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news
Termite Gut Microbe Study: Cheap Cellulosic Ethanol Soon?
Wouldn't it be great if we had a super-cheap way to make ethanol out of cellulosic materials such as switchgrass and wood chips? The problem is that you need to turn the cellulose into simple sugars before you can ferment it into ethanol... but termites have managed the trick for gadzillions of years, so why not figure out exactly what magic takes place in their guts and replicate it on an industrial scale? Some white coats at Caltech have taken a big step in that process, performing a vast genomic study of the microbes in Nasutitermes termites' guts and identifying more than a thousand potentially useful enzymes. Hooray, soon we'll all be running 16:1 compression alky-burners! [MIT]
report
Making Cars Look Like Animals Could Reduce Accidents
A study conducted by Yale and the University of California has found that the human brain is more attuned to detecting animal than mechanical motion. The results could point the way for safer cars being made in the image of wildlife. In tests, subjects were over three times as likely to recognize motion in animals than in cars. Quoted in The Telegraph, Professor Leda Cosmides of the University of California said, "It may seem fanciful, but it is possible that painting cars to look more like animals might increase attentional monitoring of them." The Telegraph Photo credit: Sister72
roads
Blacktop Cadence: It's Tarmac!
You've walked on it. You've most likely skinned your knees on it while playing kickball or four-square. We're willing to bet you've hooned on it. Yes friends, it's the reason we're not all driving Land Rovers today: it's tarmac! An evolution of John Loudon McAdam's road-building system, which involved breaking rocks in the hot sun, tarmac — introduced by E. Purnell Hooley as a way to cut down on dust produced by the vacuum created by fast-moving vehicles — used a crushed-stone aggregate bound with tar. More »
retro
SUPER POTENTIAL! Older than Starion, Younger than Mitsubishi
Mitsubishi began as a shipping firm founded by Yataro Iwasaki in 1870. The theory of superpotential was first posited by E. T. Whittaker in a series of papers dating back to 1903. The Starion was introduced in 1982. It took a war between Japan and Russia, two World Wars, a stalemate in Korea and a debacle in Vietnam to finally bring the two together. Oh, and a space in what was originally a compound word. But we sure are awfully glad they found each other. More »
commentary
A Wistful Thought
Besides Starions and Starlets, conversations amongst ourselves (read: Davey G. and Uncle Bumbeck) often lead to the sheer ridiculous awesomeness of 1950s and '60s technology, before it was Health-and-Safetey'd out of existence. We're huge fans of NACA (which gave us the coolest air scoop of all time) and early NASA. And we think, just maybe it's time for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to buiild a car. Not a Mars rover, but an honest-to-Uranus earthbound vehicle that can accomplish completely ridiculous things. More »
news
Survey Says: 4x4 Drivers Are Most Reckless
Well, no kidding. Any time you're behind the wheels of what feels like a tank, you will believe you're invincible — but now there's a study to prove it. The Imperial Collefe of London found that roughly 19% of SUV drivers didn't wear seat belts and the use of distracting devices such as cell phones was four times higher than for "normal" cars. Well, you don't drive an SUV, right? Wrong — these idiots (like some of us, we should add) do share the road with you — and since they (we're) bigger — there's a substantial risk to all. However, it looks like we may be off the hook as the study concludes it may be parents who seem to be the most distracted. We could have told them that. More »
gadgets
Shape-Shifting Metals Could Lead to Safer Cars
Imagine that, like a toontown taxi, a regular road car could suck in its gut just before a crash to better absorb the force of a side impact. Now picture a bunch of German guys in white short sleeved shirts and pocket protectors trying to make it happen. That, according to New Scientist, is a pretty good picture of what's going on inside Siemens, which is developing a new active-safety system using a shape-memory alloy. A car so equipped would call on mounted cameras and radar to detect an encroaching object, which would activate a type of metal in the body structure that could shift its shape to distribute the shock more evenly — thereby reducing catastrophic injury. It's just one of the projects the EU is funding to make cars safer by employing all manner of new technologies. More »
science
Foot-Pounds vs. Newton Meters: Jalopnik Goes to School
So we mentioned in our R10 post from earlier that we didn't get the whole lb. ft. And because our addled little brain is somewhat screwy when it comes to physics (we did well in Honors Bio but struggled through high-school Chemistry and didn't bother with physics if it involves math, forget it). And we could've saved ourselves a lot of embarrassment if we'd just looked up a conversion table on this glorious interweb at our fingertips. But we didn't. Anyway, kindly reader Weston writes in and explains the whole damn thing. Click through to humiliate us further. More »
gadgets
Hey Mister Heat Miser: Advances in Theromelectrics Could Lead to Better Efficiency
Factoid: 70 percent of fuel energy consumed in car engines is dissipated as heat. Finding a way to conserve that energy, and use it to generate electrical power to run cars' systems, is the goal of researchers at GM and BMW. They're using advances in nanotechnology to develop thermoelectric materials for such systems — which could, say, harvest heat from an exhaust pipe — to increase fuel efficiency by replacing cars' alternators with heat-electricity generators. First applications will likely be niche uses — one supplier is already selling thermoelectric car-seat heating and cooling units. More »
gadgets
