Hasta La Gadget!

Want to go green? There are many ways to do so, and driving an electric vehicle is definitely one of them. Having said that, with electric vehicles being touted to be the future, it would be prudent to figure out a reliable and eco-friendly method to generate electricity. While solar panels have been seen by many to be the answer, there is always the issue concerning cloudy places as well as the rainy season, not to mention we get a fair number of hours of night each day on average. Brenmiller Energy, a leading thermosolar company, decided to harness the sun’s energy in a better way, through the use of the sun’s heat instead of its light.

Being different from standard photovoltaic cells which will convert photon energy directly into electricity, Brenmiller’s use of the sun’s heat would mean using parabolic mirrors in order to concentrate the sun’s rays on a smaller patch, and the heat that could reach approximately 500 degrees C/932 F would then be used to create steam, which in turn moves the turbines to generate electricity.

Not new at all, but at least this system can store some of that heat which is generated and would be called upon whenever dusk falls, or the sun turns out to be shy and would like to hide behind some clouds. This result in a fully stabilized steam supply which theoretically speaking, is available 24 hours per day.

Solar Steam Boiler Helps Make The World Greener

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The difficulty in finding and booking award travel is one of the primary reasons travelers often grow disaffected with airline loyalty programs. If the miles can’t be used, then what good are they? Even carriers that promise more award availability than their competitors aren’t necessarily guaranteeing a worthwhile deal. Those award flights may not be for the routes you find useful, or they may include especially expensive awards that don’t make the best use of your miles.

The thing is, the process of booking profitable award travel actually begins before you earn any miles. Every savvy traveler must ask three key questions:

1. Where do I want to go?
An airline that offers regular flights to Europe may not provide frequent service to Hawaii, making it much easier to book a free vacation to one destination versus the other. Airline alliances make it easier than ever to avoid this problem by linking route networks, but gaps still exist.

2. How do I want to get there?
One of the best uses of frequent flier miles is for international business or first-class awards. But if your airline has a reputation for poor premium cabin service, this may be a waste of your miles. Check to see if the airline has a partner that is known for its five-star service.

3. Am I flexible?
Award flights are generally available when the airline expects to have leftover seats. It would rather give them away to its frequent customers than let them go empty. But this means you are unlikely to find award flights to popular holiday destinations, because the airline has no difficulty selling them.

Despite these conditions, award flights tend to have very flexible routing rules and pricing loopholes that make it easier to book complicated itineraries. And one benefit of frequent travel on award flights is that even if you are unable to pick the best dates, you can probably expect to visit again in the future. There is less pressure to create once-in-a-lifetime vacations if they become more commonplace.

See: Cheap Ways to Travel to Europe on Points

Understand the award chart and alliance partnerships
Conventional revenue fares between an origin and destination are priced in dollars and reflect the demand between those cities. But award seats often use zone-based pricing. For example, an award ticket from anywhere in the U.S. to anywhere in Europe requires the same number of miles while the cash price for these tickets can vary drastically. Often, award prices are the same regardless of which airline you fly within the carrier’s alliance or how many connections you make. Keep searching if you don’t see award availability right away or consider accumulating miles with a different carrier in the same alliance if it has a better award chart.

For example, United Airlines has a very generous award chart that permits a free stopover on all international round-trip awards, but its MileagePlus program will sometimes charge twice as many miles for partner awards versus an award on its own planes. This may be a deal breaker for some travelers.

A limited number of carriers, such as British Airways, use distance-based pricing for awards. This can be very inexpensive for nonstop flights. One partner — Alaska Airlines — operates dozens of daily flights from the West Coast to Hawaii. These can be booked through British Airways’ Avios program for only 12,500 miles one-way, whereas many other carriers (including Alaska Airlines) will charge 20,000 miles for the same flight.

Fuel surcharges are the final sticking point. These are rolled into most conventional international fares, so customers never see them, but airlines differ in how they apply them to award tickets. Most U.S. carriers, including United Airlines, do not impose fuel surcharges on awards. American Airlines doesn’t, either, except for flights on British Airways. Both carriers fly to London and both can be booked with American Airlines’ AAdvantage miles. But choosing the wrong flight for an award can cost hundreds of dollars more for an ostensibly “free” ticket.

See: How to Get Upgraded on Your Next Flight

Use a strategy to search for award availability
Award search tools are fairly limited. They don’t automatically search for every possible itinerary to your destination, nor do they look at all the available alliance partners. As a result, it sometimes seems like no award seats exist.

Part of the problem may be where you search. United Airlines will display most partner flights in its search engine, but you will have to call to ask about availability on Singapore Airlines. British Airways doesn’t list Alaska Airlines, and American Airlines has a much longer list. Fortunately, most airlines release the same award inventory to all their partners, which matches the “saver” award inventory they offer their own members. You can search for Alaska’s award availability on its own website or with American Airlines, and then call British Airways to book the ticket. Qantas and British Airways have solid search tools for the oneworld alliance, while ANA and Aeroplan can be used to search for Star Alliance flights.

Adding more connections also helps. Look at your airline’s route map and the route maps of its alliance partners to see which connecting hubs make sense. Free online tools like OpenFlights.org can help. When you go back to searching for award flights, begin by looking for award space on each segment individually and then piece the flights together.

As long as connections are less than four hours for domestic flights or 24 hours for international flights, there are few rules to limit constructing your own itinerary, though some carriers specify a maximum total distance flown. Most seasoned travelers begin by searching for the over-water segments because these have the least award availability. Finding domestic connections at either end is relatively easy.

Check your reservations with the operating airline
Finally, don’t forget to keep an eye on your reservation. The airline that ticketed the award still needs to communicate with the airlines that operate each flight, so if you booked a partner award you may want to wait a couple of days and then call the other airline to confirm it has your reservation on file. This is also a good time to ask about seat assignments or special meal requests. The ticketing airline will be able to provide a different six-digit confirmation number for each partner.

Booking award flights is never as easy as one would hope, but it can be extremely satisfying when all of the pieces come together. Patience is required to find the right availability, the best carriers and premium cabins. Sometimes you’ll be looking in obscure places for award seats your airline said didn’t exist. But above all, stay calm. If you do need to call in, build a friendly rapport with the agent, who will hopefully expedite the process.

See: Are Frequent Flier Programs a Fool’s Game?

Scott Mackenzie is a neuroscientist who learned how to travel and earn elite status on the cheap during graduate school. He now shares these tricks on the blog Hack My Trip. You can also follow him on Twitter @HackMyTrip.

Airline pilots were once the heroes of the skies.

Tami Simon, Founder and CEO of Sounds True, shares her daily experience with fear and her advice on how fear can strengthen the emerging process in this excerpt from our Grace&Fire podcast. You can listen to our full conversation, Emerging into Being, on the Emerging Women website.

Chantal Pierrat: When we emerge, there’s often a fear or anxiety about the unknown. I’m curious if you have experienced fear through your career at Sounds True?

Tami Simon: I’m very comfortable with fear being a part of my life, every day. I think we’re not just always emerging, as in phases of our life when we have new challenges and new opportunities to creatively express ourselves; we’re actually emerging fresh in every moment. We’re always truly emerging.

Fear is actually that breeze of being out of control. “I don’t know what’s going to happen here, and I’m entering something that is unknown.” Sometimes I just open an email and I feel afraid. I read them and I think, “Really? Oh my God, I thought that this was going to happen and it’s not going to happen,” and I notice that my body is flushed with something that you could call fear.

I think the reason that I feel OK with it is that I love being courageous. I love seeing people act courageously and I love watching myself respond to events with courage. There wouldn’t really be acts of courage, real courage, if there wasn’t fear. If fear was absent, then it wouldn’t require this pulling and drawing on inner strength and finding our inner resources. We would never be challenged to tap that well.

CP: Is there a particular practice that you fall on or you lean on in times when fear gets really acute?

TS: I’d say there’s a practice and there’s a perspective. The practice would just be tuning into the body, breathing, allowing the force of gravity, relaxing, and experiencing at a somatic level a sense of just being OK with whatever’s happening in the body and letting the breath come and go in an unencumbered way.

The perspective comes from the meditation teacher that I’ve studied with now for 12 years, Reggie Ray, who was a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. At one point in a talk, he said, “Everything depends on how much you trust.” It’s a trust in what’s happening, in the actual intelligence, the feedback that’s coming in one’s own heart, the goodness that’s inside of us that we can call on and bring to the situation.

CP: If you had one piece of advice to give a woman who is in that state of emergence, where she’s creating something where there is a lot of unknown and there is a lot of fear, what would it be?

TS: Again, I want to underscore that I think we are always in a state of emergence. Take one next step. Just do that. You don’t have to know the whole thing. You don’t have to take some huge leap. We just step. One next step leads to the next step, leads to the next step, leads to the next step.

I think part of what gets us all effed up is that we want all kinds of assurances, we want to see the big picture, we want to know where this is taking us, we want to know, “If I take one step, what’s the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh step?” I don’t think it’s like that. I think in this very moment, there’s one next step to take. One phone call to make. One journal entry to write. One piece of furniture to buy.

Then pause after the step and listen to the universe. Listen to space. Listen to the creative force. And listen for what is the next true step, the next step that’s in alignment with that guidance. Some steps will feel terrifying and some won’t. But once we get used to stepping, we’re emerging. Our walk is a walk of emergence all the time. Constantly, new creative life is pouring out of us–new projects and new opportunities.

Dive in and take the first step with Tami Simon, Brené Brown, Danielle LaPorte, Zainab Salbi and many other feminine visionaries at Emerging Women Live 2014 in NYC. Sign up for the FREE Livestream broadcast, Oct 9-12th.

Electric vehicles like the Nissan LEAF are definitely ushering in a potentially new era of private transportation that will hopefully be able to help keep our environment cleaner with less emissions (or rather, zero emissions in the case of an electric car), not to mention having other incentives like an electric highway to obtain a higher adoption rate when it comes to pushing the ownership of electric cars to the masses. Having said that, the notable Nissan LEAF electric car was used to highlight London’s battle with air quality through an interesting manner.

The Nissan LEAF, which is the world’s best-selling electric vehicle (EV), was actually the very same “device”, so to speak, used to power a striking piece of street art in Waterloo, London, where this particular artwork pointed to the capital of England’s iconic skyline.

Reverse graffiti artist, Moose, who also happened to be the founder of this unique form of art, had this to share about his effort. “It’s a pleasure to be given the opportunity to create public art in this way and I’m very pleased with the iconic simplicity of the mural and its message.”

Reverse graffiti works differently from traditional graffiti, where Moose would be able to create his art simply by cleaning dirt off surfaces via a jet washer or wire brush, and as a result, this would leave a rather striking design in negative on the wall. Most of the dirt happened to have been caused by particulate matter from vehicle exhausts, and the levels are more often than not, exceed guidelines and limits throughout the busy areas of London and other European cities.

The Nissan LEAF would power the jet washer which was used to clean the wall, and this was made possible thanks to the LEAF to Home equipment which is capable of converting electricity from the car’s battery, delivering up to a couple of days’ power to a household on a single charge.

Press Release
[ Nissan LEAF helps create artwork in spite of pollution in London copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]