There are many innovations turning up in the latest experimental and production electric cars, affecting everything from batteries to motors to control systems. The need to make them all work together is prompting a complete rethink about the way cars should be designed and manufactured, and it is unclear which technologies will dominate as the constraints imposed by internal combustion engines give way to the new limits and possibilities associated with electric propulsion. But one group of engineers have stuck their necks out and declared that a particular technology, the electric hub motor, is likely to become the most widely used drive system. A hub motor, as its name suggests, is built into the hub of a wheel and drives it directly, rather than having a single motor driving the wheels via a mechanical transmission. It is an idea pioneered by Ferdinand Porsche, the founder of the carmaker of the same name, more than 100 years ago. Mr Porsche got his first job in the automotive business with Jacob Lohner in Vienna, and put electric motors into the hubs of the wheels of the Lohner-Porsche, a vehicle which made its debut at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris. It […]
BAGHDAD | A Shiite militia that was crippled two years ago by defections and a U.S.-Iraqi crackdown has quietly started to regroup. The revival of the Mahdi Army, loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, adds street muscle to the Shiite party that emerged strongest from Iraq’s parliamentary elections. An al-Sadr spokesman said the force was gearing up to ensure U.S. forces stick to a Dec. 31, 2011, deadline to withdraw from the country - threatening attacks on American troops if they stayed past the date. In the near term, Sunnis fear the militia will turn its firepower against their community in vengeance after an uptick in militant violence against Shiites in recent months, a move that could revive the sectarian bloodshed that nearly tore the nation apart in 2006 and 2007. Al-Sadr disbanded the militia in 2008. But his spokesman, Salah al-Obeidi, told The Associated Press that it had officially been revived. In a show of the movement’s new boldness, al-Sadr offered to help Iraqi security forces - who have almost no visible presence in their eastern Baghdad stronghold - protect Shiites after a wave of bombings April 23 targeted their places of worship. Prime […]
NEW YORK – Americans 45 and older are far more open to sex outside of marriage than they were 10 years ago, but they’re engaging in sex less often and with less satisfaction, according to a major new survey by AARP. What’s the problem? AARP’s sex and relationship expert, sociologist Pepper Schwartz, thinks financial stress is a prime culprit. ‘The economy has had an impact on these people,’ she said. ‘They’re more liberal in their attitudes, yet they’re having sex less often. The only thing I see that’s changed in a negative direction is financial worries.’ The survey, being released Friday, is based on detailed questionnaires completed last year by 1,670 people 45 and over. The AARP, which represents 40 million Americans over 50, conducted similar surveys on sexual attitudes and practices in 1999 and 2004. One of the most pronounced changes over the 10-year span dealt with sex outside of marriage. In the 1999 survey, 41 percent of the respondents said nonmarital sex was wrong. That figure dropped to 22 percent in the new survey. Yet sexual activity – marital or not – seems to be less frequent overall for this age group. […]
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it can be difficult and costly to get at the raw gaseous stuff, at least in the kind of commercial volumes that could sustainably fuel a hydrogen economy. But researchers at the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have made a substantial leap toward a hydrogen-based future by devising a cheap, metal catalyst that can split hydrogen gas from water. The ability to pull apart H2O molecules into their constituent atoms is, of course, the key to creating a hydrogen-based energy economy. If we can do so in a cheap and energy efficient manner, we could potentially turn Earth’s vast supply of water into our own vast supply of cheap, clean power. But most hydrogen gas on earth comes packaged as natural gas — a carbon-based fuel — or packed into water, which can be split into oxygen and hydrogen through a process called electrolysis. Electrolysis requires a good deal of electricity, but if renewable fuels generate that power the process can be carbon neutral. What it can’t be is cheap; electrolysis requires a catalyst to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas, the most common of which is […]
Washing your hands ‘wipes the slate clean,’ removing doubts about recent choices. That’s the key finding of a University of Michigan study published in the current (May 7) issue of Science. The study, conducted by U-M psychologists Spike W. S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz, expands on past research by showing that hand-washing does more than remove the guilt of past misdeeds. ‘It’s not just that washing your hands contributes to moral cleanliness as well as physical cleanliness, as seen in earlier research’ said Lee, a doctoral candidate in social psychology. ‘Our studies show that washing also reduces the influence of past behaviors and decisions that have no moral implications whatsoever.’ For the study, Lee and Schwarz, who is affiliated with the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and the Ross School of Business in addition to the Department of Psychology, asked undergraduate students to browse through 30 CD covers as part of an alleged consumer survey. Participants picked 10 CDs they would like to own, ranking them by preference. Later, the experimenter offered them a choice between their 5th and 6th ranked CDs as a token of appreciation. Following that choice, participants completed an ostensibly unrelated […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
