Can we turn our newspaper press into a solar printer?
Archive for the ‘environment’ Category
Spray-On Solar Cells, Printed Like a Newspaper Being Developed by Univ. of Texas Researchers : TreeHugger
Posted by tom.altman on August 27th, 2009
LA To Retrofit 140K Lights
Posted by tom.altman on February 16th, 2009
Los Angeles California To Retrofit 140,000 Street Lights With LED Bulbs : TreeHugger.
LED are so cool. I tired to replace the lights in my laundry room with some – but they were the cheap and I think I should have ponied up for the better ones.
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38 MPG in a minivan, factory VW minivan.
Posted by tom.altman on May 5th, 2008
Image via Wikipedia
You know I love my volkswagens. And I really do not like minivan. But I may be convinced to get one of these seriously ugly vehicles. The little grocery getter hauls 7 and gets upper 30’s for MPG. Now I know it’s using a diesel, but seriously…can someone in Detroit at one of the major automakers take a peek at what is happening in Europe with cars?
Sure diesel is 12%-55% higher per gallon, but this van gets 30%-50% better mileage than compareable – still nets 5%-25% savings.
Posted in environment, just because 
Tags: Fuel economy in automobiles, minivan, mpg, Volkswagen, vw 
1 Comment »Honda Insight Modification Gives 180 Miles Per Gallon
Posted by tom.altman on March 4th, 2008
I love these kind of people – taking things apart and making them better.
Production on the Honda Insight stopped in 2006, but Mr. Dabrowski has been hard at work making the 57mpg car even more fuel efficient. The first solution, called Manual Integrated Motor Assist System, gives the driver the ability to manually adjust the gas-to-electric ratio. He says that this can improve mileage by an average of 10-20% on Insights…
My only issue with the Insight is it looks like the car from Tron.
Souped Down 1959 Opel T-1 Gets 376.59 mpg
Posted by tom.altman on February 28th, 2008
Yea – 1959…Opel of all things – 376 MPG!!!
Could you believe that the car above made the 1975 Guiness World Record book? Its claim to fame is getting an amazing 376.59 miles per gallon of gasoline, and that in a 1973 contest sponsored by Shell Oil (now Royal Dutch Shell).
Check it out. Granted – it was drastically changed…but the body shape was VERY 1959!
An underwater lake?
Posted by tom.altman on February 26th, 2008
Yea – check out this video which talks about an underwater lake in the Gulf of Mexico. Unreal…we know so little about this earth we live on!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/Gf1TIicid3E&rel=1]
Could you go paperless – I mean no paper at all?
Posted by tom.altman on February 15th, 2008
This was an article from the NYT about a family going virtually paperless.
Mr. Uhlik, an engineering director at Google, and his family live a practically paper-free life. The children are home-schooled on computers. Other sources of household paper — lists, letters, calendars — have become entirely digital.
I really like the image/graphic they added with – but didn’t give enought emphasis to. When you think paperless home or office – sometimes we leave out the paper towels and coffee filters!
What do super soakers and solar energy have in common?
Posted by tom.altman on January 10th, 2008
It’s pretty cool – I guess the guy who invented the super soaker is a really smart guy:
So when the guy who invented to Super Soaker water gun said he was looking at a 60% efficient solar engine…His project is featured in this month’s Popular Mechanics and it has received funding from the NSF, not known for giving money to just anyone. Turns out the Super Soaker’s inventor, Lonnie Johnson, is also a nuclear engineer with over 100 patents.
If he can get to 60% efficiency, that is about 2X of anything anyone is mass producing right now. Cool.
The Invisible Ingredient in Every Kitchen
Posted by tom.altman on January 8th, 2008
In the “Dining & Wine” section of the New York Times, I found a post called “The invisible ingredient in every kitchen” the other day. It goes on to talk about how heat is this invisible ingredient.
Every cook relies every day on the power of heat to transform food, but heat doesn’t always work in the way we might guess. And what we don’t know about it can end up burning us.
This is a later lengthy, but interesting article on how being efficient, we can cook faster, smarter and most importantly – save energy.
The Case for Diesel: Clean, Efficient, Fast Cars (Hybrids Beware!)
Posted by tom.altman on December 28th, 2007
Is 2008 the year of the diesel? (probably more like 2009).
Most Americans have a bad impression of diesel cars. We think of them as loud, hard to start and foul-smelling. We sneer at them for lacking the get-up-and-go of their gasoline-powered cousins. And we dislike them for their perceived environmental sins, chiefly the polluting brew of sulfur and nitrogen compounds that they emit into the atmosphere. All those complaints were fair a generation ago, when the twin energy crises of the 1970s propelled diesels into national popularity and kept them there for a decade. Back then, many drivers ignored diesel’s faults, or were unaware of them, because diesel cars ran 30 percent farther on a gallon of fuel than similar gasoline-powered cars. It felt savvy to buy a diesel, even daring. Then fuel prices dropped in the mid-1980s, and drivers abandoned their clattering, odoriferous fuel sippers. They went back to gasoline.
