Mileage innovations- the ticket out of the recession

In today’s economy everybody wants to save money on gas and oil, and due to that ideology people have started to put more of an emphasis on saving money and keeping track of oil prices. I see this sort of thing every day, people are always frustrated when the go to fill up their cars, when you look at people filling their cars you see that they are always watching the numbers slowly trickle up. Well, car makers are also aware of this major problem and now they are building cars that will get better mileage and will also create greener, faster, and safer cars for the future. The future might seem as if it is really far away but 2 years ago I went to the future car show with my dad and about half of those cars, or cars like them, are on the road today! Technology moves dash and that is why I a sure that in approximately 4-5 years some cars will at least attempt to use some of the new feats of technology I will show you- if I may say so myself it’s going to be pretty cool, I can’t wait!!

Well I am in high school, and I still got a couple years till I get a car, but there are kids all around the world who even at my age or younger are already working on such new technologies… And one such student is Sam Champman-Hill. Sam, being only 14 years old, won the annual mileage marathon challenge at Mallory Park. His 20 person team boasted a sleek aerodynamic design, weighed just less than 100 pounds, and achieved 1,980 mile per gallon efficiency. { http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-13873369 }.

this is Sam Chapman-hill's car

Another student Kitty Foster finished her race in a car that used a Cambridge design partnership oxygen concentrator and a micro-diesel engine and achieved a 1,325 mile per gallon efficiency! Now while these cars may seem like they came straight from the future, they didn’t they came from the minds of the brilliant students in England. Now how amazing would it be to be driving a car that could have an almost 2,000 mile per gallon efficiency! That would make the amount of money you pay for your gas 1/50th of what it is now! Another thing that I love about this car is that it is so sleek and futuristic; this not only drives like a car from the future but looks like one too! This kind of research and brilliance kinda makes me reflect on what I did this year in research class… my experiment was nothing compared to this, bacteria compared to a 2,000 mile per gallon car!
One part of the car that seems to hinder the mileage that the car achieves is the wheels. Everyone who owns a car knows that cars must be inflated if they are to drive well, and if they are not properly inflated it affects your mileage. Well, now scientists have invented a car wheel that has no need for inflation it is a metal circle with a thick ring of rubber put around it. Replacing a car tire with one of these rubber non-inflated ones changed the mileage of the car dramatically, so dramatically that the car actually achieved 1000+ miles per gallon! Now all these advancements are so revolutionary that I am surprised that ford doesn’t have a commercial of a 3000+ mile per gallon car, but one must remember that it takes a long time to produce such a car and it costs a lot too… However for me I don’t believe that that is the reason that these cars are not on the road, I think that it is because of the relationship between oil companies and car companies. Capitalism, while it is the force that makes America the great country that it is today, also has such problems. Since the cars that car companies only get average 30 MPG oil companies are happy with the money they make, and when prices rise people suddenly look to buy the cars that are newer and get 40 or 40+ miles per gallon, now if cars were to get 3,000+ MPG then this deadly system would basically stop. Can you imagine a world where a gas station was a pit stop that you would only have to go to like once every month or every 2 months, the oil companies as well as the car companies would go insane!

Airless Wheel of the future

Now we must learn to change our selves and accept new and innovative ideas in order to one day achieve a Utopian capitalistic society where everyone is concerned about making money as well as seeking to do good to others. In order for this society to arise modern society must have a complete reform where almost all its values must be changed, from me and my money to the world and the benefit of humanity? One day this change will happen and all that we have to do to make that day come is learn to be more acceptant!

Time: What is it ?

So yesterday I was watching through the wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and a question that they asked was what is time, is it a major part of our lives as in we can’t live without it or is it just an illusion? It is a very interesting question that many have tried to answer, physicists, mathematicians, theoretical scientists, and now me. One of the hardest questions Morgan asked was what time is; trying to define it that is a hard task! I tried defining time in such a way that it is not repetitive and I can explain it in such a way that I could say it and my friends wouldn’t give me awkward stares and this is what I came up with; Time is the word that we use to describe the general flow of events from beginning to end, from cause to effect, so that events go in a logical order we can perceive. The bigger question though was what actually IS time, is it an illusion crated by the human mind so that in a conscious state we can make sense of things or is it much more important?

scientists rallying back and fourth

Scientists have rallied back and forth for some time on this fundamental question and have come up with many different thoughts. One of the most popular thoughts was Albert Einstein’s take on what time was. He thought that the universe would not make sense without time and that it was a critical part of the universe, he thought that time was actually a dimension of its own and he thought the same was true with space! With these two thoughts he created a fourth dimension the dimension of space, and it was called space-time. Albert Einstein theorized that we interact with everything in those four dimensions, the rock has the three dimensions that we see and it also has a space-time. This space time idea really helped scientists understand many things much clearer. One of the biggest revolutions from this theory was gravitation, it suddenly made sense to scientists that if they used the theory of space time they could explain what gravity was, it was simply a bending in space-time. This was exactly what Einstein had said in his theory of general relativity; the closer you are to something of a higher mass the more gravitation will remain in between the two objects. This and a multitude of other reasons lead the idea of space-time become very widely accepted, and it was this acceptance that deterred scientists from challenging it. However it is the nature of science to challenge all ideas and find the truth and it was only a matter of time till this theory was challenged too.

Could it all just be an illusion?

Some new scientists propose new and radical new theories on what time could actually be… An illusion created by your mind. Many experiments have been done to try and prove this idea and worse they have had some very surprising results! For one, scientists have found out that age is relative and as you age your perception of time starts to change, you start to feel as if time is going by very quickly, and up to twice as fast by the time you are sixty! This is a major revolution because it shows that time could be all in the head and an aging mind starts to speed up the clock. Scientists have also found that the brain tries to adjust things in your mind so that you feel like everything is going correctly. For instance when you snap your fingers it looks and sounds to you as if everything is happening at the same time while actually your brain hears the snap first while the eye takes more time, the brain sends out both signals at the same time so that you think that they happened simultaneously. That is pretty cool but also pretty scary that our brain has that kind of power over us and we have no idea it even happens, that kind of makes one think… What else has the brain been holding back from me? One of the coolest pieces of evidence for the idea that time is all in our brain is the story of the driving man, who while he was driving saw the world zip by very fast, even when he slowed down the world kept going by and he thought he was accelerating, in actuality he had slowed down! Yes he had slowed down his whole life, he walked slowly, talked slowly and even breathed slowly she had started going in slow motion! It turned out that his massive time perception problem came from a tumor in his brain and that is evidence enough for most people that time is psychological.
My take on this is that time is what Albert Einstein had thought it to be, it is a dimension of space we interact with for indeed it does make sense, how else could someone explain the speeding up of time in space or even why gravity exists it is simply logical. However I also agree that time is relative, but not the way that these scientists believe it to be, I think that time is relative because of space-time. Since space time has relative time and we humans are very time obsessed our brains want to make time as standardized as possible, it does not want a near-tree time and a near-car time it wants a time that is good for anywhere! My explanation for why an aging brain has different time perception is that as you age your brain weakens and sometimes synapses cannot be sent, your brain starts slowing down and takes more time to register everything and makes it all happen at the same time so since your brain slows down you think that your day goes by faster but in actuality it is the same rate it is just your brain going at different speeds to give you that same simultaneous feeling for time.

A Close Call For Planet Earth

So this is my first blog post so I thought why not start off with a bang, and what better than an event that almost caused the sixth biggest mass extinction this planet has ever seen!

Friday June 24, 2011 12:20:00 PM: Astronomers spot a rather chunky asteroid heading towards earth large enough to cause a major extinction, yet one can’t help to consider our position when the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project discovered the asteroid called 2011 MD, and was only able to give us four days’ notice. Working from their base in New Mexico, the LINEAR team used one-meter ground based telescopes to search the skies for near-Earth object (NEO) threats. The discovery of 2011 MD on Wednesday shows that we need to get better at identifying potential asteroid threats, invest more money and time into projects like LINEAR, and come up with a set plan to react to threats such as these. The more time we have, the greater chance there is of us being able to do something about it.

Surprisingly, NEOs are more common than we think, with more than 8,000 known. This newly discovered interplanetary interloper is thought to measure about 20 meters wide, making it not much real threat — but it’s a warning all the same. Due to the frequency and danger of this threat is it clear that new ways of detecting and reacting to such threats is essential. Since we have never actually had to face such a deadly and mysterious threat we are not as well prepared for it as we should be, and people believe that they are generally safe from such a threat.
Watching movies about asteroid impacts really gives you a good understanding on the chaos that would arise from an asteroid on a crash course with earth, and it would also show what type of impromptu reactions people would have. One of the most rudimentary reactions that people have is to blow up the asteroid and hope that the prices are small enough that when they enter the earth’s atmosphere they will burn up and disintegrate, this is a flawed and illogical “solution” that would not be able to destroy an object big enough to cause a serious threat to earth.
Three physicists from Leicester University decided to figure out how many nuclear weapons would be needed to destroy an asteroid large enough to wipe out life on Earth. They calculate the energy required would be an explosive yield equivalent to 2.3 x 10 to the power of 7 megatons. Since the largest warhead ever tested was 50 megatons, we would need at least 463,000 nukes. Unfortunately, there are only 17,995 nuclear warheads in the world (goddamn post-Cold War peace dividend). As such, the physicists conclude that blowing up the asteroid is not a solution (geekologist), to quote one of my favorite science teachers from high school, “blowing up an asteroid would just break into into millions of radioactive suitcases heading straight for earth.”
Another solution that many have proposed it to get the asteroid to veer from its collision course with earth or to slow it down so that earth could move in its orbit so that the asteroid would miss earth. For Sci-Fi fans our thought of veering an asteroid is attaching a rocket onto the asteroid either pushing against it to slow it down or pushing it as such an angle that it would change its direction, while these are very logical solutions, with today’s technologies these are almost impossible to accomplish. This is exacerbated with the fact that the American space shuttle program has its last flight Friday and it takes months in advance to prep such a rocket to go into space.
What I believe that we should do is work on what our strongest asset is rockets. I believe we should invest more money in rockets and advancing their technology to the point that it would only take a few hours to prepare a rocket and get a crew that could go into space. This would mean educating our youth in aerodynamics and rocket science as well as creating interest in space travel and in understanding space.

For now we are safe, it was a close call and hopefully it will serve as a wakeup call for people everywhere that this threat is eminent and could strike at any moment. Luckily, it was a meteor so we were tracking it, comets are even more unpredictable, hopefully people will understand that now is the time to work together and come up with some kind of plan to react to such threats!

For further reading

http://www.the-geekologist.com/?p=329

http://news.discovery.com/space/why-im-sad-asteroid-2011-md-missed-earth-110628.html

http://news.discovery.com/space/visualizing-asteroid-2011-md-zip-past-earth-animation-110624.html

Hello world!

Hello world!

I am a new blogger and will be making this blog to keep everyday people such as yourselves updated on the new and changing world of science and technology! Today these two worlds are rapidly changing and everyday there seems to be some sort of new advancement that comes about… and my job is to show everyone exactly what is going on. I will cover an array of topics including advancements in the fields of technology, medicine, biology, immunology, and many more! I also plan on writing many posts on what is going on in space, which is one of my favorite fields! You can also arrive here via my tinyurl which is http://tinyurl.com/CryogenXX and if you like my blog please follow me on Twitter @CryogenXX