I ran across this web page that claims to be able to teach you how to turn your car into a water powered vehicle or a water/gasoline hybrid. Can anyone give me any insight into this? If it's the real deal, this could change so many things. God, even the idea of filling my tank from the tap just made my day!

This Fox News report looks pretty convincing, too!



[Daves Daily]

In Tibet, there are two ways to cook your food: an open fire fueled by yak dung or wood (which isn't exactly easy to obtain); or solar cookers, which consist of two-inch-thick concrete covered with tiny glass mirrors.

Fire produces lots of smoke that leads to lung disease in people who do most of their cooking indoors. Solar cookers are much cleaner, but are so heavy that they need 4 people just to move one. Plus their focus isn't always dead-on, which can damage food, cooking equipment and even start fires.

Scot Frank, a student at MIT, and Catlin Powers of Wellesley College took a trip to Tibet in 2006. One thing they heard regularly from the villagers is that life would be so much easier if there was a light mobile version of their solar cookers. This way they could go take care of their flocks or fields and still eat. But it need to be strong enough to handle the fierce winds that whip across the plateau.

Ask and you shall receive.

Some MIT students and some students from Qinghai Normal University in Tibet's Amdo region cooked up exactly what they were looking for. The cooker they made, which was inspired by the nomadic tents in the region, is made from yak-wool canvas panels, the supports are bamboo, and the dish is covered with a reflective mylar. It can be assembled and disassembled easily and one person can carry it. Plus it can be anchored to hold against the wind. The students will begin testing a prototype of the cooker this fall, and make it available for mass production in local factories.

The students called themselves SolSource Tibet, and entered MIT's yearly IDEAS comp., winning one of two Yunus Innovation Challenge awards and $3k to put towards the project.

The solar cooker cost about $17 to make and, for an additional $26, can be fitted with an extra attachment and used to heat homes.

[MIT News]

Just in case you wanted to save some dead presidents of your power bill AND keep playing video games on your PC 8 hours a day, boy does LG has a pitch for you! The Flatron W2252TE-a monitor claims to be "the world's most energy efficient." It uses roughly 45% less power than a traditional display, which means about 40 watts less. But it still looks great with a 1680 x 1050 resolution, 2ms response time, 170 degree viewing angle, and a 10,000:1 contrast ratio. The price has yet to be set.

[Pocket-lint]

Now that's a faucet. 300,000 gallons of water a second, which is part of a 60-hour flow of around 75,000,000,000 gallons of water meant to revitalize the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon.

Since 1995, 27 agencies have been working on a plan to mimic natural flooding that will redistribute sediment from central riverbeds to the riverside. This would rebuild sandbars downstream and create a better habitat for endangered fish, such as the humpback chub, and create better recreational spaces for people to use.

The first discharge was in 1996, and carried a small amount of sediment through the Grand Canyon into Lake Mead. Blast number two, in 2004, didn't move enough sand.

Results for this flow should be in within the end of the year and will provide a benchmark to base the next one on. So far, the initiative doesn't look too successful.

[Popular Science]

Paper airplanes of the future will be feared. This paper is made from cellulose like normal paper, no big deal. The thing is, science nerds at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden made the fiber so tiny and free of defects that it 7 times stronger than that legal pad of yours.

To achieve this, they break down the pulp with enzymes, beat it with a machine, and treat the fibers with carboxymethanol. I don't know what that is or does.. neither does Google Search :) Anyway, this process gives the paper a tensile strength of 214 megapascals, compared to the 30 MPa you get with regular paper.

This wouldn't really mean much to us regular folks except it could replace other plastic items, the manufacturing of which would put out petroleum waste. Green team go!

[OH GIZMO!]

The New York Times is reporting that the "Roadrunner," an American military supercomputer, has reached a long-sought-after benchmark by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. Part of it's insides comes directly out of the Playstation 3.

This (world's fastest?) computer contains 116,640 processor cores, with 12,960 chips that are an improved version of the Cell processor used in the PS3. "The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations," said the New Work Times

"Roadrunner" takes a lot of power.. like enough to power a large mall, and requires three different programming tools since it has three different kinds of processors. Plus all 116,640 processor cores need to stay occupied at once for it to continue running. What a chore.

[NY Times]

In the past few weeks, two surfers were killed and one injured by shark attacks off of Mexico's Pacific coast. To prevent any more uninvited trouble, biologists are going to tag hundreds of sharks in the area. The study will begin in about two months and last about a year. This will help the scientists understand the sharks' movement and when and why they come so close to the coast. But if someone kept sending out free food on a surf board in your back yard, what would you do?

Reuters.com

By taking a common tranquilizer along with a medicine that slows the production of stress hormones, cocaine addicts may be able to fight their addiction in an impressive new way. The new drug combination should reduce their cravings without getting them high.

On Wednesday, Embera NeuroTherapeutics announced the first clinical trial for a treatment that combines tranquilizers with a medicine that slows the production of stress hormones. They hope the combination will reduce the cravings of cocaine addicts without getting them high.

Forty-five volunteers are signed up to help kick their habits under the supervision of Anita Kablinger, a professor of Psychiatry at Louisiana State University. The control group will get a placebo, and the rest will receive Some will receive a combination of the sedative oxazepam and the hormone-blocking drug metyrapone.

So, instead of inducing artificial pleasure, their just cutting people's bodies off from chemicals that stress them out. That's innovative.

Wired Science
Potential New Way to Kick a Coke Habit: Mixing Tranquilizers with Hormone Blockers

So here's a new concept: make a balloon, put a fan on the outside and a turbine on the inside, raise it to 1000 ft. elevation (where the wind never stops blowing), and use it to avoid paying for electricity ever again.

Sound simple? Well it's not that simple.

This contraption, invented by Fred Furgeson (you can google him at the lower-left side of this page:), the Magenn Power Air Rotor System's (MARS') turbine will rotate at whatever speed the wind may push it. It plays by it's own rules! Anywho, that means between 2 and 28 meters-per-second. Held up by helium and the Sky Captainesque shape, the structure is held tightly to the earth by a copper tether that is attached to two generators on both front and back. Also the spinning motion gives the MARS perpetual lift and helps it maintain it's rightful place directly (almost) above it's grounded point of origin (there's gotta be a better way to say that).

Now this sounds super and all, but keep in mind that the MARS is the size of a small house. It will be easier to maintain than other forms of electrical harvest (wind farms and whatnot), and helium leaks are only at half a percent in the structure. This seems like a fantastic idea now, but I'll bet by 2010 we'll be seeing Martin Lawrence or some other B-actor (yeah, I said it) promoting this on late-night infomercials for 5 easy payments of $19.95.

I wonder if you can apply the same technique to water and set one of these puppies up in the middle of the East Australian Current. Probably not, but that gives me an idea for a screenplay...

Source 1
Source 2

The New York Times' recent look at big ideas of 2007 noted a particular way to to get hammered. By eating a pickle. Dave Arnold, who head's culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute, has created a crunchy martini by soaking peeled cucumbers in gin and vermouth instead of using the more outdated salt and brine approach. After plunging this tailgate-friendly treat into a Mason jar with the concoction, Arnold vacuum-seals and heats all of it. This collapses the cucumber's air pockets. When the seal is broken, the air pockets fill themselves full of juicy liquor. Brilliant. And thanks to the Mason jar, the pickle keeps it's crunchiness! Though he serves it in a fancy way (sprinkled with celery seeds, grated lime zest and sea salt), I have a feeling this new delicacy will be a common item at football games and dive bars sooner than we think. Why else would every bar-tender stock a pickle jar?