Day to Day Green
BMW's Vision Concept Car Could Be the 2013 Hybrid 
Wednesday, June 30, 2010, 09:54 AM
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Remember this one. It may be a reality soon. The Vision EfficientDynamics concept is a three-cylinder diesel, four-door, plug-in hybrid that generates about 356hp, 590-pound-foot output. The hybrid allows the diesel engine to drive the rear wheels directly or with assistance from a rear-axle electric motor through a six-speed gearbox and the electric motor up the front drives the front wheels. For maximum performance, all the three system can be made to run in tandem.

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Painted Mountains in a Literal Sense May Help Glaciers 
Monday, June 28, 2010, 10:10 AM
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In Peru, the disappearance of Chalcataya, a most important glacier, was a call for action. Then a huge chunk of Hualcan, another mountain glacier in Peru, broke up causing a lakeside tsunami.

These events led to a competition for "100 Ideas to Save the Planet." Out of 1700 entries, inventor Eduardo Gold was one of 26 winners of the World Bank-sponsored contest. Golds idea was to simply paint the mountains white, thus keeping their surface temperature down and allowing new ice to form and hopefully stay.

The paint is nontoxic. It is made from a combination of egg whites, lime, and water and it works by increasing the reflectivity of the mountain, preventing the normally dark rocks from absorbing the sun's heat.

Peru is home to 70 percent of the world's tropical glaciers, and global warming has hit them hard - nearly one-fourth of Peru's glaciers have melted in the last 30 years, threatening the continued livelihood of millions of Peruvians who depend on them for fresh water.

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Home Fusion Reactors - Are They Becoming Reality? 
Friday, June 25, 2010, 12:10 PM
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You might be alarmed to learn a homemade nuclear reactor is being built next door. But what if this form of extreme DIY could help solve the world's energy crisis?

By day, Mark Suppes is a web developer for fashion giant Gucci. By night, he cycles to a New York warehouse and tinkers with his own nuclear fusion reactor.

The warehouse is a non-descript building on a tree-lined Brooklyn street, across the road from blocks of apartments, with a grocery store on one corner. But in reality, it is a lab.

Fusion power is considered the "Holy Grail" by many. It is believed that the power would be cheap and safe. I hope its true. However, until someone manages to do it we will not know for sure.

Currently no-one has found a way of making fusion reactors produce more energy than they consume to run.

Mark is the 38th independent amateur physicist in the world to achieve nuclear fusion from a homemade reactor, according to community site Fusor.net. Others on the list include a 15-year-old from Michigan and a doctoral student in Ohio.

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Are Electric Vehicles Cost Prohibitive? 
Friday, June 25, 2010, 12:00 PM
Posted by Administrator
Prices are currently too high for electric cars to become mainstream in the UK, according to Dr Ben Lane from whatgreencar.com, who suggested that a government grant could change things.

Mr Lane added that "more investment in the recharging structure" was also required before the cars would become commonplace. The comments followed news from JD Power and Associates which suggested that global sales of electric cars are expected to reach 940,000 units this year from last year's 732,000 units.

In my mind, there is also an issue of recharging time. I have read articles that suggest battery swap stations to make recharging a non-issue and other articles that suggest ultra large electronic capacitors instead of batteries. The one thing that is consistent in my mind is the effort required to make it work in an everyday sense.

For my life right now with two small kids, there has to be a fast way to charge, good safety, lots of storage for bicycles and other items to get to the park or friends houses. Think about it a little, what has to happen before you will consider an all electric car?


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Wing Tip Device Promises 6% Fuel Efficiency Increase For Aircraft 
Thursday, June 24, 2010, 11:30 AM
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Fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are huge priorities in the aviation industry. Take the Boeing 747, which guzzles somewhere around a gallon of jet fuel per second - it's clear that even a small improvement in fuel consumption can make a huge difference to costs at the end of a long-haul flight. In fact, 6% improvement would be about 600,000 gallons of fuel per year, per 747 aircraft.

The Minix device sits at the tip of an aircraft's wing as a replacement to the vertical or tilted winglets now common on many craft. Its primary purpose is to smooth out and negate the high-pressure spiral vortices that form when a plane is in motion as the high-speed airflow struggles to deal with the complex pressure differences in the area where the wing terminates.

These vortices not only create a significant amount of drag on the aircraft, they create a turbulent and occasionally dangerous pressure wake that can interfere with other planes that pass through the same airspace.

The Minix wing tip can be retrofitted to any aircraft wing and the developer claims that prototype testing has shown a 6% gain in drag efficiency at Mach 0.8 - the typical speed of an airliner.
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