I'd say the acting is about on par with the latest Fast and the Furious offering.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Chismillionare helps out with your next car
Current BMW lease offers. Forget your apartment or house. These are much nicer anyway plus you can get to work, school and go on vacation with them. Plus in three years, you can get a brand new one.
20 Things I Learned From Tech Support
clickety clickety...
HCCI combustion - gasoline combustion without a spark!
The gas-saving technology, called homogeneous charge compression ignition, or HCCI, uses a form of combustion that is much more efficient than conventional spark ignition. Under some conditions, it can reduce fuel consumption by 25 percent, says William Green, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT who was coauthor of the new study. That's very similar to the efficiency of a diesel engine, which also achieves combustion by compression rather than a spark. But unlike diesel engines, HCCI results in a more uniform combustion and is thus much cleaner. A system that combines HCCI with conventional combustion could improve fuel economy by a few miles per gallon on average, Green says.
Several research groups are working on the new type of combustion. Volvo, for example, has built a hybrid system that can switch between conventional spark ignition and HCCI. Some experts, however, had expected that the new type of engine would require special fuel.
The MIT research shows that an HCCI engine can operate with any of the varieties of gasoline sold in North America, making a special fuel unnecessary. The researchers tested a range of different gasolines made at different refineries. They found that the HCCI engine "was less sensitive to the fuel than people had feared," says Green.
While the HCCI has several performance limitations, these can be addressed using a hybrid approach, in which an engine could switch between HCCI and conventional spark ignition. Using already mass-produced parts could make it relatively inexpensive to build such a hybrid, Green says.
In conventional gasoline engines, a spark ignites a mixture of fuel and air in a combustion chamber, creating an explosion that drives a piston. While this happens very efficiently when the engine is working hard, it's less efficient at lower loads, such as during cruising, when less gasoline is being pumped into the combustion chamber. At these times, to keep the ratio of fuel to oxygen optimized, a partial vacuum is created in the chamber. It takes extra energy to make this vacuum, which decreases the engine's efficiency.
The HCCI technology avoids the use of an energy-wasting vacuum. Instead, hot gases from a previous combustion cycle remain in the chamber; the engine uses a combination of heat from these hot gases and heat generated by compressing the mixture to raise temperatures high enough that the mixture explodes.
Several research groups are working on the new type of combustion. Volvo, for example, has built a hybrid system that can switch between conventional spark ignition and HCCI. Some experts, however, had expected that the new type of engine would require special fuel.
The MIT research shows that an HCCI engine can operate with any of the varieties of gasoline sold in North America, making a special fuel unnecessary. The researchers tested a range of different gasolines made at different refineries. They found that the HCCI engine "was less sensitive to the fuel than people had feared," says Green.
While the HCCI has several performance limitations, these can be addressed using a hybrid approach, in which an engine could switch between HCCI and conventional spark ignition. Using already mass-produced parts could make it relatively inexpensive to build such a hybrid, Green says.
In conventional gasoline engines, a spark ignites a mixture of fuel and air in a combustion chamber, creating an explosion that drives a piston. While this happens very efficiently when the engine is working hard, it's less efficient at lower loads, such as during cruising, when less gasoline is being pumped into the combustion chamber. At these times, to keep the ratio of fuel to oxygen optimized, a partial vacuum is created in the chamber. It takes extra energy to make this vacuum, which decreases the engine's efficiency.
The HCCI technology avoids the use of an energy-wasting vacuum. Instead, hot gases from a previous combustion cycle remain in the chamber; the engine uses a combination of heat from these hot gases and heat generated by compressing the mixture to raise temperatures high enough that the mixture explodes.
Making Gasoline from bacteria
The biofuel of the future could well be gasoline. That's the hope of one biotech startup that on Monday described for the first time how it is coaxing bacteria into producing hydrocarbons that could be processed into fuels like those made from petroleum.
LS9, a company based in San Carlos, CA, and founded by geneticist George Church, of Harvard Medical School, and plant biologist Chris Somerville, of Stanford University, had previously said that it was working on what it calls "renewable petroleum." But at a Society for Industrial Microbiology conference on Monday, the company began speaking more openly about what it has accomplished: it has genetically engineered various bacteria, including E. coli, to custom-produce hydrocarbon chains.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19128/
LS9, a company based in San Carlos, CA, and founded by geneticist George Church, of Harvard Medical School, and plant biologist Chris Somerville, of Stanford University, had previously said that it was working on what it calls "renewable petroleum." But at a Society for Industrial Microbiology conference on Monday, the company began speaking more openly about what it has accomplished: it has genetically engineered various bacteria, including E. coli, to custom-produce hydrocarbon chains.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19128/
This day in history- 1991 Ladies and Gentlemen the World Wide Web
1991: The world wide web becomes publicly available on the internet for the first time.
The web has changed a lot since Tim Berners-Lee posted, on this day, the first web pages summarizing his World Wide Web project, a method of storing knowledge using hypertext documents. In the months leading up to his post, Berners-Lee had developed everything necessary to make the web a reality, including the first browser and server.
His historic post appeared on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, ending a journey that began back in 1980, when Berners-Lee was at CERN, an international particle physics lab located near Geneva, Switzerland. There, working with collaborator Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee began the Enquire project, the forerunner to what would become the web.
The project, which made hypertext a chief communications component for the first time, was intended to facilitate the sharing of information among researchers across the broader internet
The web has changed a lot since Tim Berners-Lee posted, on this day, the first web pages summarizing his World Wide Web project, a method of storing knowledge using hypertext documents. In the months leading up to his post, Berners-Lee had developed everything necessary to make the web a reality, including the first browser and server.
His historic post appeared on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, ending a journey that began back in 1980, when Berners-Lee was at CERN, an international particle physics lab located near Geneva, Switzerland. There, working with collaborator Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee began the Enquire project, the forerunner to what would become the web.
The project, which made hypertext a chief communications component for the first time, was intended to facilitate the sharing of information among researchers across the broader internet