and agricultural waste advanced biofuels represent a sustainable nonpolluting source of transportation fuel that would also generate domestic jobs and revenue.
The U s. Clean Air Act began requiring regulatory controls for vehicle emissions in the 1970s
The pollutants products of fossil fuel combustion are emitted by cars trucks and buses. Pollutants rise up into the atmosphere
and accumulate until being washed down as wet deposition by rain or snow or as dry deposition between rain events.
Every car now has a catalytic converter that reduces tailpipe emissions. So adoption of highly efficient control technologies as uniformly as we do across the United states has resulted in lower emissions.
considering that the time period also was marked by dramatic growth in gross domestic product urban population and the number of vehicles.
and automobile manufactures are aggressively trying to develop vehicles that run on hydrogen fuel cells. Unlike gas-powered engines that spew out pollutants the only byproduct of hydrogen fuel is water.
The potential for profit and environmental benefits are why so many automobile oil and energy companies are working on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as the transportation of the future Zhang said.
Many people believe we will enter the hydrogen economy soon with a market capacity of at least $1 trillion in the United states alone.
Nesting hens will avoid nesting near humanmade structures and disturbances in habitat from roads to buildings to the conversion of native grasslands to cropland.
They say they want to be good stewards of the land and I believe them. Prairie chickens are an important component of that land
#Petroleum use, greenhouse gas emissions of automobiles could drop 80 percent by 2050: U s. reporta new National Research Council report finds that by the year 2050 the U s. may be able to reduce petroleum consumption
and greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent for light-duty vehicles--cars and small trucks--via a combination of more efficient vehicles;
and greenhouse gases vehicles must become dramatically more efficient regardless of how they are powered said Douglas M. Chapin principal of MPR Associates
i e. energy cost savings improved vehicle technologies and reductions in petroleum use and greenhouse gas emissions exceed the additional costs of the transition over and above
Improving the efficiency of conventional vehicles is up to a point the most economical and easiest-to-implement approach to saving fuel
This approach includes reducing work the engine must perform--reducing vehicle weight aerodynamic resistance rolling resistance
The average fuel economy of vehicles on the road would have exceed to 180 mpg which the report says is extremely unlikely with current technologies.
Therefore the study committee also considered other alternatives for vehicles and fuels including: hybrid electric vehicles such as the Toyota Prius;
plug-in hybrid electric vehicles such as the Chevrolet Volt; battery electric vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf;
hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles such as the Mercedes F-Cell scheduled to be introduced about 2014; and compressed natural gas vehicles such as the Honda civic Natural gas.
Although driving costs per mile will be lower especially for vehicles powered by natural gas or electricity the high initial purchase cost is likely to be a significant barrier to widespread consumer acceptance the report says.
All the vehicles considered are and will continue to be several thousand dollars more expensive than today's conventional vehicles.
Additionally particularly in the early years the report predicts that alternative vehicles will likely be limited to a few body styles and sizes;
some will rely on fuels that are not readily available or have restricted travel range; and others may require bulky energy storage that will limit their cargo and passenger capacity.
Wide consumer acceptance is essential however and large numbers of alternative vehicles must be purchased long before 2050
if the on-road fleet is to meet desired performance goals. Strong policies and technology advances are critical in overcoming this challenge.
The report identified several scenarios that could meet the more demanding 2050 greenhouse gas goal.
Each combines highly efficient vehicles with at least one of three alternative power sources--biofuel electricity or hydrogen.
Natural gas vehicles were considered but their greenhouse gas emissions are too high for the 2050 goal.
However if the costs of these vehicles can be reduced and appropriate refueling infrastructure created they have great potential for reducing petroleum consumption.
While corn-grain ethanol and biodiesel are the only biofuels to have been produced in commercial quantities in the U s. to date the study committee found much greater potential in biofuels made from lignocellulosic biomass
--which includes crop residues like wheat straw switchgrass whole trees and wood waste. This drop in fuel is designed to be a direct replacement for gasoline
and could lead to large reductions in both petroleum use and greenhouse gas emissions; it can also be introduced without major changes in fuel delivery infrastructure or vehicles.
The report finds that sufficient lignocellulosic biomass could be produced by 2050 to meet the goal of an 80 percent reduction in petroleum use
when combined with highly efficient vehicles. Vehicles powered by electricity will not emit any greenhouse gases
but the production of electricity and the additional load on the electric power grid are factors that must be considered.
These vehicles also rely on batteries which are projected to drop steeply in price. However the report says that limited range
and long recharge times are likely to limit the use of all-electric vehicles mainly to local driving.
When hydrogen is used as a fuel cell in electric vehicles the only vehicle emission is water.
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles could become less costly than the advanced internal combustion engine vehicles of 2050.
Fuel cell vehicles are not subject to the limitations of battery vehicles but developing a hydrogen infrastructure in concert with a growing number of fuel cell vehicles will be difficult and expensive the report says.
The technology advances required to meet the 2050 goals are challenging and not assured. Nevertheless the committee considers that dramatic cost reduction
The best approach therefore is to promote a portfolio of vehicle and fuel research and development supported by both government
Overcoming the barriers to advanced vehicles and fuels will require a rigorous policy framework that is more stringent than the proposed fuel economy standards for 2025.
and vehicle technologies are close to market readiness and consumer behavior toward them is understood well The report warns that forcing a technology into the market should be undertaken only when the benefits of the proposed support justify its costs.
The beetles don't carry disease but their larvae feed on the ash trees'sap effectively killing the trees by depriving trees of their nourishment.
Thomas C. Baker Distinguished Professor of Entomology at Penn State knew that the male EAB locates a mate by flying over an ash tree finding a female by identifying her green wings
Baker and a postdoctoral fellow in his lab Michael J. Domingue were using dead female EABS for bait to trap the male beetles.
The two researchers working with a graduate student in Lakhtakia's lab Drew P. Pulsifer created a mold of the top of the female beetle's body.
The decoy beetle is made by a process of layering polymers with different refractive indexes to create the desired iridescence
and create a color similar to the beetle's own iridescent green. The researchers'findings are scheduled to be published in the April issue of the Journal of Bionic Engineering.
They also ran a pilot test in Hungary with a related beetle pest that bores into oak trees.
The pilot in Hungary used two controls--a dead EAB and a decoy made of the polymers
The goal of the project is to sequester 1 million metric tons of CO2 a year--the equivalent of removing 200000 automobiles from the road.
#Femme fatale emerald ash borer decoy lures, kills malesan international team of researchers has designed decoys that mimic female emerald ash borer beetles
Specifically we coated a dead female beetle with a vapor of nickel and used the'nickelized'shell to fabricate two matching molds in the shape of a resting beetle said Akhlesh Lakhtakia Charles Godfrey Binder professor of engineering science and mechanics
The finished bioreplicated decoys retained the surface texture of the beetle at the nanoscale. Additionally we painted some decoys a metallic green.
The scientists found that both types of synthetic decoys as well as the dead pinned females elicited initial flights by males toward them.
According to Domingue the light-scattering properties of the beetle's shell--which the team experimentally demonstrated using a white laser--made the nano-bioreplicated decoys more lifelike and therefore more attractive to males than the non-textured 3d printed decoy.
Small bumps and spines on the outer surface of their wings and heads that aren't visible to the human eye scatter light in a distinctive pattern.
Beetles appear to be able to recognize this feature of the decoys and are attracted strongly to it.
thus enabling us to figure out how these destructive beetles find each other to mate and how we can exploit this behavior
UHF can travel far but it hasn't had the high capacity of Wifi. This provides the best of both worlds he said of the new technology.
because the signals travel for miles and one popular idea for the liberated portion of the spectrum is for open wireless access points like those used for today's Wifi hotspots.
and professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Dr. Mahalingam is studying how wildland fire propagates in an effort to be able to more accurately model such fires via physically based computational models.
With funding from the U s. Department of agriculture's U s. Forest Service Division Dr. Mahalingam and his collaborator UAH Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering faculty member Dr. Babak Shotorban are currently supervising four doctoral
Wildland fires involve complex interactions that include fuel distribution terrain topography chemical reactions energy transfer and the associated fluid dynamics that transport moisture gas-phase hydrocarbons air
#University students developing robotic gardening technologyfor more than a half-century NASA has made the stuff of science fiction into reality.
Researchers are continuing that tradition by designing robots to work in a deep-space habitat tending gardens and growing food for astronaut explorers.
As astronauts explore beyond Earth they will need to make their habitat as self-sustaining as possible.
and use it in future space missions said Tracy Gill NASA's technology strategy manager at the Kennedy space center in Florida.
The University of Colorado students demonstrated their X-Hab project at Kennedy's Space station Processing Facility on June 23 to a group of employees that included center director Bob Cabana.
It is a concept for producing edible plants during long-term missions to destinations such as Mars. Heather Hava who is working on a doctorate in aerospace engineering sciences explains that the goal is to have robots do much of the monotonous tasks saving time
for the astronauts. The'Plants Anywhere'approach is designed to help minimize astronaut workload said Hava whose degree will focus in bioastronautics.
This keeps them free to concentrate on more important tasks. A year ago the University of Colorado student team demonstrated a gardening system with plants robotically tended on a Lazy susan-like device.
In their new system a Remotely Operated Gardening Rover or ROGR travels around the habitat tending to a fleet of Smartpots or SPOTS
and a fluid delivery system that can provide fresh water or water with nutrients. Larsen explains that the system could be operated remotely
If an astronaut requests tomatoes for a salad the system decides which specific plants have the ripest tomatoes
We also want the plants to be in the astronauts'environment so they can see them smell them
Hava noted that the team has benefited from support from former NASA astronaut Joe Tanner who now is a senior instructor of aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado and Nikolaus Correll assistant professor of computer science at the university.
Gill says involving students in ongoing NASA projects is crucial for the future. This is an opportunity to prepare the next generation of engineers scientists
and explorers for our space program he said. They tell us how their design for the system keeps evolving.
Gill added that Gioia Massa Ph d. of the International Space station Ground Processing and Research Project Office Morgan Simpson of NASA Ground Processing Directorate and Ray Wheeler Ph d. of the Surface Systems office in NASA's Engineering and Technology Directorate also provided guidance
for the University of Colorado team. They all also helped advise the students as they developed their project
NASA and the National Space Grant Foundation selected seven projects from six universities for the 2013-2014 X-Hab Academic Innovation Challenge.
In doing so they worked in close cooperation with members of the NASA Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) Program's Deep-space Habitat Project team.
Participants are required to explore NASA's work on development of deep-space habitats and help the agency gather new ideas to complement its current research and development.
The University of Colorado Boulder also is among five universities selected by NASA for the 2015 X-Hab Academic Innovation Challenge.
The above story is provided based on materials by NASA. The original article was written by By Bob Granath NASA's Kennedy space center Florida.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length h
#Discovery provides insights on how plants respond to elevated carbon dioxide levelsbiologists at UC San diego have solved a longstanding mystery concerning the way plants reduce the numbers of their breathing pores in response to rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
The Cedars-Sinai surgeons highlight the advantages of a spinal navigation technique that uses high-speed computerized tomography (CT) imaging to navigate in and around the spinal column from different angles.
Computer-guided surgical navigation technology delivers on quality and safety said J. Patrick Johnson MD a neurosurgery spine specialist and director of Spine Education and the Neurosurgery Spine Fellowship program in the Department of Neurosurgery.
This approach represents a major leap forward for instrumented spine surgery said Terrence T. Kim MD an orthopedic spine surgeon in the Cedars-Sinai Spine Center and expert in the computer-guided navigation field.
and the potential future use of robotic spine surgery with computer navigation. The special issue of the journal can be accessed at:
Linden who called the 16 teams a family of researchers said the foundation has funded trips for CU-Boulder team members to collaborate with the other institutions in places like Switzerland South africa and North carolina.
#Biofuel-to-hydrocarbon conversion technology licensedvertimass LLC a California-based start-up company has licensed an Oak ridge National Laboratory technology that directly converts ethanol into a hydrocarbon blend-stock for use in transportation fuels.
The technology could also supply a source of renewable jet fuel required by recent European union aviation emission regulations.
and widely license breakthrough technologies that substantially expand the use of sustainable transportation fuels that reduce greenhouse gas emissions
Commercialization will lead to the widespread use of proprietary Vertimass technology for low cost production of sustainable transportation fuels for aircraft and heavy and light duty vehicles from multiple sources of biomass on a large scale.
The use of bioethanol instead of gasoline reduces the CO2 emissions from cars and fossil fuel consumption.
Rebecca De Santis and Ruth Schmitz-Streit of University of Kiel in Germany and Monica Balsera of the Institute of Natural resources and Agrobiology of Salamanca in Spain also worked on the projectgrants from the National Science Foundation the National aeronautics and space administration
The technology is a low-cost version of the continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) systems that are a standard feature of most neonatal units in the developed world.
In fact moistening a pound of dry spores would generate enough force to lift a car one meter off the ground.
are trained the truckers to properly transport these animals? How long do they wait at the slaughter facility?
Apps, like the parking app Streetline that helps drivers find available parking spots, use this sensor technology too.
We survive without a ticket agent at the airport, a cashier at the grocery store and a teller at the bank.
and is poised to take up residence at other universities, train stations, hospitals, corporate campuses and shopping centers. Briggo will open a kiosk at Austin Bergstrom International airport this fall.
To be fair Briggo executives are hardly out to eradicate the human barista. The human element of coffee shops is said beautiful
The right place for robotic coffee Terry Mahlum, regional director for Delaware North Companies Travel Hospitality Services,
and retail outlets in more than 25 airports around the globe, saw the Briggo kiosk on the University of Texas campus
and envisioned it at the local airport. It â¢s a good fit in Austin, with all the innovation and high-tech there,
The kiosk is slated for a central location across from Gate 13 in the American airlines terminal.
only 50 square feet, will appeal to the business traveler and anyone else on the move. For travelers who still want the human touch,
the airport has five other coffee shop options. We're going to promote Briggo pre-security, Mahlum said.
So passengers will be able to get on their mobile apps and place the order while they're standing in the security line.
Samuel Nahmias, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Studylogic, a research firm whose clients include the top coffee chains,
24/7 (for the ER doctor at the hospital or the late-arriving passenger at the train station).
is a hi-tech mobile trailer used for cultivating medicinal marijuana. The aptly-named Big Bud is a fully functional weed farm that features programmable lights,
So about this trailer designed to grow marijuana, where did the idea come from? Oddly enough, it's something that's been done for about 30 years.
and buried the crops in the ground before they eventually switched to using trailers. This is pretty rudimentary,
so what we did was just take it to the next level by implementing hydroponic technology and developing it into a full line of trailers for not only the medical marijuana community,
Giving them the marijuana from a sterilized environment like our trailers is a huge benefit to this industry.
So what kind of customers do you get who express interest in owning a Big Bud trailer?
These companies, Cyber-Rain and ET Water, have released both recently cloud services that provide guidance about
Five Virginia schools and one school in Hawaii are currently participating in the pilot with planned expansions to include schools collaborating with Hofstra University in New york
We printed a space shuttle out of two Play-Doh colors. They were blown just away. Kids might not learn in the abstract,
which will reduce the cost of transportation. That's a significant benefit. Often, where the energy resource is is far away from where you want to consume that resource.
These innovative things really transformed how information travels around the world, Chu said, adding  optical fibers and wireless communication as examples.
TRANSPORTATION The shift from self-and animal-powered transportation to the steam engine was also transformative.
But it didn't. The Lincoln administration's funding of a transcontinental railroad--$16, 000 in bond subsidies to rail companies for each mile,
Developments in the rail industry furthered along more in the shipping and aviation industries, which in turn impacted other markets,
Trains and planes and ships revolutionized the food market, he said. It really transformed the way people move
Then came the automobile. While taking pains to note that it was  Gottlieb Daimler who invented the automobile and internal combustion engine, not Henry ford,
Chu said that it was Ford's assembly line that took the car to the mass market.
Productivity per worker went up enormously, he said. ENERGY Chu said he saw similarities to Ford's assembly line
when he visited a Suntech solar plant in China. With four stories of automated production lines and the record for polycrystalline silicon efficiency, the company was executing on the mantra,
Clean energy technologies can positively impact the environment the same way that automobiles did. Not that cars don't produce smog,
of course--but the major environmental pollution problem at the turn of the century was the millions of pounds of manure in city streets produced by horses used for transport.
At the time, gasoline-powered vehicles provided clean streets, Chu said. Now we have another environmental problem,
he said of pollution and greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. It may not be quite as visible or an assault on our senses as horse manure
does America want to merely invent new technologies like Gottlieb Daimler, or manufacture it to great success like Henry ford, too?
'After inventing aviation, the U s. was able to recover to lead the aviation industry once again,
Chu said. The same ought to happen in energy. We can become us again, he said.
If you put a lot of it in a car, you need to retrofit your vehicle to handle it.
One dirty little secret? The EPA waiver. Gasoline has a special vapor pressure specification for volatility for fumes.
So we're using cellulosic biomass waste streams--corn cobs, treetops and limbs, dead pine trees from pine beetles.
and go to popular private equity center Sand Hill Road. There are a lot of incentives out there. Once you're successful there are incentives,
so I know what it takes to bring technology from test-tube scale to production.
Ethanol is projected to rise to 20 percent of the overall transportation fuel supply. Drop in fuels and non-food feedstocks are needed.
Drivers: energy security, rural community growth, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, food constraints, green jobs. Binetti outlined the advantages of cellulosic ethanol:
à  Retail gas stations can be taken into and out of butanol service without problem. It's much easier to distribute
to its journey through distribution warehouses, to its ultimate retail destination in grocery stores. From a compliance standpoint, that is mandated.
In rail, it's the locomotive itself, it's switching devices, it's diagnostics. I liken it to rail--we make the switches, not the rails or railroad ties.
Our aircraft engines plant in Cincinnati. A healthcare facility in Europe. Now we have a cool in-house system where we track
I'm traveling around the world. The outer circle where I spend a lot of time is with our customers.
the only fully legal flying carthe last time a flying car had shot a at making an impact was in 1956,
when the precursor to the FAA deemed the iconic Taylor Areocar safe for flight. Even without tangled masses of red tape holding it back,
The craft has received recently endorsements from authorities of both road and sky, meaning that the classic retrofuturistic dream of a dual-mode flying car is well within grasp.
Logan Ward reports for Popular Mechanics: On September 28, 2010, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a Light Sport Aircraft certificate for the Maverick Sport,
the latest version of the flying dune buggy developed by Steve Saint and his crew at the Indigenous Peoples Technology and Education Center (ITEC).
Last June, the vehicle received a license plate from the Florida Department of transportation. This means what it sounds like it means:
that the Maverick Sport is a street-legal, air-legal vehicle. So, how'd the Indigenous Peoples Technology and Education Center (I-TEC) guide their creation through the narrow, winding halls of state and federal transportation institutions?
Quite cleverly: Rather than seek Federal Highway Administration certification for their vehicle â a process that requires boatloads of money for crash tests,
among other things â they've designed it as a kit car. These can be licensed in most states...
And as far as the FAA is concerned, the Maverick Sport is powered officially a parachute. The Sport Pilot license required to fly it is much easier to obtain than a standard pilot's license.
For the first certified Maverick's vanity plate, FLY CAR seemed an appropriate choice. As for the hardware, it's a lithe, 900lb vehicle reminiscent of a dune buggy.
Its creators say that it can accelerate from 0-60 in under four seconds, though its airspeed is limited to 40mph.
Its flight feature depends on a large, stowable glider wing and a rear-mounted propellor for thrust.
The Maverick Sport should be available for purchase in time for Airventure 2011 a yearly air show held in July.
The price? A cool 80 grand. As you could have guessed, the Maverick Sport has a unusual creation story.
but to solve practical transportation problems in the developing world. From CNN: What we're doing here at
'The Maverick flying car is just one piece of the puzzle for I-Tec. We've been working on this particular project for six years,
while the glider car is at an $80, 000 price point, but it wouldn't take much of a reduction to turn this into an attainable tool--or toy--for countless individuals and organizations.
it's a flying car. It'll sell itself
Novel ways to fake ancient goodsbeijing   Strolling through Beijing's Panjiayuan Market, it's easy to imagine you've entered an antique treasure trove.
Do not rely on Apple's ios 6 Mapsaustralian police have warned that motorists should rely less on technology
and more on common sense as the number of stranded motorists needing rescue climbs higher. Down Under, motorists in Victoria, Australia, have been warned by police to be careful
when relying on Apple's disappointing mapping system--especially as the number of drivers ending up in peculiar locations is on the rise.
Apple was earmarked for criticism this September when Google maps was removed from ios 6, forcing the firm's customers to use their own brand of mapping technology on gadgets including the iphone and ipad.
After following directions on their iphones, the Mildura Police force say that many motorists are finding themselves in the middle of Murray-Sunset National park instead of the actual location of Mildura,
Some of the motorists located by police have been stranded for up to 24 hours without food or water and have walked long distances through dangerous terrain to get phone reception.
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