Chrysler once envisioned a future filled with turbine-powered automobiles capable of screaming down America’s highways at staggering speeds. They even built a few hundred road-ready prototypes. But neither Chrysler nor any other car company ever made turbine cruisers. Capstone MicroTurbine, however, wants to put the whirling engines back on the road in a big way.
The industrial turbine manufacturer has built a plugin turbine-electric supercar, called the CMT-380. The car is driven by powerful electric motors that get their juice from lithium-polymer batteries and a microturbine that spins a generator. The 30kW microturbine/generator is is usually used for power in industrial and military applications. In the CMT-380, it burns diesel or biodiesel and gives the car a 500-mile range. Plus, it’s ultra-low-emissions rated and burns cleaner than many modern gas-engined cars.
The car is no slouch either. Capstone say it’s capable of reaching 60mph in 3.9 seconds and can hit 150mph. It’s also pretty good looking. The CMT-380 is built on a slick Factory Five Racing GTM kit, which resembles a Ford GT40 crossed with a Jaguar XJ220.
The CTM-380 is meant to show what the Capstone microturbine can do in an automobile and may see limited production if it generates enough interest. It’s an interesting concept—turbines are a great choice for power generation in a hybrid because they’re efficient when they spin at a constant speed. They can also run on almost any liquid fuel that has a high enough octane.
Link to Gizmag article
Seems like they’re injecting everything with glow-y jellyfish genes nowadays. The latest victims of the glow-in-the-dark craze are prairie voles.
Scientists injected a jellyfish gene that makes a fluorescent protein into vole embryos. When the embryos grew into itty-bitty baby voles, they glowed. Even better, the voles were able to pass the glow gene down to their offspring.
Link to ScienceDaily article
As if hot dogs weren’t disgusting enough—now we can grow them in a vat of nutrient-rich goo under fluorescent lights. A team of scientists from the Netherlands, hell-bent on grossing out the known world, have grown a hunk of pork in their lab, without a pig.
The team took muscle cells from a live pig and, hold your lunch, plopped them in a solution made from the blood of animal fetuses. The cells multiplied and clumped together, producing what the scientists describe as “a soggy form of pork.”
Before the meat hits the market, scientists will need to figure out how to toughen it up and maybe even mix in some tasty vat-grown pork fat.
Scientists estimate that the fake meat could cut tons of carbon—livestock is one of the largest producers of carbon dioxide worldwide. The grown meat would also be safe for vegetarians as no animals would be harmed in its production. But the question remains: Will vegetarians eat vat-grown pork from a tube?
Link to Gizmag article
More than 2.5 million people are afflicted with Multiple Sclerosis. It’s a nasty disease, one that slowly eats away the brain and nervous system. Thankfully, there are many treatments to lessen its effects, but there is no cure. Italian doctor Paolo Zamboni, however, thinks he may have found one.
When Zamboni’s wife was diagnosed with MS, he dove into every piece of research he could find. While searching some old medical texts, he found some research that suggested MS is caused by buildup of iron in the brain. The theory goes something like this: Iron blocks blood vessels, which then rupture. Blood and immune cells flow into the spinal-cerebral fluid. Immune cells attack the nervous system, triggering MS. After reading this, Zamboni did a few tests on his wife and other MS patients. He found an excess buildup of iron in nearly every case.
Zamboni immediately ordered a simple surgery to clear the iron blockage from two of his wife’s main arteries (the ones leading to the brain). Within days of the procedure, there was marked improvement.
The doctor went on to try the procedure on 65 other MS patients. Seventy three percent of them are completely free of symptoms two years after the treatment.
More studies are underway, but the quick procedure could improve the lives of millions.
Link to Gizmag article
Fossil fuels are going extinct, leaving a niche that’s quickly being filled by new power-producing technologies. In Norway, osmosis is being used to generate electricity. State-owned utility Statkraft has built the first experimental osmosis power plant south of Oslo on the Oslo Fjord.
It works like this: Osmosis draws fresh water across a membrane to a tank filled with salt water. The moving water spins a turbine, which produces power. Right now the power plant only cranks out enough juice to power a coffee maker, but Statkraft plans to scale up the technology to a real-deal power plant by 2015.
Link to Reuters article
Ocean currents never stop flowing. They’re a ceaseless source of energy—if you can harness them. They’re too slow to spin turbines and the ocean tends to wreak havoc on steel and concrete. A team of engineers led by professor Michael Bernitsas at the University of Michigan, however, have discovered a way nab the energy in ocean currents despite these problems.
Their new system, called VIVACE (Vortex Induced Vibrations Aquatic Clean Energy), exploits vibrations that can tear man-made structures apart.
It all has to do with Aeolian Tones. Originally described by Leonardo da Vinci, they’re the ghostly resonating sounds that strings or cables can emit when air passes over them. The vibrations that make those sounds are caused by vortices pushing the cable back and forth. These vibrations can be extremely violent, as seen in the infamous film of the Tacoma Narrows bridge oscillating itself to bits. Engineers typically try to avoid these vibrations when building structures, but Bernitsas is using them in VIVACE. Slow-moving ocean currents crete vortices that are strong enough to push steel tubes up and down, and generate power.
The system is currently being tested and could be ready for deployment in the near future. Bernitsas estimates that the ocean currents could generate enough power for the entire world. His company, Vortex Hydro Energy, plans to have systems on the market soon.
Link to Vortex Hydro Energy
Link to Endgadget article
NY Times science writer Michael Specter’s new book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, has been getting a lot of press lately. In this Gizmodo article, he discusses building with biology—genetically modifying organisms to produce the things we need, from fuel to plastics to food. From the article:
. . . you put some chemicals together and you get an organism, and then you get a more complex organism, and you get organisms that’ll do things, and you can get drugs, or chemicals, or plastics or fuel…
Check it out.
Link to Gizmag article
The glue on spider webs is extremely sticky. Just ask a fly.
A team at University of Wyoming has isolated two genes responsible for producing the proteins that make spider glue so sticky. From Gizmag:
Supported by the National Science Foundation, a team led by Omer Choresh from the University of Wyoming has in fact recently reported on an extensive study involving the DNA sequencing of the orb-weaving spiders Nephila clavipes andAraneus gemmoides. The group identified two sophisticated proteins that have evolved over millions of years and are believed to be responsible for the glue’s strength.
The plan now is to stick the genes into bacteria that will then spit out spider-web glue in quantity. The glue could be a valuable alternative to surgical glues or Elmer’s.
Link to Gizmag article
In the real world, if your estranged father slices off your hand with a white-hot blade of light, you can’t just hop aboard the nearest medical vessel and have a perfect cybernetic replacement attached to your stump. You’ll likely end up with a hook, or if you’re lucky, a gruesome, pallid rubberized mechanical hand that opens and shuts like a crab claw. The engineers at SmartHand are trying to change that. Their latest bionic hand replacement, called SmartHand of course, delivers fine motor movement and even touch sensitivity to amputees.
The SmartHand has 40 sensors that relay information to nerve ends, giving users the sensation of touch. The latest SmartHand has been grafted to Swedish amputee Robin af Ekenstam. According to a TV interview, Ekenstam says he can feel the things he grasps with the SmartHand.
“I am using muscles which I haven’t used for years. I grab something hard, and then I can feel it in the fingertips, which is strange, as I don’t have them anymore. It’s amazing.”
Amazing indeed. For now, the SmartHand resembles a sleek Terminator unit, but the engineers are working on a more lifelike Luke version for the future.
Link to Gizmag article
In the developed world, we take electric light for granted. But more than a billion people on the planet live without it. That’s why Danish researcher Fredrik Krebs created a cheap, printable solar panel and flexible LED light combo. The as-yet-unnamed lamp has a printed solar panel on one side and an LED panel on the other. During the day, the panel lays flat to soak up the sun’s energy. At night, the flexible lamp can be curled into a cone to make a simple lamp.
The lamp’s current solar panels only operate at 1 percent efficiency, but they still collect enough power to run the lamp. The lamps are made to last for a year and will cost $7 (or less) each by the time they go into production.
Something as simple as a solar-powered lamp can make a huge difference in remote villages or towns that have no or intermittent power. With such a cheap light source, teens around the world can read comics and Sci-Fi novels late into the night. Or, you know, study math and science.
Link to Popsci article
