17March2009
10March2009
By July of this year Philips will have given the U.S. what (to my knowledge) is the first attractive LED bulb to use our standard incandecent form factor. It will cost $50, but is rated to give 45,000 hours of light. It’s important to note, however, that LEDs won’t burn out as we are used to incandecent bulbs doing, which is to say that at the end of that 45,000 hour stint of bulb-use, it won’t have died, it will just have dimmed by 10%.
Not only will it be usable for up to 40 times as long as an incandecent bult, but the light it gives, equivalent in intensity to a 40 watt bulb, will use just 7 watts of electricity.
For those for of us trying keep our total energy use under 2000 watts, it will come as a delightful boon to use as little as 77 watts to light our entire apartments, with every bulb on (should we want to do such things), as opposed to 75 watts for one corner.
Energy concious bulb-buyers currently tend to go for compact fluorecent bulbs, but are just as often worried about their mercury content, and the unpleaset light qualty generally found. LED bulbs have no mercury, but will still have to prove themselves friendly on the eyes. i’ll certainly be picking up at least one of thes hummers to see how it feels.
10February2009
The X prize foundation is a group dedicated to fostering innovation in various fields of study. They work from the principle of “Revolution through competition,” which is to say: they offer a $10,000,000 award to “the first team to achieve a specific goal, set by the X PRIZE Foundation, which has the potential to benefit humanity.” There are currently 4 prizes, with at least 4 other areas for as yet planned prizes; the former are: Space, Automotive, Genomics, and Lunar—the latter are Energy and Environment, Exploration, Education and Global Development, and Life Sciences.
A little over two years ago Popular Science ran a story related to the announcement of the Automotive X prize. The plan, in a nutshell is as follows: develope a production ready car-like vehicle which gets at least 100 miles per gallon of fuel, or equivilant. (The full prize guidelines can be seen here.) The finalists will conduct a race of sorts to demonstrate their respective automobiles in the ultimate competition for the prize, and to hopefully make a much more dramatic and powerful statement than any other such demonstrations from recent memory.
The two most promising teams out of the gate were the Tesla Motors group, working on their luxury all-electric car which runs on the power released by what are essentially 7,000 laptop computer batteries, and the Aptera group.
Aptera took a somewhat novel approach to the goal. Rather than looking to new fuels or drastically different sorts of engines, they looked to improve the car surrounding that engine and regular gasoline. By focusing those efforts on decreased weight from new composite materials, and increased aerodynamics (as well as other less dramatic improvements to the engine and drive mechanisms), they created a car which when first reported claimed a 300 mile per gallon efficiency, running on regular gasoline.
Almost a year ago, when Aptera began taking pre-orders, the rating had been reduced to 230 miles per gallon. Now that their official website is up and doling out healthy amounts of information and promotion, and they near the competition for the 10 million dollars, the milage rating has been pulled back to an only slightly less amazing 100 MPG.
This will be one of the first times that such a radical automobile design has been made a reality, and i for one, am very excited.
10February2009
Oslo will soon begin fueling it’s public transportation with processed sewage. According to a worldchanging.com article, the city will begin it’s testing with 80 buses in September, having by then adapted 2 of it’s sewage plants to capture and process the methane from it’s resident’s waste. The plan will save money in the cost of the fuel, and carbon emissions in the operation of the vehicles.
The U.S. of A is now the world’s top producer of wind-generated electricity. An article from the Scientific American website reports that the total wind-energy capacity of the country has risen to “25 gigwatts (GW) — enough to power more than five million homes.” Let’s hope the Obama administration’s far sighted plans to continue this kind of growth will work as well as we all hope.
And finally, depending on your reproductive plans, you may want to take that cell phone out of your pocket, gentlemen . . . recently i posted a link to research about the apparently dramatic effects of slight cell phone use (in increasing the likelihood of developing cancer). More new research, here reported by CNN describes the cell phone’s effects on sperm. Again, it is not good.