TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Why the Right to Emit Carbon Dioxide Is Given Away in U.S. Climate Change Bill A massive climate bill has taken its first step forward in the House, its path paved by the giveaway of allowances -- free greenhouse gas emission permits designed to mute the economic impact of a carbon cap-and-trade program. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Powering Cars with Potholes Automakers are examining a variety of technologies to enhance fuel economy. But a group of undergraduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found an overlooked source: shock absorbers.When a car’s wheel hits a hole or bump, a standard shock absorber disperses the impact energy through hydraulic fluid and moves a piston. In the M.I.T. design, the fluid is instead forced through a small turbine attached to a generator. The generator, powered by the compressions, can recharge batteries or power the vehicle’s electrical equipment. The students say that for heavy vehicles such as Hummers, the system can boost fuel efficiency from 2 to 10 percent, depending on the terrain. They have formed Levant Power Corporation to commercialize a product they are calling GenShock. Right now they are tailoring GenShock for U.S. Army vehicles and big-rig trucks, but it could possibly be adapted for passenger vehicles. [More] rss.sciam.com |
In the Beginning... Introducing the Origins Issue A Greek statesman who lived in the sixth century B.C. put forward the first explanation, shorn of theological trappings, that captured the essence of all things living and inanimate. Thales of Miletus noticed that water could exist as a liquid, gas or solid and posited that it was the fundamental constituent of matter from which the earth’s denizens--men, goats, flowers, rocks, and whatnot--somehow sprang forth.As with all natural philosophy (a pursuit now known as science), Thales’ observation immediately provoked an argument. Anaximander, a disciple of Thales (today what would be called a graduate student), asked how water could be the single basic element if rock, sand and other substances appeared to be devoid of moisture. [More] rss.sciam.com |
T-minus 18 months and counting: Virgin Galactic and the future of space tourism Twenty-five years ago when Sir Richard Branson (sans the "sir," at the time) called up Boeing and asked for a spare 747, few would have predicted the brash entrepreneur would so radically disrupt the formerly staid business of air travel. Perhaps folks had higher hopes for the former record executives' feature film production debut at the same time: 1984 . But today Branson is master of airlines on six of seven continents, employing hundreds of jets, and now the ennobled Brit predicts, his company is a scant 18 months from the first commercial near-orbit flight . [More] rss.sciam.com |
Nano-Risks: A Big Need for a Little Testing A decade ago the great worry about nanotechnology was that it could quite literally destroy the planet. As Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy warned in his essay “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” self-assembling nanobots could potentially spread out of our control (Mis-)programmed to replicate ad infinitum, these subsentient bots would spread across the landscape as a gray goo of devastation, consuming the earth and every unlucky creature who called it home.Nowadays we can only wish that our planet-dooming scenarios were so far-fetched. Our existential worries revolve around the all too immediate problems of global warming and disease, and nanotechnology--incorporated into improved solar panels, wind turbines or drug delivery mechanisms--could, if anything, emerge as an important tool to fight these threats. [More] rss.sciam.com |