Synopsis:
Domenii:
BBC 00063.txt
#Can a city really ban cars from its streets? The German city of Hamburg has announced plans to become car-free within the next two decades.
It is an ambitious idea, but city officials obviously feel that the personal motorcar does not fulfill a function that walking,
According to the official website, parks, playgrounds, sports fields, allotments and cemeteries will be connected to form a network,
which will allow people to navigate through the city without the use of cars. Banishing the car from urban areas is becoming a common trend in many European cities.
London imposes a ongestion chargeon private vehicles entering the city centre during peak hours. The Danish capital Copenhagen is building bicycle superhighways radiating out from the city centre.
These developments combined may make worrying reading for driving enthusiasts. Is the era of the personal car over?
In the century since the Ford Model T was introduced in 1908, global vehicle numbers have swollen to well over a billion.
But according to recent research, the growth spurt may have peaked. Professor Michael Sivak, at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute has published just a series of reports looking at car use,
and its environmental impact. His calculations show that otorisationin the United states might have reached a peak in 2008,
and that the figures have been on the decline since. That holds even when the global economic downturn,
and its negative impact on car sales, is taken into account. Sivak speculates that a number of factors could be contributing to the trend,
probably making it more than a passing fad. They include increased telecommuting (or working from home) and the movement of populations back to city centres.
In China, Beijing and Shanghai are looking at plans to limit the number of new vehicles being registered to curb growth.
It a movement more cities are looking towards, particularly in the US. think it is fair to use our data to look at similar trends in say, France or England,
but I am very careful not to extrapolate this to developing countries, says Sivak. However another recent report, from analysts IHS Automotive, states:
sian and developing market cities will not achieve the levels of car motorisation enjoyed in the West Energy problem Another way to examine the issue is to look at the number of households without a car.
each have more than 30%of households without a light duty vehicle, says Sivak. In fact, the figures show that 56%of households in New york (which top the list) don have a car. think that will be surprising to most people.
It was surprising to me and I am in the business. Perhaps it is not so surprising in cities like New york,
In Los angeles, only 12%of households are car-less, and in affluent San jose, heart of Silicon valley, it is only 5. 8
when the amount of energy used is measured. In fact, everything seems better than driving. A long distance train uses 1, 668 BTU per person mile.
and cars a staggering 4, 218. BTU, or British thermal unit, per person mile is a measure of energy used to move a person a mile.
The balance has shifted since the 1970s, when the energy per person mile was about twice as much for flying than for driving.
Now, cramming more people onto planes makes them more efficient per person. he load in aircraft,
while the load in cars has decreased, explains Sivak. o you are spreading the energy across fewer people in a car.
To match the emissions levels of flying, the US car fleet needs either to improve from the current 21.5 mpg on average to at least 33.8 mpg,
or carry 2. 3 people per trip instead of the current 1. 38 people says Sivak.
BBC 00076.txt
a graduate student at Cornell University in New york. He raised the money, more than $70, 000, through the Kickstarter crowdfunding website to enable people to have their own personal spacecraft, known as a sprite.
There has been tremendous interest in this ambitious mission. It was one of the first stories I covered in this column
and you can hitch a ride for not a lot of money, explains Manchester In this case, Nasa is flying Kicksat for free as part of its Educational Launch of Nanosatellites programme.
Those fitted with magnetometers like the ones that provide your smartphone compass will transmit data about the Earth magnetic field.
and a bit of know-how, will be able to follow all the spacecraft from the ground. hat wee been able to do with Kicksat is tap into the developments in consumer electronics,
ee using a lot of the components that have been developed for smartphones to make these tiny satellites possible.
along with thousands of people around the world students, schoolchildren, radio hams and space enthusiasts. For most of them, this will be the first space mission where they have direct involvement.
BBC 00090.txt
#How to fix a car#without a mechanic Think of a mechanic working on your car, and youl probably imagine oil, grease,
That because modern vehicles are becoming more and more complex, with a vast array of components. Whereas in the past a mechanic,
or even car enthusiast, could reasonably recognise and understand everything that made an engine run, now the proliferation of sensors, computers,
and safety devices makes this near impossible. BMW vision for the way its engineers should be working on its cars is different.
Instead of reaching for any of the shiny silver tools on his cart the mechanic picks up a pair of what looks like sunglasses with connected buds for his ears.
and is given computer-generated instructions on what to disassemble, in what order. The glasses the mechanic is wearing contain small screens to provide an overlay of computer-generated images on the real world augmented reality (AR.
From Google glass competitors, to contact lenses with built-in displays, this tech is coming in part enabled by the wide adoption of smartphones.
It seems to be almost waiting for people to come up with novel applications for it.
BBC Future has reported before on the future vision of cars with augmented windscreens, or even ee throughbackseats, effectively making the car seem transparent to the driver and helping visibility.
Most of those concepts won be reality until far off in the future, but car companies are jumping into the augmented reality world.
Volkswagen is using AR and promoting it as the futuristic way to provide servicing for its new concept, the XL1.
The Augmented reality maintenance and service support system is named Marta (Mobile Augmented reality Technical assistance) and will provide instructions to help identify
and label vehicle components. e see a lot of use in the automotive industry. For us it always been a sector
which sees the value in the technology, and it always been easy to riveresults within that area,
Smartphone repair kit? As well as car companies using the technology internally to help engineers and mechanics, it is increasingly being made available to the rest of us.
Audi has released recently a mobile phone app in Europe that can identify over 200 elements on the inside of a car.
It is a user manual, and then some, with the ability to pick out what the camera is being aimed at,
and deliver more information on it. Augmented reality apps can also be used for maintenance at home, perhaps making simple fixes on modern cars more accessible to more of us.
How often have heard you people remark that older cars are easier to work on and that the engine of most modern cars mostly just looks like a slab of plastic?
AR could help see through that plastic. ay youe driving down the road, and a light comes on you freak out
and pull over. You can then load up that scenario, based on the symbols, in an app, says Lord.
The driver would simply point their smartphone camera in the general direction of the problem. t scans the engine,
The system also has to work in multiple lighting conditions. If a customer breaks down at the side of the road at night, in the rain,
a reliable AR app on their phone still needs to be able to identify that it is looking at an engine.
Computers have a much harder time. Is a straight edge a part of the car, or part of the building it is parked near?
The hope is that AR systems will become robust enough that explicit instructions are needed no longer.
If a mechanic or a driver has a problem, they will simply turn to their phone,
or tablet, for help, which will replace complicated paper-based instructions. o couple AR with the user manual is the next logical step.
It kind of surprising we don see this more than we do already, says Dr Jeffrey Miller, at the University of Southern California Computer science Dept,
and member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). So the car of the future may come with one simple instruction DON read the manual t
BBC 00111.txt
#Is this the year that green racing finally takes off? Motorsport has traditionally been speed about noise
and the smell of burning rubber. Spectators loudly cheering the high-octane thrills and spills in racetracks around the world might not spare much thought about what damage it could be doing to the environment.
But despite this, racing recently appears to have got something of an environmental conscience and the world of green racing is slowly but surely growing.
Promises of a green racing revolution have yet to get off the grid, though. Last year, a fuel cell car was due to race in the prestigious Le Mans 24-hour race in France in June
but had to pull out at the last minute due to technical problems. In 2008, Formula Zero a race between hydrogen-powered cars built by six competing universities tried to show that sustainable energy needn be faced po,
and while the zero-emissions race is no longer going, it boosted the idea of a cleaner, greener brand of motorsports.
One of the biggest issues for green motorsport, however, is how to turn around public perception.
Can fans be convinced that environmentally friendly cars can also be fast and exciting? There are encouraging signs that this is happening.
running cars on ethanol and turning its race meets into centres for recycling everything from waste engine oil to old mobile phones.
And on Monday Formula E demonstrated its new, fully electric race car for the first time in Las vegas, capable of reaching speeds of more than 150mph (240kph),
and will see the cars competing in 10 world cities, including London, Beijing and Los angeles. The key is how effective the tech will be.
This is currently being exploited by German carmaker Audi, which uses it to recapture energy usually lost
when braking, and then use it for acceleration. F1 cars have used hybrid tech in the form of kinetic energy recovery systems,
or KERS, since the 2009 season. Power boost Regenerative energy recovery is also at play in the vehicle
I was allowed to throw around a test track; a modified Hybrid chevrolet Corvette, usually viewed as an all-American muscle car.
This car also runs on a blend of biofuel, known as E85. In this case, the car uses a type of advanced cellulosic 85%ethanol renewable fuel from woody biomass.
This manages to avoid some of the main problems associated with biofuels; that they use land and water that would be used better for food production.
The car also has hybrid technology with regenerative brakes. When the car is slowed, energy is recovered
and stored in a battery. When an added burst of speed is needed, a paddle behind the steering wheel provides a boost using that stored energy. n racing,
if youe not going to make it faster, or more exciting, why even do it? asks Forrest Jehlik from the Argonne National Laboratory, part of the US Department of energy, outside Chicago,
where I test-driving the car. ut if you can do that, and at the same time remove yourself from the environmental debate, it a win for everybody.
In this case, the car I am driving is a simulator perhaps fortunately as I continually crash it into the barriers.
It is one of several in a large show trailer designed to be taken to events such as races and car meets,
so that enthusiasts can witness the benefits of green tech, first hand. The simulator consists of a racing seat, a large flatscreen in front,
and immersive sound. The experience is like a racing game, but with much more realistic controls.
Jehlik is the man responsible for this green-racing simulator, and he is convinced that planet-friendly technology has a role to play in the future of motorsport.
He put me through my paces. I did not make any concessions to economical driving.
I drove as fast as I could, and certainly didn limit my top speed or harsh manoeuvres perhaps
At the end of the simulation some interesting statistics are displayed on the screen. Over a 200-lap race, in a conventional car,
I would have used 193 gallons (730 litres) of gasoline. But the computer claimed that using the biofuel mix,
and some regenerative braking, I would only have used 39 gallons (147 litres) of gasoline. The rest would have been biofuel,
and tested in motorsport eventually make it into the more regular cars that we drive every day,
and wee having a much smaller impact on the environment. It too early to say
greener and much quieter motor racing may be closer to the starting grid than you might think y
BBC 00131.txt
#How the world's tiniest film can transform computers Researchers at IBM have made the world's smallest movie.
Possibly quite a lot about the future of data storage and memory capacity. Research into atomic-scale memory focuses on the#ability to move single atoms, one of the smallest particles of any element in the universe.#
#In 2012, IBM scientists announced the creation of the world's smallest magnetic memory bit,
-and scientists need to have some fun amidst all the hard work. So, to try to illustrate the possibilities,
BBC Future met researcher Andreas Heinrich in his laboratory at IBM's Almaden Research center in California,
head over to our Facebook or Google+page, or message us on Twitter
BBC 00143.txt
#Would you take smart drugs to perform better at work? Would you let your child get on a bus driven by someone on mind-altering drugs?
What about having an operation conducted by a surgeon taking stimulant pills? Unappealing at first glance; however would your opinion change
if you knew those drugs made the driver less likely to crash, and the surgeon better able to keep a steady hand?
Drugs that help people with brain and neuropsychiatric conditions improve concentration, planning and memory, or reduce impulsive
and risk-taking behaviours, are increasingly finding their way into the hands of healthy people who want to study harder,
work better, cope under stress and keep going during night shifts. And the use of these so-called"smart drugs#is set to grow in our increasingly competitive world,
working for longer and driving for longer, says Barbara Sahakian, Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge,
and maybe we'd have more inventions, faster medical discoveries, safer transport and bigger economies.
should taking them be a condition of employment? If popping pills can make completing mental challenges easier,
Are students who take cognitive enhancers to get better grades and access to top universities cheating,
and will those not taking them feel obliged to do so to keep up? Those that use smart drugs swear by them.
who took the narcolepsy treatment modafinil and the cognitive disorder drug piracetam in the final year of his politics degree course at Warwick University, UK.
He is by no means alone. While accurate data on the use of cognitive enhancers is lacking,
there have been a few small surveys. Sahakian estimates 16%of US students are taking study buddies
while a poll of students at Oxford university carried out last year, found 7%had tried them.
In the academic world, the phenomenon reaches both the top and the bottom of the tree.
A 2008 online survey carried out by the journal Nature found that one in five readers had taken the anti-hyperactivity drug Ritalin, narcolepsy treatment modafinil,
with some US doctors now prescribing Adderall#amphetamine salts used to treat ADHD and narcolepsy#to healthy children from low-income families purely to improve academic performance.
Doors of perceptionshift workers truck drivers, pilots and doctors are known also to take cognitive enhancers. Stimulant use has long been commonplace in the military,
from Incans given coca leaves before battles to Allied soldiers using amphetamines during World war Two,
and British, French and US troops using modafinil in more recent conflicts. In his book Mind Wars, Jonathan Moreno describes extensive recent research by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa),
including experiments into the use of beta blockers to reduce stress hormones. Some argue the development of new, more effective cognitive drugs,
as well as ageing working populations and greater competition for work all point towards their use becoming more widespread in future.
Use on college campuses and even in high schools has become increasingly common and normalised, says Anjan Chatterjee, a neuroscentist at the University of Pennsylvania.
Students think of these as study aids in the same way as someone might drink coffee before work.
As young people who are getting used to thinking about cognitive enhancement in a non-medicalised way get older it is likely to just become a normal part of how we approach the world.
Whether such predictions are borne out will depend on perceptions of whether cognitive enhancers work. I take modafinil if
I need a short-term boost of focus or if I need to revise for exams,
says John. Time passes quickly because you are working so hard and effectively, and when you go home you can remember absolutely everything.
It also increases your alertness and awareness like a kind of turbo-charged caffeine only without the jitters,
cardiovascular problems and psychosis associated with stimulants. We don't really know what the long-term health implications of taking these drugs are for healthy people,
Tests carried out on 18 pilots at Stanford university found those given the Alzheimer's disease drug Aricept for 30 days were better able to retain complex aviation tasks learnt on a simulator than those given placebos.
And last year Sahakian and Ara Darzi of Imperial College London, found that doctors who had been deprived of sleep for one night showed improved working memory, planning,
In a 2010 review Claire Advokat, Professor of Psychology at Louisiana State university, found that stimulant drugs such as Ritalin might improve memory retention
Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania led by psychologist Irena Ilieva found volunteers given Adderall performed no better in 13 different cognitive ability tests,
says Mitul Mehta, a senior lecturer at Institute of Psychiatry, King's college London. Brain scans he carried out found those with the lowest working memory capacity to begin with improved the most when taking Ritalin.
Another study, led by Martha Farah, Director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society at the University of Pennsylvania
and you increase the speed of cars, things flow quicker. But if you do so in heavy traffic you get traffic jams.
wrote the authors of Beyond Therapy, a 2003 report by the US President's Council on Bioethics.
says John Harris, Professor of Bioethics, and Director of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovations, University of Manchester, UK.
But then so are many things, such as education, so in a free society it is for people to weigh that up
and decide whether it's a desirable course of action. Another objection is that as with other new technologies, not everyone is likely to have equal access to cognitive enhancers and their benefits.
This leads to fears that it will become even harder for those from low income backgrounds to get into the best schools, universities and jobs.
John, the Warwick University student, doesn't feel his use of the drugs is giving him an unfair advantage.
whether workers should be coerced into taking smart drugs to improve job performance. Again, Harris says the issue is hardly unique to cognitive enhancement.
You can't drive a car unless you pass a driving test, and that's a form of coercion,
or steadying the hands of surgeons. What about indirect coercion, feeling the need to take smart drugs
if their fellow pupils were taking them.""Peer-pressure coercion to take them is a worry
Some people feel pressure to start work very early and not go home until the boss has gone.
But the legality is of little relevance as customers turn to internet pharmacies to obtain them.
and doing so without medical supervision, says Sahakian. So it would be sensible for people to have access to safe, effective cognitive enhancers,
and then perhaps people could do it in consultation with their GPS. It's a call echoed by the joint UK scientific academies report which states:
Regulatory authorities such as the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency are set up to evaluate the effects of treatments on disease and disorders, not healthy people.
Neither large pharmaceutical companies nor public funding bodies are likely to put forward the necessary funds because of the stigma attached to promoting the drug use to healthy people.
if we have data from larger studies into the effects of these drugs. The question is who would be willing to carry these tests out.
head over to our Facebook or Google+page, or message us on Twitter n
BBC 00145.txt
#Will China have an Apollo moment? Huddled around television sets, a nation waits with baited breath as a spacecraft door is opened.
Slowly an astronaut emerges, the blackness of space behind him. He gestures to the camera before edging his way out.
or Jade Rabbit on board. China has made no secret of its designs on the Moon, with speculation that one of its citizens will walk on the surface within the next ten years.
Fuelled by Cold war fears and supposedly by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy wanted to take on
and in the process persuade the rest of the world to work with them. Space was a way of showcasing US power and ingenuity."
While Apollo was about the Cold war, it is harder to glean the exact motives for China's lunar programme.
It doesn't want to spend money to do something as quickly as possible.""China is aware of how the USSR fell apart,
"Much of this has to do with economics, #believes Smithsonian's Launius. Countries are asking whether they can sell satellites or landers.
Among the other countries, there has been some comment that China has collected a"string of pearls,
Apollo spurred many advances, from portable cordless vacuums to microchips in your computer. China is hoping for a similar effect to make it more competitive globally.
By 2020, the world's fastest growing economy aims to have more than half of its growth created from science and technology.
and to more accurately carry out strikes against adversaries.##Earlier this year, for example, China's space agency said it launched three satellites to clean up space debris orbiting the Earth:
however, fear that this is actually an anti-satellite weapon programmme, designed to eliminate observation or communication satellites belonging to another country.
But whether the rewards are really worth the cost to the economy and policy is another matter.
but they risk breaking the bank to achieve. The US supports its space programme, but is reluctant to increase Nasa's funds.
and that they would have supported the US space programme with more funding, #says Joan Johnson-Freese,
chair of the Department of National security Studies, at the US Naval War College.""At least that's my personal opinion.
Earlier this year, female taikonaut Wang Yaping gave the first live lesson from space to 60 million students on the effects of zero gravity.
One user posted in response on the social media site Weibo, according to CNN: The US used to be proud of their space class,
The countries vast and beautiful landscape filled the screen, before cutting to the familiar and grainy Apollo landing footage.
head over to our Facebook or Google+page, or message us on Twitter o
BBC 00148.txt
#Africa, Clooney and an unlikely space race What do George Clooney and Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir have in common?
They both have their eyes on space #and in particular, harnessing the satellites orbiting above Africa's skies.
He would stage zero gravity simulation training by sticking aspiring astronauts into a steel barrel and rolling them down a hill.
The satellites it put into the space provide everything from high-resolution imagery to monitor the country's shrinking farmland, to cheaper wireless and internet coverage.
Last year, Ghana launched its Space science and Technology Center, to"foster teaching, learning, commercial application of space research,
Yet Joseph Akinyede, director of the African Regional Centre for Space science and Technology Education in Nigeria, an education centre affiliated with the United nations Office for Outer space Affairs,
says that the application of space science technology and research to"basic necessities#of life#health education, energy, food security,
satellite technology has played a role in everything from telecommunications, broadcasting and GPS mapping to weather forecasting for agriculture and climate monitoring.
Since 2010, satellite capacity across the continent has tripled nearly, helping in part fuel Africa's"mobile revolution#.
#Over 70%of Africans have mobile phones, according to a recent report from Mckinsey, a global consulting firm#and satellites have made often it easier to connect remote areas,
citing mobile phones, agricultural activities, and aviation.""If we want to use the applications, we need to know the hard part of science.#
and control of data and information generated. When it comes to what happens over Africa's skies,
#The cost of investing in satellite technology may expensive, but the long term cost of purchasing satellite services from external providers can be even more so.
With the money earned from his appearance in commercials for the coffee company Nespresso Clooney has been funding the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP),
A satellite captures real-time imagery of Sudan, enabling a team of analysts to monitor troop movements, bombings and other aggressive activities by al-Bashir in the disputed border areas between Sudan
#explains Akshaya Kumar, a lawyer who works with SSP.""We can see craters consistent with aerial bombardment#we can identify different types of buildings that have been destroyed#schools,
medical clinics#and sound the alarm to stop violence from reaching certain levels of severity.#
#President al-Bashir has indicated that this eye from above is rather unfair, a one-sided measurement of accountability,
and Information technologies"to liberate Africa from the technological domination #and establish the Afrispace space agency. As it happens,
says Abdul Hakim Elwaer, director of Human resources, Science and Technology for the African Union. An AU working group on space
For years, African leaders have seen space investment as"a luxury, at the bottom of the list of priorities,#says Hakim.
or society website was loaded with incomplete or broken content#some were not even functioning. On one call to Ethiopia's former Minister of Capacity Building,
I received a preprogrammed error message.""The network is fizzing out. Please try again later,
head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter l
< Back - Next >
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011
