With Chevrolet Volts in the hands of the media this week for preview drives, it looks like range in electric-only mode is on the order of 30 to 35 miles before the gasoline “range extender” engine kicks in. Previously, GM talked about ranges of 40 miles, forty-ish miles, and most recently a range of 25-50 miles. It also turns out that gasoline fuel economy isn’t so special, either.
The latest combination of crazy gadgets built to help with real problems is the “Plasmacluster” — a cell phone with an ionizing air-purifier built-in, from NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese wireless carrier and handset manufacturer. According to some studies, your cell phone is one of the most germ-infested items you carry around with you, and your hands aren’t likely to be much better. The Plasmacluster supposedly uses an “ion emitter” to keep bacteria and viruses at bay within a 12-inch radius of the phone, keeping you healthy while you chat.
To be clear, there’s little real science behind “ionized air purifiers” and other devices that promise to clean the air with the magic of charged particles, but that hasn’t stopped a booming industry of such products from hitting store shelves around the world. The Plasmacluster looks like a thicker-than-average flip phone, and is still in development according to NTT DoCoMo.
It’s likely the phone will never see a release outside of Japan, but if it does, the cell phone radiation crowd will have a field day debating whether having an “ion generator” on your phone does more harm than good.
[via DVice]
Google Computer-Driven Prius from Ben Tseitlin on Vimeo.
“[W]e have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves.” Hang on, what? It’s never a good sign when life imitates an early Stephen King novel… Those are the words of Sebastian Thrun, Google’s Distinguished Software Engineer, posted to the Official blog. The blogs of the rest of the world naturally responded with a collective, “wait–what?”
Google has, in fact, created a self-driving car–not only that, the company took it on a test drive down the coast of California, from its Mountain View campus to its office in Santa Monica. Then, naturally, they cruised the thing down Hollywood Boulevard. Word is that the car really wanted to check out the selection at Amoeba Records.
And this isn’t the first time Google has taken the car out into the wild. Past exertions have included Lombard Street (the world famous “crookedest street”), the Golden Gate, the Pacific Coast Highway, and the circumference of Lake Tahoe. The car has driven some 140,000 miles–with trained operators on-board, naturally.
The goal of the vehicle is “to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use,” according to the company. The cars (yes, cars plural) utilize video cameras, radar sensors, and lasers (that’s how you know it’s from the future) to spot other traffic. Built-in maps, meanwhile, help the vehicles navigate the road.
The car is in constant contact with Google’s data centers, which process all of the information gathered by the vehicles.
In all, Google seems confident of the potential of its crazy future car, “We’re also confident that self-driving cars will transform car sharing, significantly reducing car usage, as well as help create the new ‘highway trains of tomorrow.’ ” Anyone else think that this is beginning to sound like an exhibit from the 1964 World’s Fair?
Back in July, a team of high school students gathered on the dusty flats of the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada with a single purpose: to launch a 29-foot rocket into orbit using some rocketry training, their knowledge of physics, and a couple of Sony laptops powered by Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors. The event was the culmination of The Rocket Project, and after several delays and weather mishaps, the students finally managed to launch their rocket into orbit successfully.
Following the students on that journey were a handful of documentary filmmakers who released short episodes of the students trials and successes, and now a complete half-hour Rocket Project Documentary will air on The Science Channel tonight at 9:00pm Eastern (check your local listings for additional airings.) If you miss the half-hour documentary though, the shorter Web episodes that follow the months-long story of the launch are still available at The Rocket Project Web site.
If this doesn’t help restore some of your faith in the healing potential of technology, nothing will. A company called Berkeley Bionics this week showcased its latest creation, the eLEGS bionic exoskeleton. The product, which was originally designed to help the military during long outings, is now being showcased for its potential in helping paraplegics walk.
The “wearable, artificially intelligent, bionic device” can fit most people between 5’2 and 6’4 who weigh under 220 pounds. Under “ideal circumstances,” wearers can walk at speeds of up to two miles an hour, thanks to the device’s “unprecedented knee flexion.”
The exoskeleton weighs about 45 pounds, and the battery should last for about six hours of walking. According to Engadget, Berkeley Bionics is looking at a $100,000 price point for the device, with a commercial version coming in 2013, if all goes according to plan.
Yes, you read that right. In 30 years, and for the cost of a mere $117 billion, America will finally catch up to the rest of the industrialized world.
The purposed plan would connect Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and DC. In a mere three-and-a-half hours, the new high-speed trains will be able to zoom a professor from MIT down to meet the President at the White House (both of whom are likely now in their 20s and posting things on Facebook they will later regret) to discuss the policy implications of teleporters, which will totally exist by then. This is compared to the current travel time of eight hours on conventional local service, and six-an-a-half hours on the Acela.
Progress!
To keep things in perspective, here are some other things that will also occur the year Amtrak’s high-speed trains comes on-line:
Wasn’t “Amtrak Joe” supposed to be all over this?
Weather, terrorist threats–let’s face it, airlines already have enough reasons for delays without bringing alien life into the mix. That, however, is seemingly what happened in the Inner Mongolia region of China, when a “flat and tubular” unidentified flying object shut down a major airport.
The UFO caused flights from Beijing and Shanghai to be diverted to other airports. This, according to British tabloid The Sun, is the third time this year that airfields in China have been closed because of unidentified craft.
This time the object was reportedly sighted via the radar screens of air traffic controllers who alerted the airport after failing to make contact with the object. A spokeswoman said of the event, “To guarantee security, aircraft had to land at secondary airports. Otherwise, it may have led to collision.”
A space collision, naturally.
2010 is shaping up to be a big year for carbon at the Nobel Prize committee. After awarding the prize in physics to two Russian-born scientists for their research on the ultra-thin carbon construction known as Graphene, the committee has given the prize in chemistry to three professors who developed a tool for create carbon-carbon bonds.
Two of the professors are U.S.-based–Richard Heck of the University of Delaware and Ichi Negishi of Perdue. The third, Akira Suzuki, is a professor at Japan’s Hokkaido University.
The committee had the following to say about the trio’s work,
This chemical tool has vastly improved the possibilities for chemists to create sophisticated chemicals, for example carbon-based molecules as complex as those created by nature itself.
The tool is known as palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling–I’m sure it’ll get a slicker name, once Hollywood gets its hands on it. Palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling has a wide range of potential uses in fields like agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and electronics.
“The key word here is versatility,” Negishi told CNN. “One of our dreams is to be able to synthesize any organic compounds of importance, whether it is medicinally important compounds … or important from the point of view of material science. And we believe that our technology or our chemistry will be applicable to a very wide range of compounds, without knowing what they might be.”
DARPA, the military’s secret nerd consortium, recently awarded a $7 million dollar contract to Lockheed Martin to deliver 15 field-testable prototypes of the agency’s automated “One-Shot” rifles by next October.
The One-Shot project is able to calculate atmospheric conditions to tell a gunman exactly where to fire to hit a target from a range of up to 3,600 feet. The program began in 2007 when Lockheed developed a down-range sniper system that calculates ballistics based on average crosswind, range, temperature, pressure, humidity, and a range of other conditions.
via FoxNews
As if carbon didn’t already have enough issues with its body image, two scientists have been award the Nobel Prize in physics for researching the properties of ultra-thin carbon flakes known as Graphene. The Russian-born duo of Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselo will split the $1.4 million prize.
Geim and Novoselov are researchers at England’s University of Manchester. They discovered some pretty amazing things about Graphene, which is both the world’s thinnest and strongest material.
Graphene is transparent and can conduct electricity better than other material. Its atoms, according to The New York Times, “are arranged in a flat hexagon lattice like microscopic chicken wire, a single atom thick.”
The material is a candidate to replace silicon as the basis of computer chips.
Geim and Novoselov apparently began their Graphene research on a lark, as part of the same “Friday evening” experiments that led Geim to levitate a frog using magnetic fields. That particular experiment won the scientist a less prestigious IgNobel award.
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