Science, Technology & Health: February 2008 Archives
About a year ago I wrote about a compressed air car prototype, and it looks like plans are moving towards production in 2009 or 2010.
Zero Pollution Motors (ZPM) confirmed to PopularMechanics.com on Thursday that it expects to produce the world’s first air-powered car for the United States by late 2009 or early 2010. As the U.S. licensee for Luxembourg-based MDI, which developed the Air Car as a compression-based alternative to the internal combustion engine, ZPM has attained rights to build the first of several modular plants, which are likely to begin manufacturing in the Northeast and grow for regional production around the country, at a clip of up to 10,000 Air Cars per year.And while ZPM is also licensed to build MDI’s two-seater OneCAT economy model (the one headed for India) and three-seat MiniCAT (like a SmartForTwo without the gas), the New Paltz, N.Y., startup is aiming bigger: Company officials want to make the first air-powered car to hit U.S. roads a $17,800, 75-hp equivalent, six-seat modified version of MDI’s CityCAT (pictured above) that, thanks to an even more radical engine, is said to travel as far as 1000 miles at up to 96 mph with each tiny fill-up.
Still not sure how they're going to deal with the danger of carrying highly-compressed air around with you. As I mentioned last year: gasoline-powered cars rarely explode, but compressed gas containers can easily explode if punctured in an accident.
In addition to driving Hummers instead of Priuses, real environmentalists drive short distances instead of walking.
I ask because I came across an interesting challenge to the notion that taking short trips in a car is bad for the planet. This challenge comes from Chris Goodall, the author of “How to Live A Low-Carbon Life.” Mr. Goodall is a member of the Green Party in Britain and a devout environmentalist — he says he has ceased air travel because of its emissions. But he also questions how much good is being done by eliminating short trips by car. In fact, he says that in some circumstances it’s better to drive than to walk. ...If you walk 1.5 miles, Mr. Goodall calculates, and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to the emissions from a typical car making the same trip. And if there were two of you making the trip, then the car would definitely be the more planet-friendly way to go.
And yes, that includes the amortized carbon "footprint" of the car manufacturing and food production processes.
Presumably this implies that walking across the country produces far more carbon dioxide than flying across the country.
(HT: Megan McArdle.)
In the epic tradition of pirate vs. ninja, the US Government presents missile vs. satellite:
The explosion is pretty cool. I hope they release the high definition video that General Cartwright mentions.
I've written before that the LHC is not likely to destroy the universe, and it's also unlikely to own a wormhole to the past or future.
The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) hopes its "atom-smashing" tests - which aim to recreate the conditions in the first billionth of a second after the "Big Bang'" created everything - will shed invaluable light on the origins of the universe.But Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovich, of Moscow's Steklov Mathematical Institute, say the energy produced by forcing tiny particles to collide at close to the speed of light could open the door to visitors from the future.
According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, any large amounts of matter or energy will distort the space and time that surrounds it.
If the energy or mass is large enough, it is claimed that time can be distorted so much that it folds back on itself - creating a wormhole, or time tunnel, between the present and the future.
I'll be going, and for $5 I'll bring you back a copy of Grays Sports Almanac. Just hit the PayPal button to the right.
(HT: GeekPress and Gravity Lens.)
Did anyone else have no idea about the full title of Darwin's "masterpiece" that is now commonly referred to simply as On the Origin of Species?
Those who argue at school board meetings that Darwin should be taught in public schools seldom have taken the time to read him. If they knew the full title of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, they might have gained some inkling of the racism propagated by this controversial theorist. Had they actually read Origin, they likely would be shocked to learn that among Darwin's scientifically based proposals was the elimination of "the negro and Australian peoples," which he considered savage races whose continued survival was hindering the progress of civilization.In his next book, The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin ranked races in terms of what he believed was their nearness and likeness to gorillas. Then he went on to propose the extermination of races he "scientifically" defined as inferior. If this were not done, he claimed, those races, with much higher birthrates than "superior" races, would exhaust the resources needed for the survival of better people, eventually dragging down all civilization.
Darwin even argued that advanced societies should not waste time and money on caring for the mentally ill, or those with birth defects. To him, these unfit members of our species ought not to survive.
Uh, yeah. As Professor Tony Campolo writes in the rest of the article, Darwin's philosophy is no less morally and spiritually influenced than the theory of intelligent design. It even has its own gods: whites. I can't figure out why they didn't mention any of this in high school... it's almost like the secular humanist education system was trying to brainwash me by teaching half-truths and concealing all contrary viewpoints.
(HT: Ed Driscoll and Brothers Judd.)
Not sure if the right term here is phishing or trolling, but I've been getting a lot of unsolicited password-reset emails recently from various sites I belong to. I can only assume that someone is flooding these sites with random password reset requests, and that the sites are then sending automated confirmation emails to any account hit by the flood. Theoretically there shouldn't be any danger as long I don't click the confirmation links in the emails.
Anyone else seeing the same thing?
A to-scale diagram of the universe. Very cool. (HT: GeekPress.)
Yet another stem cell miracle performed with a patient's own stem cells and not requiring the murder of an unborn child: scientists in Finland have grown a jaw bone replacement and successfully implanted it.
Scientists in Finland said Friday that they had replaced a 65-year-old patient's upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen.The researchers said the breakthrough opened up new ways to treat severe tissue damage and made the prospect of custom-made living spares parts for humans a step closer to reality.
"There have been a couple of similar-sounding procedures before, but these didn't use the patient's own stem cells that were first cultured and expanded in laboratory and differentiated into bone tissue," said Riitta Suuronen of the Regea Institute of Regenerative Medicine, part of the University of Tampere.
She said at a news conference that the patient was recovering more quickly than he would have if he had received a bone graft from his leg.
"From the outside nobody would be able to tell he has been through such a procedure," she said.
That's amazing. Completely. We're living in a future our grandparents could never have imagined.
I've always wondered how the wealthy managed their health care, and now I know: "boutique medicine".
f firms like MDVIP are the Cadillac of health care, then MD2 (pronounced "M-D-Squared") is the Bentley -- offering unlimited access to patients who can afford it."Imagine if your brother, your father, or your mother was a physician and you became ill, that's what we provide," said MD2 partner John Moses.
Each MD2 doctor treats no more than 50 families, Moses said.
"What that means is that our physicians have all the time necessary to provide complete access to their patients, extraordinary care and service, and home or office visits," Moses said. "We're able to offer total privacy because it's highly unlikely that we would ever have more than one patient at our office at any given time."
The offices don't have waiting rooms (or much waiting) and patients are encouraged to call their doctors directly when they need to talk to them. If a patient needs to see a specialist, the MD2 doctor will help find the best ones and even go to the appointment.
Moses said MD2's style of care costs a family of four about $24,000 a year. That fee would cover all doctor visits and any other services the office provides, such as X-rays, but outside treatment -- an MRI, for example -- would cost extra.
Sounds like it might be a bit excessive, but there are certainly plenty of people who can afford it.
