I’m in an airport right now, waiting for my plane to get me home. So I looked for green aviation news and found out this one:
For the first time in the history of aviation, Boeing flew a manned fuel cell powered vehicle. Three test flights took place in February and March 2008 at the airfield in Ocana, south of Madrid, Spain. During the test flights, a two-seat Dimona motor-glider with a 16.3 meter wingspan was used as the airframe. You know what fuel cells are, right? You don’t? Ok. Fuel cells are devices that use hydrogen and oxygen as their input to produce electricity. (more…)
I guess everybody’s complaining about the skyrocketing oil prices these days. This trend is expected to be worse, and it’s expected to reduce the people’s gasoline consumption by big figures. That can be to the benefit of the environment, on one hand, but on the other hand it can be terrifying for the general public, who will feel this oil price raise as a rise in food and services’ price. For some countries, this can have lethal consequences.
Still, a company called EFuel100 showed up with a product that replaces the gas pump from the oil station with your own gas pump. (more…)
Just a few months ago I was presenting the Tesla Roadster as a pioneer in electric vehicles. And it surely is. It does 60mph in just 3.7 seconds, is extremely light and not so comfortable.
This time, the British have projected a brand-new electric car that would ultimately compete with Tesla’s famous Roadster.
The car is called Lightning GT. It does the 60mph in 4 seconds (only 0.3s slower than the Roadster), and it is expected that the first prototypes will be unveiled by the end of 2008. The most interesting thing, though, behind this electric car is the battery. (more…)
The servers, routers, switches and other components of a network are designed to work with much larger quantities of data than they do daily, but they use just about the same amount of electricity whether they’re idle or busy.
Sergiu Nedevschi of the University of California in Berkeley, US, and his colleagues from Intel Research labs in Berkeley and in Seattle, found out a way to save about 50% of the energy that a network consumes , by delaying data flowing into it by just a few milliseconds, during which the network adapters and servers could pass into sleep mode, saving energy. (more…)
It is said that BMW has plans for making full electric vehicles, as new Californian laws force the cars manufacturers to have a significant electric vehicles offer for the market beginning with 2012. They plan to make Li-Ion powered car, with two seats (90% of the time only one is used in practice). The car will have an autonomy of at least 200 miles. BMW already has a tiny car model, Isetta, and rumours are that they will be producing the new electric car based on this one. Other news sources say that it will be co-branded with Smart.
Omolody, from Flickr, has already made some pictured predictions of how the new Isetta might look. One of them is shown above.
This project, developed in Budapest, Hungary is a free magnetic energy generator and it’s ready for sale, as the video says. They have done this project in the past 19 years with extensive scientific and mathematical research. Though, the scientists succeeded to harness an unusual form of energy from magnetic fields. Watch the video!
Falx Air Vehicles, from Staffordshire, UK, will release commercially a tilt-rotor hybrid airplane by the end of 2009. The tilt-rotor concept is present in the aviation since the 1950’s, but there haven’t been any breakthroughs in this area yet. Still, Falx puts a 100hp combustion engine on it, a powerful solar array, and an electric engine which gives 240hp at its peak. (more…)
The Russian scientists invented a laptop battery that lasts 10 hours on a consumption of 20W. The battery represents in fact a fuel cell created using nanotechnologies. According to the scientists led by Lev Trusov, by the end of 2009 fuel cells will be launched into production with 10 thousand monthly units. The project has become international.
The new battery has been developed on the basis of the so called fuel cells, which differ from ordinary batteries by substances for electrochemical reactions to come from outside. Such a battery life is unlimited (it works till it is provided with a substance for reaction, i.e. methanol, or hydrogen) and it needs no reloading like Li-Ion accumulators do. The world is currently revolving around finding better Li-Ion technologies, and at the same time fuel cells are taking up their space into the market. (more…)
Meet the new invention of the 21st century. It is a solar heater. The basic principle is pretty simple: water is stored in a bed-sized floating bag, which looks like this:
The French have also a word to put up in the hybrid cars competition. Now they modified their beloved Peugeot 307 to meet today’s stringent hybrid cars standards.
If you didn’t find out already by typing “google.com”, today’s Earth day, my fellow readers! Enjoy this sunny, or maybe rainy or (I hope not) snowy day, and try to pollute as little as you can. Try to study about how people got into this game of planet destroying, try to understand why and what we do wrong.
Try to teach your children to ride electric bikes and cars (even toys), try to teach them respect for the nature, and be an example for them - after all, it’s you who they learn from. Don’t hesitate to condemn any form of abuse against our environment… don’t throw your papers and your chocolate package on the streets, or worse, in a forest.
In times of hunger, war and disaster, it is our duty to try and bring some help to the helpless people affected by them. Global warming and global dimming are now affecting us all. Who’s going to help us, if not ourselves? Help this world by doing everything like it should be done. And you know what should be done. It’s impossible not to hear about it everywhere in our days.
If the Holy Scripts didn’t tell you about pollution, that doesn’t mean pollution is not a moral issue. It is, because it affects people, who may die from your negligence (by “you” I mean you personally and you as a mass of people). You saw the power of one. You saw it many times. You can do it, you can save the planet, if you have a heart… for Earth’s sake!
The Japanese from Toyota want to make something that’s never been done before. They want to conceive a vehicle that has 1/3 the weight of a Prius, and 1/2 of its consumption. Let’s not talk about the carbon dioxide emissions. (more…)
Volkswagen has made a tradition from launching new versions of their famous little sporty car. This time they want to beat Toyota’s Prius, the long-time established standard in the hybrid car industry. VW says they will make a diesel version of Golf, with a smaller and smarter engine (of only 1.2L), aided by an electric engine. (more…)
Here’s a little tricky experiment that you can do on your own at home. It’s very simple to do, all you have to have is a solar battery (you can buy that cheaply from a scrap store), a bottle, a toy with wheels you don’t need anymore, and a little bit of super glue. It runs completely on solar power. Starting from this guy’s idea, I’ll try to improvise a method to recharge my remote controlled toy car from the sun (all big kids must have a RC toy handy, don’t they?)
So, watch the video and start teaching your kid little things. In time, they’ll become bigger and hopefully, if done on a larger scale, save our planet.
Denmark has a problem. When you’re not like the whole crowd you come from, you’re different and you want to stand up, then you have a problem. Denmark produces a lot more electricity from wind farms than it can consume. In fact, they even want to sell it to Germany and other countries at a small fee, “to get rid” of it. (more…)
Some Washington University engineers using an advanced imaging technology found out that vigorous mixing helps microorganisms turn farm waste into a source of alternative energy.
Hog and cow manure is a persistent pollutant from very large, industrial-sized barns and feed lots, but can become a very useful resource of methane when broken down by bacteria. (more…)
Yet another cool invention from Samsung. After they did break many European and American markets, they plan to knock out those solar power fanatics, by using water as a power source. Yes, you heard right. They intend to make fuel cell batteries that can power anything you can use in your pocket (cell phone, radio, mp3, etc). In fact, it’s not an invention in the full sense of meaning. It’s merely an innovation, an effort to bring the fuel cell technology to the market. (more…)
I’m in an airport right now, waiting for my plane to get me home. So I looked for green aviation news and found out this one:
I guess everybody’s complaining about the skyrocketing oil prices these days. This trend is expected to be worse, and it’s expected to reduce the people’s gasoline consumption by big figures. That can be to the benefit of the environment, on one hand, but on the other hand it can be terrifying for the general public, who will feel this oil price raise as a rise in food and services’ price. For some countries, this can have lethal consequences.
Just a few months ago I was presenting the Tesla Roadster as a pioneer in electric vehicles. And it surely is. It does 60mph in just 3.7 seconds, is extremely light and not so comfortable.
