| Uncharted waters: Students retrofit sailboat with hydrogen power and motor up the Hudson Editor's Note: A team of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students are traveling up New York's Hudson River this week on the New Clermont, a 6.7-meter boat outfitted with a pair of 2.2-kilowatt hydrogen fuel cells to power the boat's motor. Their journey began September 21 from Manhattan's Pier 84 and will cover 240 kilometers (at a projected speed of 8 kilometers per hour). After making several stops along the way, the crew expects to arrive back at Rensselaer Polytech's campus in Troy, N.Y., on September 25. This is the first of Scientific American.com's blogs chronicling this expedition, called the New Clermont Project . [More] rss.sciam.com |
In Deep Water: Will Essential Ocean Currents Be Altered by Climate Change? [Slide Show] Every second, a vast quantity of cold, dense seawater equal to six times the combined flow of every land river on Earth streams over an ocean-floor ridge that stretches between Greenland and Scotland. This deep southbound current, flowing from the Norwegian, Iceland and Greenland seas into the North Atlantic, is the lower limb of the Gulf Stream and its northerly extension, a great conveyor belt of ocean heat and salt that transports warm tropical water north from the equator. Most climate change models predict global warming will slow these flows, in part by altering a key component of the Atlantic's circulation, called deep-water formation. If that happens, northern Europe will cool--or warm less severely--as the rest of the globe swelters. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Closing of Rest Stops Stirs Anger in Arizona The state’s decision to close 13 highway rest stops has been met with more anger than other cost-cutting moves. nytimes.com |
N.F.L. Youth Clinics Link Football Skills and Citizenship A league official sees a direct connection between the N.F.L.’s efforts to clean up behavior and the more than 125 high school player development clinics the league is running around the country this summer. nytimes.com |
Window Shopping for Electric Cars: How to Compare Conventional and Plug-in Vehicles The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has an electric car problem. Federal law requires that new cars be sold with a label that includes the vehicle’s fuel efficiency as measured in miles per gallon. Yet beginning next year, gallons will start to give way to watts, prompting the EPA to redesign their window stickers.In an attempt to smooth the transition, the EPA has adopted a new unit called miles per gallon of gasoline-equivalent (MPGe). Basically, it is a conversion factor that measures the electricity required to run the car (usually expressed in kilowatt-hours) in another unit of energy: gallons of gasoline. An all-electric vehicle should get somewhere north of 100 MPGe, even though it will never use a drop of gas. [More] rss.sciam.com |