by: TreeHugger Transportation, 2010-11-24 21:39:50 UTC
The Infrastructurist points us to Matt Yglesias, who posts a chart comparing the energy use of different transport modes in BTUs per passenger mile. He notes:
Today there seem to be almost 30 flights daily between Seattle and Portland. Clearly a lot of people are making the trip. If you built a high-speed rail connection, a lot of people would take tha... Read the full story on TreeHugger
Humans are well-intentioned but lazy creatures; give us a long-winded report about sustainable retailers and we will quickly forget about it. Give us a printable, color-coded guide telling us what brands to avoid and it just might make an impact. Climate Counts, a non-profit that rates companies once a year on their voluntary efforts to mitigate climate change, hopes to do just that with its Striding Shopper campaign.
The campaign, which is being rolled out over the next five weeks, ranks 150 companies representing over 3,000 brands with a color-coded system--red for "stuck," yellow for "starting," and green for "striding." The ranking is based on 22 criteria that determine whether companies have measured their climate footprint, cut down on their potential climate change impacts, supported progressive climate change legislation, and publicly disclosed their climate actions.
Climate Counts already offers a pocket shopping guide that ranks everything from food services companies to banks, but the Striding Shopper campaign will focus squarely on the retail sector, making it ideal for holiday shoppers.
Climate Counts isn't the first to rank sustainable products with a color-coded system. Whole Foods recently launched the first in-store color-coded sustainable seafood rating program (all red-listed seafood will be cut from store shelves by 2012). Greenpeace has a color-coded guide to its Greener Electronics ranking system. It's the kind of tactic we'd like to see more of. Color-coding may oversimplify some issues, but it's still the easiest way to impart good practices to an information-saturated public.
Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.
Scientists have done serious supercomputer number-crunching to design ... plastic molecules that won't degrade in the sun.
That may counter-intuitive in an era
when we're desperately trying to produce better biodegradable
plastics, the idea is that if plastic objects are made more resistant
then they'll be thrown away less often, reducing the need for
replacements and disposal of old plastic in landfills.
Scientists at The Australian National University suggests that if you refine the
manufacturing conditions to reduce defects, you'll get plastics that
degrade much more slowly. Their research involved some highly sophisticated processing on supercomputers along with some quantum chemistry, all to work out the process by which plastic molecules break down when exposed to the elements.
Until recently science suggested that when plastics are exposed to the sun, the sunlight and air cause free radical particles to form, which then attack the polymer molecules and lead to a chain reaction of breakdowns--leading to that whitening you often see on old plastic, and your plastic clothes pins falling off the line.
The Australian research has changed this picture, and suggests that plastics should actually be very resistant to this breakdown process. The structural breakdowns are instead caused by built-in molecule-level defects that are introduced to the plastic during manufacturing. Tighten that process up, and you have products built to last.
Rare earth metals, a collection of 17 chemical elements found in the Earth's crust, are found in a variety of electronic devices, including LED lights, electric car motors, wind turbines, solar panels, and lithium-ion batteries. There's just one problem: The metals are only found in high concentrations in a few sites in China, the U.S., and Australia--and China has threatened to stop exporting its supply. But instead of expanding rare earth metal mines, what if we look for more sustainable replacements?
Enter Nanosys, a company that offers process-ready materials for the LED and energy-storage markets, among other things. Nanosys has been thinking about rare earth material shortages for years, which is why the company manufactures synthetic phosphors out of common materials--not the rare earth materials (i.e. yttrium) usually used in phosphors.
"We make a semiconductor phosphor that employs a nanomaterial called a quantum dot," explains Nanosys CEO Jason Hartlove. "It's made out of indium phosphide, and the synthesis process is all in
the lab. There's no heavy metal mining, no destructive mining practices."
Nanosys's QuantumRail LED backlighting device is made out of quantum dots, which can purportedly generate brighter and richer colors than their rare earth metal counterparts--all while delivering a higher efficiency and lower cost.
Unsurprisingly, big-name electronics manufacturers are interested in what Nanosys has to offer. "We work with LG, Samsung, and a number of other companies that are unannounced. Our customers have a strong interest in alternatives to rare earth metals," Hartlove says. That's because LED backlighting is big business--think about all the televisions, cell phone displays, and computer monitors that rely on the technology.
The next step for Nanosys is scaling up as fast as possible. "There are no scaling limits on what we can do in terms of production," Hartlove explains.
Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.
Engineers at the University of Cincinnati have shown that under the right conditions, ordinary paper can be as dynamic as any screen.
“Nothing looks better than paper for reading,” says research leader Andrew Steckl. “We hope to have something that would actually look like paper but behave like a computer monitor in terms of its ability to store information. We would have something that is very cheap, very fast, full-color and at the end of the day or the end of the week, you could pitch it into the trash.”
Steckl’s e-paper uses electrowetting — moving colored pigments from pixel to pixel with electronic charges — on a paper substrate. Electrowetting offers color, fast response times and video capability that current E Ink electrophoretic screens can’t match, but with similarly low power consumption.
Companies like Liquavista and Plastic Logic have prototype color e-readers that use this technology, but apply the electrowetting chemicals to a sheet of glass. The Cincinati team says its electrowetted paper offers the same performance as glass, but with greater flexibility and at a lower cost.
Steckl and grad student Duk Young Kim of U of C’s Nanoelectronics Laboratory presented their findings in the October issue of the American Chemical Society’s ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces journal. It was then reviewed in the November issue of Nature Photonics. The research was part of Kim’s doctoral dissertation.
“One of the main goals of e-paper is to replicate the look and feel of actual ink on paper,” write Steckl and Kim in the ACS article. “We have, therefore, investigated the use of paper as the perfect substrate for EW devices to accomplish e-paper on paper.”
“In general, this is an elegant method for reducing device complexity and cost, resulting in one-time-use devices that can be totally disposed after use,” the researchers note.
The ACS paper on electrowetting illustrates technical details of the process.
It’s still not easy, and industrializing the process will likely take some time. For maximum performance, the process involves a specific grade of paper with a particular surface coating, roughness, thickness and water uptake and a carefully controlled contact angle at which the electrowetted material is applied to the paper support. Electrowetted glass e-readers may appear sometime next year, but you’re unlikely to see disposable paper screens in newspapers or posters for at least three to five years.
Meanwhile, the Nanoelectronics team will continue experimenting with electrowetting on various flexible surfaces, with different fluids and electronic components, trying to maximize performance.
There’s a historical irony here. In the 19th century, “wet plate” photography involved applying a silver nitrate collodion solution to a glass plate. Eventually, George Eastman was able to take a dry collodion emulsion and apply it to ordinary paper, creating the first camera that ordinary people could use. After Eastman substituted celluloid film, which was stronger but just as flexible as paper, the rest was history.
Check out this amazing kitchen appliance from Berlin-based designer Christoph Therard, a human-powered cabinet of mechanical wizardry which lats you crank normally electric-powered gadgets with nothing but your leg.
A machine like this needs a suitably cool name, and the R2B2 has one. The R2B2 works thusly: You hit pump the pedal and a big, heavy flywheel starts to spin up to 400rpm. Once moving, it can provide 350-watts of power for up to a minute. Gearing, switched with a big knob on the front, spins one of two shafts on the surface, one fast and one slow.
Therard’s research showed that the food-processor, coffee grinder and hand-blender are the most used gadgets, so he made them. The processor and grinder dock with the shafts, while the hand-blender gets its power from a flexible, twisting cable. A transmission lets it spin at up to 10.000 rpm. When not in use, everything can be stowed inside the main body.
It’s wonderful, and also almost silent in use, compared to the screaming blender-motors we usually tolerate, at least. I also like the idea of burning off some extra calories as I prepare my dinner. If Christoph ever puts this into production at the same time as I move into an apartment with a big enough kitchen, I’m buying one.
If I asked you to sketch the archetypal industrial robotic arm, you'd probably draw something like a swing-arm lamp: Straight members connected by elbow-like joints, perhaps on a rotating base like a shoulder. The finite, easily-calculable axes of motion of such an arrangement lent themselves well to the early days of robot design and the primitive computer systems that had to manage their motion.
Now, as those computer systems become capable of far more complex calculations, it's only natural that design would follow suit. Thus German engineering company Festo has designed a robotic arm based not on the human arm, but on an elephant trunk--or actually, what resembles three elephant trunks bound together.
The elegant, biomimetic design of Festo's Bionic Handling Assistant is capable of "more degrees of freedom and an unparalleled mass/payload ratio." What's even cooler is how the trunk expands, contracts and turns by alternately inflating or deflating air sacs within each vertebrae-like selection, which you can see in the animation below. A more aesthetically-pleasing performance is not a prerequisite of industrial efficiency, but it sure is a neat by-product.
After introducing the world’s first solar-powered LED light bulb back in June, the Nokero has popped out the second version of the energy-efficient bulb named the “N200” that features a robust design to withstand harsh weather conditions. Levitating the LED enclosure on a pivot to grasp as much light as possible in the daytime, the new lightbulb needs to be flipped over to the north to form a lamp at night. If compared to its predecessor, the N200 produces 60 percent more glow and has three times more life. Working on three modes, on, off and turbo-task, the rainproof lamp produces adequate energy through solar panels to illuminate for six hours on a single day’s charge. Priced at $20 apiece, the N200 is just ideal for trekking and outdoor camping.
Sounds exciting! The problem the designer is trying to solve here is the fact that malpractice suits for minimally-invasive gallbladder removals are still prevalent. To deter this sort of situation, the designer aims to employ four dimensional ultrasound technology to better “see” the insides of the patient, including inside the bladder the surgeon is detaching. This 4D imaging is used currently to see real-time images of fetuses in the wombs of expectant mothers. What this device does it make that technology realistic for the operating table.
The second image you see in the gallery below is marked with several colored markers. They are thus:
1) Ultrasound probe (cable goes outside of OR for processing)
2) Probe truck (rides back and forth to provide the motion needed for 3D ultrasound imaging) (as well as in/out to match the curve of the patient’s body)
3) Drive motor (powers probe truck motion)
4) Ultrasound gel pad (adhesive pad that provides lubrication and ultrasound transmission)
5) Arm clamps (allow device to slide to match angle of patient’s body: see video for clarification).
Designers: Alex Broerman
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Yanko Design Timeless Designs - Explore wonderful concepts from around the world! Yanko Design Store - We are about more than just concepts. See what's hot at the YD Store!
The Post-it is Perfect, I have a wad of it sitting right here on my workstation and no complains at all. This is until I saw this SAVE Post-it concept design! It has an adhesive strip running right at the center of the pad, and it’s kinda fashioned like a cello tape reel. The idea is that you write a note and then just tear off the adequate amount of sheet, so no extra paper gets wasted. Small effective steps to a better planet!
Designers: Chu Li-Chiao, Yang Hsiang-Hui & Yang Kai-Cheng
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Yanko Design Timeless Designs - Explore wonderful concepts from around the world! Yanko Design Store - We are about more than just concepts. See what's hot at the YD Store!
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