Phillippi, a principal of AutoTrends Consulting. “They’re human after all.”

While overall vehicle sales have dropped 10 percent this year, sales of large pickups are down about 25 percent through June, and S.U.V. sales have fallen over 30 percent, according to data compiled by Ward’s Automotive Group.

The shift has hit Detroit’s Big Three much harder. General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler have responded by idling truck plants across North America and temporarily laying off tens of thousands of workers.

But Toyota’s announcement that it will suspend truck production at plants in Texas and Indiana was an unwelcome first for the Japanese company.

“We never have faced anything like this before,” Mike Goss, a Toyota spokesman, said. Sales of Toyota’s full-size Tundra pickup fell 53 percent in June, and the company has bulging inventories of both the pickup and its large Sequoia S.U.V.

So Toyota is taking a page out of Detroit’s playbook by ceasing truck production at its plants in Princeton, Ind., and San Antonio from Aug. 8 until early November. The company will also suspend production of V-8 engines at a factory in Huntsville, Ala.

More than 4,000 employees will be affected, but the workers will be paid and attend training sessions during the shutdowns.

“By using this downturn as an opportunity to develop team members and improve our operations, we hope to emerge even stronger,” said Jim Wiseman, vice president for external affairs for Toyota’s North American manufacturing division.

Toyota introduced its Tundra model last year, at the same time that it opened its San Antonio plant in the heart of Texas pickup country.

The new plant and truck were aimed directly at Detroit’s last stronghold of profits and market share. But in retrospect, Toyota’s timing could hardly have been worse.

“In many ways, Toyota’s strategy hasn’t been any different than G.M. or Ford, which was to build bigger vehicles with bigger engines and bigger profits,” said Maryann Keller, an industry consultant in Greenwich, Conn.

While the Tundra has been favorably compared with Ford’s F-series and G.M.’s Chevrolet Silverado, the advent of $4-a-gallon gas has torpedoed sales in the entire segment.

The drop in sales has already forced Ford to delay the introduction of its F-series this fall.

“No one gets away unscathed,” said James N. Hall, principal at the consulting firm 2953 Analytics in Birmingham, Mich. “When segments go down, you’re going to ride down with them.”

Toyota said it would discontinue building pickups in Indiana next year, and move all of its Tundra production to San Antonio.

The automaker had planned to build its midsize Highlander S.U.V. in a plant under construction in Blue Springs, Miss.

But Toyota said Thursday that it will put Highlander production into the Indiana plant, and devote the new Mississippi facility to the popular Prius. Now built exclusively in Japan, the Prius has been selling out in American showrooms. In June, Prius sales fell 33 percent because dealers simply couldn’t fill orders.

Mr. Goss, the Toyota spokesman, said production plans for the Prius in Mississippi have yet to be completed. But he said an average Toyota assembly line produces 150,000 vehicles a year.

Over all, Toyota’s United States sales have dropped nearly 7 percent this year, and the company has also seen shortfalls in supplies of its Yaris and Corolla small cars.

But analysts said that Toyota’s moves Thursday demonstrate the flexibility and financial resources that make it such a formidable competitor.

“They have piles of cash and are as flexible as any company in the industry,” said Ms. Keller. “This is probably a good thing for Toyota because, in their history, they have shown that adversity is what makes them stronger.”

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The Legend Of the Crystal No-Brainer

A Smithsonian Channel documentary on the fake antiquities premieres tonight. (By Kevin Clark -- The Washington Post)

By Laura Yao

Washington Post Staff Writer

It arrived at the Smithsonian 16 years ago, a heavy package with no return address.

Inside: an unsigned letter and a large hollow skull made of milky crystal.

The package was addressed to the "MezoAmerican Museum" -- which isn't real. And the letter said the crystal skull was made by the Aztecs -- which isn't true.

Smithsonian anthropologist Jane MacLaren Walsh has researched the skull since 1992. It's a hoax now deemed important enough that it inspired a news conference yesterday at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History.

Why now? Walsh doesn't mention the publicity opportunity that is "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," a $306 million (so far) summer movie. "We've been doing a lot of research on it," she avers.

The museum's crystal skull exhibit -- essentially, the skull in a box -- opens today and continues through Sept. 1. The Smithsonian Channel also premieres the documentary "Legend of the Crystal Skulls" tonight. Yesterday morning, several members of the media were lured to a preview that promised to shed "new light" on the myths surrounding the crystal skull. When it was wheeled out on a cart, journalists crowded around in hushed tones; the clicking of camera shutters was the only noise in the room.

"Legend of the Crystal Skulls" recounts how the objects captured popular imagination, spawning countless tales -- namely, there are 13 such skulls that, once reunited, will divulge all knowledge and wisdom about humanity! And crystal skulls prove the existence of Atlantis, the lost city! And they crash computer hard drives!

The documentary also details how the Smithsonian's crystal skull was found to be fake, along with all of the other supposed pre-Columbian crystal skulls around the world (scientists of yore say: Oops.) One is on display in Paris, at the Musee du Quai Branly; another is at the British Museum in London. The British and the French artifacts came from the collection of antiquities dealer Eugène Boban in the late 1800s. Of them all, the Smithsonian's skull is easily the biggest, at about 30 pounds and 10 inches high.

"It's definitely from the '60s," Walsh jokes. "It's so big and bold."

Walsh and British Museum scientist Margaret Sax examined the two skulls from their respective museums under scanning electron microscopes. They saw smooth marks on the surface of the crystal, which could have been made only by modern cutting tools. Their finding was a "definitive debunking of one of the most outrageous archaeological hoaxes of the century," said David Royle, executive vice president for programming and production of Smithsonian Networks.

The most-storied crystal skull, and the one referenced in the Indiana Jones movie, is the Mitchell-Hedges skull, which is in private hands. F.A. Mitchell-Hedges -- a sort of real-life Indiana Jones, except English and a master of tall tales -- and his adopted daughter Anna said they found the skull in the ancient Mayan city Lubaantun.

The skull is known alternately as the Skull of Doom and the Skull of Love, and was said by Mitchell-Hedges to be more than 3,600 years old and the embodiment of evil.

Anna, who died last year, said she basically climbed into a hole in the ground and found it sitting among some rocks. ("I saw something shiny," she reportedly said. Simple as that.) Actually, Walsh said, the elder Mitchell-Hedges bought the skull at a Sotheby's auction in 1943 from Sidney Burney, an art dealer. No one knows where Burney got it from -- but in any case, it's probably not Mayan.

Believers in the crystal skull do not lack for conviction, however. The Mitchell-Hedges official Web site ( http://mitchell-hedges.com) proffers rebuttals to all the scientific points made in "Legend of the Crystal Skulls," stopping short of calling the documentary a work of fiction. Some believers have even concluded from the "evidence" that the skulls were made by neither modern artists nor ancient Aztecs but extraterrestrials with tools beyond the ken of humankind.

There are many questions that remain unanswered. Where did Burney get his crystal skull? Who made the Smithsonian's crystal skull? This Eugène Boban, what was his deal?

The true legend of the crystal skull, perhaps, is its ability to inspire legends. It's all very meta. This is not the Smithsonian's modus operandi -- don't the experts study actual artifacts? -- but the museum has taken some PR hits lately. Padded expense accounts and suchlike.

But it makes for a fascinating narrative: a story of New Age hype, of a convergence of science and myth, and of the time and resources dedicated to researching what is essentially a piece of '60s kitsch. As the skull was wheeled away after the news conference preview yesterday, it was not glowing, not magnetizing everything in sight, not doing anything at all. Proving, once again, that life is always more exciting in the movies.

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Ending Moderate Drinking Tied To Depression

Scientific evidence has long suggested that moderate drinking offers some protection against heart disease, certain types of stroke and some forms of cancer.

But new research shows that stopping drinking -- including at moderate levels -- may lead to health problems including depression and a reduced capacity of the brain to produce new neurons, a process called neurogenesis.

The findings from the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill appear online in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

"Our research in an animal model establishes a causal link between abstinence from alcohol drinking and depression," said study senior author Clyde W. Hodge, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and pharmacology in the UNC School of Medicine. "In mice that voluntarily drank alcohol for 28 days, depression-like behavior was evident 14 days after termination of alcohol drinking. This suggests that people who stop drinking may experience negative mood states days or weeks after the alcohol has cleared their systems,"

The mice were tested for depression-like behavior using a widely recognized method called the Porsolt Swim Test. The mice are placed inside a beaker filled with water and allowed to swim for six minutes. Mice are good swimmers and have no problem completing this task. The amount of time they spend immobile (floating and not swimming) is measured as an index of despair or depression-like behavior. The more time a mouse spends immobile, the more "depressed" it is thought to be.

"This research provides the first evidence that long-term abstinence from moderate alcohol drinking -- rather than drinking per se -- leads to a negative mood state, depression," Hodge said.

The study also found that the emergence of depression was associated with a profound reduction in the number of neural stem cells (cells that will become neurons) and in the number of new neurons in a brain region known as the hippocampus. This brain region is critical for normal learning and memory, and recent studies show that the development of neurons in the hippocampus may regulate mood, Hodge said.

According to the researcher, the negative mood state in mice may represent depression in humans and appears to be linked to a diminished capacity of the brain to form new neurons. "Thus, people who drink moderate alcohol socially, or for potential health benefits, may experience negative mood or diminished cognitive abilities due to a loss of the brain's ability to form new neurons," he said.

But the study also found that treatment with an antidepressant drug during 14 days of abstinence prevented the development of depression and restored the capability of the brain to produce new cells.

"Treatment with antidepressant drugs may help people who suffer from both alcoholism and depression by restoring the brain's ability to form new neurons," Hodge said. "Moreover, this research provides an animal model of alcohol-related depression with which we can begin to fully understand the neurobiology underlying co-occurring alcoholism and depression, and thereby develop successful treatment options. At this point it appears that blunted neurogenesis may underlie the effects of abstinence from alcohol drinking on mood, but understanding the mechanisms by which this occurs is a key challenge for future research."

Several co-authors, all from UNC, also contributed to the study: Jennie R. Stevenson, neurobiology graduate student; Jason P. Schroeder, Ph.D., and Kimberly Nixon, Ph.D., research associates with the Bowles Center; Joyce Besheer, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry; and Fulton T Crews, Ph.D., director of the Bowles Center and professor of psychiatry and pharmacology.

The research was supported by grants from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (a component of the National Institutes of Health) and by the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies.

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