Back in 2001, the IIAS, Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, funded a report on the benefits of red-light cameras, commonly referred to as the Oxnard report (you can read the study here). It was the first study to claim red-light cameras decrease accidents, and it has since been cited by hundreds of cities as the reason for the adoption of their red-light camera systems. But some people questioned the validity of that study, and three researchers from the University of South Florida; Barbara Orban, Etienne Pracht and John T. Large; recently attempted to replicate the studies findings… and they discovered the numbers just didn’t add up.

“The regression analysis of Retting and Kyrychenko [the authors of the Oxnard study] does not support their conclusion that red light cameras reduced total or injury crashes,” the University of South Florida team wrote in the American Journal of Public Health last month.

I’ve always been fascinated by ants and social insects. Just yesterday, I ordered E.O. Wilson’s The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies. We can learn a great deal about decentralization, complex systems, and our own society from social insects.

One recent line of research shows that ants are better at managing congestion than humans, and actually help each other move around their colony much more efficiently that we thought. Traffic and traffic jams have baffled scientists for ages. Congestion often appears and then disappears on the same road without any obvious reasons. But ants have a way of avoiding that congestion before it even starts.

CerMet Labs has introduced CerMet-Auto, a ceramic nanotechnology coating that supposedly reduces friction in engine parts. That reduced friction in turn translates into improved fuel economy. That’s the claim, at least. It’s designed to go in with the engine oil, then it’s carried to the areas of friction and bonds with the metal surfaces.

The company says it can improve your gas powered engine’s fuel efficiency by 5 to 15%. It comes in 10ml syringes for almost $200 dollars. CerMet CEO Dean Rose said: “Our product represents the meeting of nanotechnology, green initiatives, and the urgent imperative to reduce fuel consumption costs. It’s easy to apply, and provides a very high return-on-investment for the user.”

Toronto native Marcelo da Luz pulled in to Victoria today, after completing a 9,400 mile trip across Canada in his solar car. His 140 day journey beat the previous Guiness record holders (set in 2004) by 50 miles. Although his record hasn’t yet been recognized by Guiness, da Luz says he’s planning to continue traveling as long as he can afford to do so.

“I can only go for as long as I have support,” he says. “It’s a mix between Forrest Gump and Field of Dreams — if you build it they will come and life is like a box chocolates.”

Da Luz started in Toronto and passed through 44 cities and across Canada twice. His car, called the “Power of One” or Xof1, is a single-seat solar vehicle that cost $500,000 dollars to build. The vehicle cost about half a million dollars to build, can travel 124 miles on a single charge and has a top speed of about 75 mph.

According to LiveScience, scientists have discovered a fungus that can produce biofuel more efficiently than any existing bio-fuel production method. The way bio-fuel is made now, certain enzymes are needed to convert the cellulose into sugar, at which point the microbes can break down and ferment that sugar into ethanol.

By using this fungus, called Gliocladium roseum, commercially, the cellulose digesting step can be skipped. Instead of providing enzymes from outside the mix, G. roseum digests cellulose on it’s own and then moves on to ferment the sugar as well.

G. roseum is so good at turning plant matter into fuel that some scientists are questioning the whole theory of how crude oil was made by nature in the first place.

NASA engineers, designers, and space scientists have been testing a new Small Pressurized Rover designed for future lunar landings. Astronauts and geologists have spent the past week testing out the rover in the 11th annual Desert RATS – or Research and Technology Studies — field tests. The teams have been driving the rover through the Arizona desert, testing out it’s various configurations.

The new lunar rover is still a prototype under development, but it has features unlike any other lunar vehicle before it. It’s pressurized cabin can allow astronauts to explore the lunar surface for weeks at a time, without wearing spacesuits. And the rover’s wheels can lift independently and will operate in any direction, making it highly maneuverable on the rocky surface.
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New software developed by scientists at UC San Diego allows anyone to make duplicate keys from a single photograph. Keys can be cloned from any type of photograph, like a cell phone’s camera, and even from pictures taken over distances of hundreds of feet away. The pictures are scanned into a computer, and the software (called Sneakey) detects the exact contours of the key to create a duplicate, no matter the angle or distance at which the photos were taken.

This actually doesn’t really surprise me. I’ve been interested in bump keys and lockpicking for a long time, and a guy I once worked with showed me his method of copying a key just by looking at it. All he needs is a key blank and a hand-file. It’s just a matter of understanding that there are only a few different settings for each pin in a lock, and each bump on a key represents one of those settings. The software does the same thing, although with much greater accuracy.

Oil is a dirty word. It’s foreign and expensive and pollutes the air and the water; and those bastards at Exxon are profiting from selling us that filthy liquid. Damn them for selling a product we all buy. Point is, there’s money to be made in personal transport. It doesn’t matter if it’s oil or hydrogen or electricity fueling our movement, something will always be there to fill the gap and get us around. Right now, it’s starting to look like lithium-ion batteries may fill that gap, at least for a little while. They have one of the best efficiency to weight ratios of any battery technology so far, so we’ll probably see a lot more of them in the future.

Lithium batteries already power most mobile devices and laptops since they’re so light, and the comparatively underpowered electric cars need a fairly lightweight power source. But if electric cars become as widespread as gas-powered cars are now, or even a fraction as widespread, does the world have enough lithium to keep up? And where is it all coming from?

Right now, there are over 7-million flex-fuel vehicles on US roads, most of them are fleet cars or trucks that can switch between gasoline and E85 (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline). But there are 0 motorcycles that can run on E85. Yamaha has just filed a patent that may change that.

There is still very little information out about the patent, and Yamaha is far from creating a production flex-bike just yet. But their patent means they at least have something in the works. The patent drawing is of a single cylinder bike, which would probably make this bike fairly inexpensive. It has a normal sized fuel tank presumably for conventional fuel, and a smaller second tank tucked away behind the cylinder below the fuel injector. The second tank is most likely meant to hold the E85. Why it would need two separate tanks is anyone’s guess. I would think, just like flex-fuel cars, the engine sensors would be able to detect the different fuels and alter itself accordingly.

Chungpin Hovering Liao, a professor at the Graduate School of Electro-Optic and Material Science of National Formosa University in central Taiwan, has developed the world’s first chlorophyll organic battery that can use any liquid, including urine, to produce electricity. The battery is completely non-toxic and starts to generate power within 10 seconds after being soaked or immersed in liquid. And any liquid will work; water, beer, soda, even urine.

The model Liao has can produce electricity for between 2-7 days right now, and it only puts out half as much power as a regular battery of similar size. Plus, it’s only a tiny sized battery, not an automotive sized one, but things can change. Liao has said that mass producing his batteries could be done for anywhere betwee 3 to 6 cents each.