The bicycle is nearly perfect—an an efficient and beautiful expression of man and machine. Still, the geniuses at MIT have found a way to improve it. Meet the Copenhagen Wheel, a super-snazzy wheel with a kinetic-energy capture system and built-in electronics to monitor everything from distance to pedaling effort.

The heart of the Copenhagen wheel is a KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System). The system captures energy when you slow down, which can then be delivered on demand for a boost of speed. It uses an electric motor and batteries contained within the hub.

The Copenhagen wheel also beams information to the iPhone via Bluetooth, including speed, distance traveled, direction, and even air pollution.

The wheel will be on sale sometime in 2010. From MIT:

The initial prototypes of the Copenhagen Wheel were developed along with company Ducati Energia and the Italian Ministry of the Environment. It is expected that the wheel will go into production next year, with a tag price competitive with that of a standard electric bike. According to Claus Juhl, CEO of Copenhagen, the city might place the first order and use bicycles retrofitted with the Copenhagen Wheel as a substitution for city employee cars as part of the city’s goal to become the world’s first carbon-neutral capital by 2025.

It’s pretty slick. I’d definitely add one to my around-town cruiser, budget permitting.

Link to MIT article

The automotive future is electric. But if we want to chuck fossil-fuel-chugging cars into the recycling bin, we’ll need better batteries. Two new developments in battery tech could make electric transportation feasible.

A team at the University of Maryland has developed a new breed of supercapacitor that could replace conventional batteries in electric cars. The new supercapacitors can store as much juice as the best batteries, but deliver that juice as quickly as a capacitor.

It’s a big deal, especially for electric cars. To get an electric car to burn rubber (accelerate briskly), you need a lot of current, quickly. Batteries can’t do it without the help of capacitors—the superchargers of the electrical world. Capacitors store energy on the surface of two plates separated by an insulator. They store and release electricity much faster than batteries.

The team at the University of Maryland joined forces with engineers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology to create a grid of nano capacitors. Their prototype contains more than 10 billion nano capacitors linked together with electrodes. And they did it on aluminum foil.

Gary Rubloff, a physicist at the University of Maryland, anodized (added a layer of oxide) a sheet of foil to create a uniform grid of nanopores. Using atomic layer deposition, the team filled the pores with three layers of material that mimic the conductor-insulator-conductor layout of a normal capacitor.

A kilogram of the new supercapacitor could deliver a megawatt of power—enough to power 10,000 100-watt light bulbs.

Whiz kids at MIT have also found a way to make lithium batteries speedier. Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, has drastically improved the charge and discharge rate of lithium batteries by redesigning their structure.

Everyday lithium batteries store tons of energy, but they can’t absorb or discharge it very quickly. Turns out that the slow charge/discharge rate is due to a kind of atomic traffic jam. Charged ions get gummed up traveling in and out of the battery.

Ceder and grad student Byoungwoo Kang found that they could fee up the traffic jam by engineering a beltway of material around the battery. The result is a small battery that can be charged and discharged between 10 and 20 seconds. The discovery should lead to faster-charging gadgets and quick recharges for electric vehicles.

Link to NewScientist article

Link to MIT article

Chemists at MIT have hacked a periwinkle plant to produce anti-cancer and hypertension-fighting drugs. The chemical engineers modified the plant’s existing chemical assembly line, tweaking genes to create chemical components of the medicines. The researchers engineered mutant forms of a gene and inserted them into plant cell cultures, causing the plant to produce chemical compounds it would never produce in nature.

Plants are essentially chemical factories, capable of fusing molecules to form virtually any compound. With enough tweaking, we could coax them to build everything from medicines to fuels to super-strong building materials to revolutionary soda pop. If we can control how plants grow, we can do almost anything.

Link to MIT story

A new glass developed by engineers at MIT can soak up sunlight and divert it to tiny photovoltaic cells along its edge. The sunlight-collecting glass is so efficient and inexpensive to manufacture that it could make solar power as cheap as coal power, the engineers say.

The glass would replace the lenses and mirrors that typically focus sunlight in photovoltaic systems. It works like this: Each pane is coated with a special dye that sucks up light and then channels it through the glass to small solar cells along the panes’ edges. Researchers have created several tints of the dye, each one capable of capturing a particular wavelength of light. It’s an important development because some wavelengths, or colors, of light produce more energy than others. High-frequency ultraviolet light is supercharged while lazy infrared yields little juice. 

The researchers have stacked different panes of the glass, allowing a solar system to absorb several wavelengths of light. Using two panes, they say, nearly doubles the efficiency of the system. The panes are also good at sucking up indirect light, which means they don’t need to be mounted in expensive motorized sun-tracking apparatuses. 

Marc Baldo, a lead member of the team, says that the panes could replace windows in homes and would be much more effective on rooftops, hilltops, or anywhere the sun shines. His team is testing several different combinations of the glass and hopes to produce large-scale solar collectors soon. 

Link to Technology Review article.