Consumer alert: Lock up your pets and small children. We sense a consumer stampede in the making. Apple has some new gadgets to offer.

The Cupertino Company's chief executive, Steve Jobs, today introduced thinner iPod media players that can hold twice as many songs, showing off new designs to entice consumers during the holiday shopping season.

Customers can buy a Nano with 8 gigabytes of storage for $149 or a 16-gigabyte model for $199, Jobs announced at an event today in San Francisco. He also introduced a slimmer version of the iPod Touch, which uses the same color touch-screen as the iPhone.

Before today, Apple sold a 4-gigabyte version of the Nano in silver for $149 and 8-gigabyte models for $199. The new Nanos are made from highly recyclable materials, making them Apple's cleanest models yet, Jobs said. Apple also plans to sell an iPod Classic with 120 gigabytes of storage for $249.

Speaking of thin: During the San Francisco Apple event, Jobs flashed a message on a screen that "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,"

Jobs was making fun of an obituary Bloomberg News had prepared about him that the news service accidentally had posted.

Questions about Jobs' health swirled after he appeared gaunt at a recent Apple event. Apple has since said the 53-year-old Jobs, a survivor of pancreatic cancer, suffered from a bug and is better.

Move over, Al Gore: Google's Chief Executive, Eric Schmidt, has an energy plan he says will solve many of America's problems.

What needs to be accomplished? Two things, Schmidt said: Get all electricity from renewable sources in 20 years, and eliminate half of the gasoline cars on U.S. roads.

It'll cost a lot —$2.7 trillion — but will generate a huge amount of savings and create a lot of new jobs, including 500,000 in the wind industry alone, he said.

Speaking of Google: We at 60-Second Business Break strive for fairness. And since our first two items were about Apple, we thought it only reasonable to give you two on the Mountain View-based Internet giant as well.

The company will begin selling ads on some cable networks owned by NBC Universal in a new partnership that will expand Google's efforts to become a force in television advertising, the companies have announced.

Under the agreement, NBC Universal will make a small amount of advertising time on networks like MSNBC, CNBC, Sci Fi and Oxygen available for sale through Google's TV Ads program in the coming months, the companies said. Plus, they plan to work together to tailor the Google TV Ads platform for local markets and on developing new technology.

Silicon Valley tech stocks:

Up: Aruba Networks, Exponent, Hewlett-Packard, LSI and Varian Medical Systems

Down: Calpine, Intersil, National Semiconductor, SunPower and VMware

The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index: Down 59.95 points, or 2.64 percent, closing at 2,209.81.

The blue-chip Dow Jones industrial average: Down 280.01 points, or 2.43 percent, closing at 11,230.73.

And the Standard & Poor's 500 index: Down 43.28 points, or 3.41 percent, closing at 1,224.51.

Check in weekday afternoons for the 60-Second Business Break, a summary of news from Mercury News staff writers, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News and other wire services.