h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have a road bike with skinny wheels. Not ideal for the wintertime.

The Wankel engines as used by Mazda in their RX series of cars, they're revolutionary .

Morning all.

With the exception of Shania Twain, I don't listen to any of those "artists" that supposedly have done better than the others.

In pure fact, most engines are revolutionary. They all spin things after all. .

Truly revolutionary vehicles of late include the Bugatti Veyron with its great feats of power and speed albeit at a tremendous price, The Honda FCX hydrogen powered car (where we should be dumping R&D money instead of in hybrid tech), The Ford EcoBoost vehicles that have small motors with turbos added for fuel economy and the Mazda SkyActiv engine coupling high compression with really interesting exhaust to get great mileage as well. The Prius, Insight and other hybrids really are not always as green as the salesdrone would have you believe. They all require relatively large amounts of rare earth materials that are not easily found as well as having a fairly large carbon footprint debt just to get built and shipped to the end user markets.

We obviously need to divorce our transportation fuel from petrochemicals. That's why I think hydrogen powered fuel cells and other applications of hydrogen tech are so important. It is the most abundant element in the universe, we would be foolhardy to ignore it as a fuel source. I understand how difficult it is to get pure hydrogen gas, but that is where additional work could go. University of Minnesota had an alcohol fueled reactor that could generate hydrogen. While not perfect, it certainly could be a tool that we could put further effort toward perfecting. And there are plenty of other areas that we could research with a goal of hydrogen production.

I was talking to a biochemical scientist a couple of years ago about an idea I had of how you could use algae to produce hydrogen as a byproduct. Turns out a fair few of the pharmaceutical/petrochemical companies were already looking into this.

The idea being that "petrol" stations had algae tanks/silos attached to them to produce the hydrogen on site.

It could work.

Marv, as you know most engines in cars, motorbikes, ships and rail transport convert an up and down (or side to side, it is the same thing) into rotary motion.

I just want scientists/engineers/geeks/someone really smart to find a cure for the common cold.

We have a very light dusting of snow. Better than a lot of snow. I hope Lil's power is still on.

No snow here, a little slippy ice. I'm afraid I may have to stop cycling to work for a few weeks as mine's only a narrow-tyre hybrid road bike, and I don't want to end up in the river.

<BB<

[Runes]

No snow here just lots of cold.

A has a choir concert tonight at school, it should be very good.

The temperature outside in the shade is -14ºC. Where the sun hits, there is dripping water, which means black ice later. I have power as you see, and running water except for the toilet -- the inflow pipe is frozen, which means manually refilling the tank. Intermittent loud noises as snow avalanches off the roof.

*shoes a duck at marv* Good one, actually

-14C°.

I hope your water pipe will thaw quickly.

Santra, how does a duck take to getting steel nailed to it's foot?

Yeah, I'd like to know too

Probably as well as the duck I ate the other day that had been shot. Little Teal. Not much meat on it.

All these fuel ideas are great, but the option that can produce large quantities is the one we need. Like a good few of you, I live in a rural area. Public transport sucks big time. I NEED fuel for my car that is cheap.

Just added one of those ecofans on top of our woodburning stove. Amazing bit of kit.

(mtg)

Kelli, they auditioned 60 on Sunday and cut them down to 30. They want to have at least one representative from each of the 4 parts of the UK, so its possible that both local girls will get through. She's hoping for that outcome, as it would be nice to have someone she knows in the group. We'll know by the end of the week.

That is so cool, Beatrice. Fingers most definitely crossed.