These days, your car may even listen to you, if you have a voice-activated music system or phone. But generally, cars don’t pay much attention to what you say to them.

It could be that you just don’t have anything to say they’re very interested in. Perhaps what cars would really enjoy is conversation with others of their kind…and it may not be too long before they get it.

It’s called “vehicle-to-vehicle communication,” or “V2V” for short.  It is, literally, cars and trucks talking to each other. And starting this August, automakers will take part in a year-long field trial of the technology, a study being undertaken in conjunction with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

For the trial, 3,000 cars will be outfitted with equipment that allows them to broadcast their position, speed of travel and direction to other vehicles, and receive signals from those other vehicles in return, over a Wi-Fi network.

In an article about the “digital car,” Technology Review magazine compares the Wi-Fi signals to an alert passenger able to see in all directions at once. A V2V-equipped car could warn the driver if another V2V-equipped car was about to run a red light, or if there’s a V2V-equipped motorcycle in the blind spot.

A study sponsored by the U.S.’s National Highway Transportation Safety Administration looked at the scenarios involved in police-reported crashes involving unimpaired drivers, and found that V2V systems could potentially address a whopping 79 percent of those kinds of crashes: 81 percent of light vehicle crashes and 71 percent of heavy-truck crashes.

Your car might not just talk to other cars, either. There is also something called V2I, which stands for “vehicle-to-infrastructure.” That communication between vehicle and roadway, the study found, potentially dealt with 26 percent of all crashes: 27 percent of light-vehicle, and 15-percent of heavy-truck. Putting the two together raised the potential reduction in (or at least reduction in the severity of) all kinds of crashes to 81 percent.

If this year’s field trial and other studies produce favorable results, the U.S. government could start developing rules as early as next year that would mandate the inclusion of V2V systems in all new vehicles: pretty much a necessity if the technology is to be as effective as possible, since a one-sided conversation between a V2V-equipped car and one that’s effectively deaf and dumb won’t help anyone.

Of course, “talking cars” may talk not only to other cars, but to the entire world, via the Internet. For example, Ford has a made a deal with Google to use the search engine’s prediction algorithms, software that analyzes large data sets to spot trends. The idea, presented by Ryan McGee, a technical expert in Ford’s Vehicle Controls Architecture and Algorithm Design research group at the annual Google I/O conference in San Francisco last year, is that your car would send data to Google’s data centers, where software would predict where you are headed, based on past trips. Technology Review describes it this way: “Google might predict, say, that there’s a 59.24 percent chance you’re headed over to Bob’s house. A hybrid car might use a map of low-emission zones to determine when to switch to battery power as you drive. Or the algorithm could pick a fuel-efficient path with few hills, no rain, and the least traffic.”

This isn’t coming soon, if it comes at all: it’s probably four to eight years away. But it’s only one example of the possibilities inherent in cars that are no longer big dumb objects, but essentially rolling computers with network connectivity.

K. Venkatesh Prasad, senior leader for open innovation at Ford Motor Company, puts it this way in that Technology Review article. “The first billion vehicles in this world are like [un-networked] desktops—each doing their own little thing. The next billion cars should talk to each other and share intelligence.

“Think of how the World Wide Web changed the world,” he goes on. “The automotive sector is ripe for a similar change.”

(The photo: A Ford Mustang California Special.)

The problem has been that we really only have a few ways to get ourselves into the air, and none of them really lend themselves well to flying cars.

But a new technology presented at the Paris Air Show proffers the possibility of, not only flying cars, but more stable, easy-to-fly and mechanically robust aircraft for a plethora of purposes: the first “disruptive technology”—technology that changes everything and seriously shakes up an industry or market—in aviation since the jet engine.

The brainchild of the Austrian research company IAT21, the D-Dalus (a play on Daedalus from Greek mythology, which you have to admit is a much better choice than Icarus) is neither a fixed-wing nor a rotor aircraft. Instead, it is propelled by four mechanically linked contra-rotating cylindrical turbines, all spinning at 2,200 rpm.

Servos can turn the blades through a full 360 degrees around all three axes. That allows the D-Dalus to launch vertically, hover perfectly still, and move in any direction, a complex process made simple by computers: all the operator has to do is manipulate a simple joystick. That means the D-Dalus is far simpler to fly than any helicopter. (That’s not the only way it’s simple: it’s also simple mechanically, so simple that it requires little maintenance and what little is required can be done by someone with no more mechanical expertise than your average auto mechanic.)

Speaking of helicopters, they and all our other existing VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft are challenged by bad weather and flying long ranges. They’re also hard to land on moving platforms, such as boats in rough water.

But D-Dalus, according to its developers, suffers from none of these problems. Its ability to thrust upward allows it to “glue down” as it lands, even on a moving vehicle or tossing boat. It’s extremely stable, handling rough weather with ease.

That stability, combined with a built-in sense-and-avoid system to keep it from running into things, and the fact it has no vulnerable external parts (unlike a helicopter, for example) means the D-Dalus can hover very close to cliff faces and building walls (making it potentially very useful for search and rescue missions).

The lack of external moving parts also gives the D-Dalus 360-degree vision: no blind spots in any direction. Throw all of these capabilities into the pot, along with the fact it’s nearly silent, and it’s not surprising the military is interested in it for surveillance drones.

But there are many other potential uses. The D-Dalus is so stable, it could even be flown safely into a building through an open window. Once inside, it could be used to remove explosives or contaminants, extract injured people, or even hold and direct water hoses for fire fighters.

D-Dalus aircraft can lift heavy loads, and the bigger they are the more efficient at lifting they become, which means they could be used as skycranes for loading and unloading ships when regular cranes aren’t available. The current D-Dalus has a 120 bhp engine, rotors five feet long, and can lift up to 70 kg, but IAT21 is working with Cranfield University in the U.K. on a version with a larger, more powerful engine, a new hull shape, and advanced guidance and control systems.

Every new technology runs into challenges. In the case of the D-Dalus, in early testing, all available bearings failed due to the huge forces on the blade pivots. In response, Austrian inventor Meinhard Schwaiger (who already has 150 patents to his name) created (and, of course, patented) a new, near-frictionless swivel-bearing.

You’ll notice there’s no mention in any of this of a passenger-carrying version: but there’s no reason one couldn’t eventually be developed, “for public transit,” as the news story I read put it.

“Public transit” conjures up images of airliners, or maybe airbuses, but really, we all know what it really means.

Flying cars!

And once we have them, the future really will be here…at last.

About time, too.

Later, I was crossing a street downtown when a van went through the yellow in front of me. It looked to me like the driver had plenty of time to stop—but no doubt he had his own excuse.

It’s a rare driver who doesn’t run through a yellow light on occasion, and in most cases it’s barely even a conscious decision. You have a split second to decide to brake, keep going…or even speed up.

So how do we make that decision?

A transportation engineering graduate student at the University of Cincinnati recently decided to see what he could learn about the factors influencing the decision to run a yellow light.

In cooperation with the Ohio Department of Transportation and with the help of his advisor, Professor Heng Wei, Zhixia Li conducted research in Akron, Cleves and Fairfield, Ohio. The results were set forth in a paper called “Analysis of Drivers’ Stopping Behaviors Associated with the Yellow Phase Dilemma Zone—An Empirical Study in Fairfield, OH,” and were presented at the 2010 American Society of Highway Engineers National Conference held last week in Cincinnati.

Unfortunately the paper itself is not yet online, but a press release about his findings was put out a few days ago.

According to the release, Li found that lane position, type of vehicle, travel speed, speed limit and the timing of the light all figure in the running of yellow lights.

For example, he found that people in the right lane are 1.6 times more likely to speed through a yellow light than drivers in the left lane.

Drivers in heavy trucks are more likely to pass through a yellow light than drivers of automobiles, SUVs, vans or pickup trucks. I suspect that’s a matter of momentum: it takes a heavy vehicle longer to stop than a lighter one, and once it’s stopped, it’s harder to get going again.

I also suspect, though Li’s research has nothing to say on the matter, that in Saskatchewan in the winter time the incidence of people running yellow lights increases dramatically because suddenly all of us are dealing with the problem of momentum: brake too hard on an icy road and you’ll skid through the intersection, possibly out of control. Even if you do manage to stop, you may find it almost impossible to get going again. In effect, winter turns us all into heavy trucks.

(Er, turns our vehicles into heavy trucks. Although, after a month of Christmas goodies…)

Travel speed is a pretty obvious factor: the faster a vehicle is travelling at the onset of the yellow light, the more likely it is to pass through it. And that naturally means that the higher the posted speed limit, the more likely vehicles are to pass through the yellow light at an intersection.

Finally, there’s the timing of the light.

Yellow lights are typically set to last somewhere from three to five seconds. Drivers coming to an intersection with a longer yellow light are more likely to pass through it (presumably because they’re familiar with the intersection and know how long the light is going to be).

In fact, Li found that for every additional second a yellow light persists, drivers are three times more likely to pass through the intersection under yellow. In other words, drivers are three times more likely to pass through a four-second yellow than they are a three-second yellow, and three times more likely than that to pass through a five-second light, which if my math is right means that they’re a whopping nine times more likely to pass through a five-second yellow than a three-second one.

This kind of empirical data should be of great use to traffic engineers attempting to make better, smoother and safer the flow of traffic through cities.

It might even, the press release suggests, “help drivers consider their own actions when in the yellow-light dilemma zone.”

But that, I’ll believe when I see.

But there’s an obvious problem with this. That stuff we’re turning into fuel is also food for humans and feed for animals.

(And as an aside, how come we always call it “animal feed” as opposed to “animal food”? And why don’t we ever refer to “human feed”? Hmm?)

A lot of the plant is wasted when you grow crops for fuel or food. The leaves and stems, with their tough cell walls made of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, are more of a nuisance than anything else. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a use for what is now plowed under or burned?

There is, or there soon will be, thanks to research aimed at using bacteria to convert this “lignocellulosic biomass” into fuel in its own right.

A just-published article in Nature reveals the state of the art. Titled “Microbial production of fatty-acid-derived fuels and chemicals from plant biomass,” it describes the successful engineering of the common bacterium Excherichia coli–better known as E. coli and generally in the news when it contaminates water or meat and makes people sick–into a producer of biodiesel.

One of the co-authors of the research study is Jay Keasling, chief executive officer for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). “We’ve got a billion tons of biomass every year that goes unused,” he says, adding that fuel produced from that biomass could make up for as much as half of U.S. oil imports, turning “the U.S. Midwest into the new ‘Mideast’.”

That’s not hyperbole: by one estimate, lignicellulosic biomass could produce more than 7,500 litres of renewable petroleum per acre.

The researchers modified the E. coli genome, inserting genetic code for the production of an enzyme called hemicellulase, which can break down hemicellulose into smaller sugar molecules which E. coli can then turn into fatty acids.

E. coli normally produces only as much of the fatty acids as it needs for its own cell membranes. But the researchers’ E. coli were further modified so that the fatty acids just kept coming, turning each bacterium into a microscopic biodiesel factory.

The process takes place in fermentation vats, into which the bacteria expel little drops of oil. Turn off the impellers, and the oil floats to the top, where it can be skimmed off.

Even better, by tweaking the process, chemical products ranging from solvents to lubricants to jet fuel could conceivably be produced.

Of course, it’s important to note that the research reported in Nature is just a proof of concept. There’s no commercially viable process for doing any of this yet–but Keasling hopes there will be within a very few years. Work will continue as the researchers search for ways to make use of even more of what’s in the feedstock–not just the hemicellulose.

There’s already a company standing ready to market fuels and other microbe-produced chemicals. Based in California, LS9, founded by a geneticist and a plant biologist, helped fund the research reported in Nature. LS9 points out that the crude oil produced by bioengineered bacteria has none of the contaminating sulfur of regular crude oil, so it’s cleaner. And despite its unorthodox origins, it can be refined like any other crude oil in a standard refinery.

There are other companies pursuing their own paths. Amyris Biotechnologies, for example, says it has also created bacteria capable of providing renewable hydrocarbon-based fuels. There are many more.

Why would this be preferable to ethanol production as it is currently carried out? Aside from the aforementioned fact that we’re presently turning food into fuel, hydrocarbon fuels are more efficient than ethanol, packing about 30 percent more energy into any given quantity. And even better, they take less energy to produce: ethanol production, which involves distilling, requires 65 percent more energy than hydrocarbon production does.

Perhaps the oil industry will slowly evolve away from the purview of drilling companies and into the realm of agriculture.

As for the marketing slogan for this new germ-produced form of fuel, I think I’ve come up with a winner: “E. coli. It’s not just for food poisoning anymore.”

What do you think?

Fermenting the sugars found in corn or other grains into ethanol has been around for a long time, of course, and it’s pretty much a proven technology. On the other hand, do we really want to be turning food into fuel?

More promising have been recent advances in turning lignocellulose, the stuff that makes up the cell walls in plants, into ethanol and other fuels: that would allow us to use grasses, wood chips, straw and other non-food as biomass.

Now comes word of a fuel-producing technology that doesn’t require biomass of any sort: just carbon dioxide and sunlight. And no, I’m not talking about trees.

On Monday, a Massachussetts company called Joule Biotechnologies announced that it has the technology to convert carbon dioxide directly into transportation fuels and chemicals. Not only that, they say, “this eco-friendly, direct-to-fuel conversion requires no agricultural land or fresh water.”

The company was founded in 2007, and relies on something it calls “Helioculture” technology, mixing, as the New York Times’s article on the announcement puts it, “CO2, Slime and Sunshine.”

More specifically, the company grows genetically engineered microorganisms in specially designed bioreactors. The microorganisms are photosynthetic, able to use energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol or hydrocarbon fuels.

The process works well in the laboratory, so the real question is if it can be scaled up to an industrial-sized plant. To find out, Joule plans to break ground on a modular pilot plant early in 2010 that will produce ethanol (trademarked as SolarEthanol), and the following year hopes to begin construction on a commercial-scale operation that can also produce hydrocarbons and associated chemicals, “several of which have already been demonstrated at laboratory scale.

It’s looking for sites near CO2 producers such as coal-fired power plants and cement kilns, with locations in Texas, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico, places with lots of sun and lots of space, under consideration

Open spaces are needed because a large plant would look a lot like a solar array: a huge field covered with panels, except these panels, rather than producing electricity, would produce liquid fuels

The company estimates that a single acre covered with its “SolarConverter” panels (flat, transparent, and about the size of a sheet of plywood) could produce 20,000 gallons of ethanol at a cost of $50 a barrel. (That makes it competitive with oil, although it’s worth noting that that price includes existing subsidies: what the unsubsidized cost would be, I don’t know.)

At that level of production, if you built enough plants to cover, in total, an area the size of the Texas panhandle, you could meet all of the United States’ transportation fuel needs.

In Technology Review, writer Kevin Bullis notes that the company’s technology sounds similar to that of biofuels produced by algae—but the company says it is not using algae, and its stated production estimates are an order of magnitude greater than algae-based biofuels, which are estimated to have potential yields of only 2,000 to 6,000 gallons per acre.

Its estimated cost of production is also only a fraction of that of algae-based biofuels, which currently would require crude oil to rise to $800 a barrel in order to be competitive.

Besides, algae produces oils that have to be refined, whereas Joule says its microorganisms will produce ethanol or hydrocarbons directly. The Joule microorganisms also excrete the fuels, whereas algae has to be harvested and processed to extract oil.

Too good to be true? Maybe. But there are other companies in the race to develop the same kinds of technology. And with the push to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and move away from fossil fuels, that race is only going to get hotter.

So remember the name: Joule Biotechnologies.

Someday, its genetically modified critters could be cheerfully churning out the fuel that powers your car.

Not all of those roads are paved, however. In fact, most aren’t. And as anyone who has had occasion to drive extensively on the rural road system can tell you, while gravel roads are better than mud roads, they have their own…interesting…characteristics, of which one of the most annoying is the “washboard effect.”

Washboards are fine if you’re a 19th century pioneer woman trying to clean the clothes or the abs of a 21st century male bodybuilder, but washboard-like ridges on a road are downright dangerous, reducing traction, causing extreme wear and tear on the vehicles vibrating over them, and threatening to extract the fillings of the unfortunate drivers.

Nor is this washboard effect limited to gravel roads: those annoying ripples appear on just about any road with a loose surface, from sand to snow.

Nobody has been entirely sure how this annoying phenomenon arises—until now.

A team consisting of Anne-Florence Bitbol and Nicolas Taberlet of Ecole Normale Superieure in Lyon, Jim McElwaine of the University of Cambridge, and Stephen Morris of the University of Toronto, working in England and France, have managed to create washboard surfaces in the laboratory—and just as importantly, model them mathematically.

Seeking to find the simplest possible instance of the effect, they created an experimental setup consisting of a rotating table a meter in diameter, covered with a layer of sand between five and 10 centimetres thick. A hard rubber wheel attached to an arm was free to roll on this granular “road,” which moved beneath it at a velocity ranging from 0 to 10 km/h.

Unlike there would be a with a car driving over a road, there was no suspension involved, no torque from the engine, and no bouncy inflatable tire—but even so, the ripples formed, rapidly, after just a few passes of the wheel.

As the researchers put it on the experiment’s website, “The fact that our simplified systems produce washboard ripples is important since it shows that neither tyres nor suspension are necessary to obtain washboard roads, although of course, adding a spring, a dashpot, a tyre or an engine would affect the size of the bumps. In other words, it is not because of the suspension of cars that washboard roads exist. The ripple wavelength is not simply the speed of the wheel times the bounce frequency of the suspension, which seems to be a common belief.

Also surprising: neither the size of the wheel nor the size of the grains covering the road influenced the pattern (although the mass of the wheel did). In fact, the wheel didn’t even have to spin: even when it just plowed along the surface, the washboard developed.

In fact, ripples formed in sand both wet and dry, with both fine and coarse grains, and even in long-grain rice; with or without an added spring on the wheel; for various weights of the wheel; and at a large range of speeds. In scientific terms, the phenomenon is “very robust.

It’s not just seen on roads, either. You see it on ski hills (as moguls), steel railway tracks (as tiny bumps), and even in computer hard disks, where the hopping of the read head sometimes creates a washboard pattern

So if the fault lies not in our automobiles’ suspensions, where does it lie

According to the U. of T.’s Morris, the effect is related to the physics of stone skipping. A skipping stone creates a ripple that the stone then launches off of into the air, landing and creating another ripple, and so on. This carries on until the stone’s speed falls below a certain threshold

Similarly, a car’s wheel, travelling over a granular surface, creates ripples that it launches off of, landing and creating another ripple, and so on, and so on. The difference is that, unlike water, a granular surface “remembers” the ripples, which grow larger with each subsequent pass of a wheel

Fortunately, there’s a simple way to avoid a washboard effect: you just have to keep the cars travelling on the road below a certain critical velocity. For cars that’s around 8 km/h, which means there is a strong scientific argument for the government setting the rural speed limit to, oh, say, 5 km/h

I’m sure that would be acceptable to all concerned.

(Via Instapundit.)

(Via Instapundit.)

MOSCOW, September 24 (RIA Novosti) – A 15-year-old boy from the Urals suffered acute frostbite after riding the wing of a Boeing-737 plane on a two-hour flight from Perm to Moscow, Russian radio station Mayak reported on Monday.

After clinging on for the entire 1300-kilometer (808-mile) flight to Vnukovo Airport, the boy, named Andrei, collapsed onto the tarmac. His arms and legs were so severely frozen that rescuers were at first unable to remove his coat and shoes, the radio station said.

What on Earth is there to hold on to on a 737′s wing? At 900 kph?

More likely he was in the wheel well, if this incident really happened at all.

(Via Transterrestrial Musings.)

***

Lighthouse keeping has always sounded like a romantic occupation to me. As a kid, I even won honorable mention in a creative writing contest with a story featuring a lighthouse keeper.

Of course, being a prairie boy, I had never actually even been in a lighthouse. And that held true until just recently, when, on a trip to Ontario, I climbed two of them, on the shores of Lake Huron.

Lighthouses are not a new invention. The Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the World in ancient times, was built in the third century B.C. and stood something between 115 and 135 metres in height.

Lighthouses proliferated in the seventeenth century, as ships ranged across the world. The first Canadian lighthouse was built at the entrance of the harbour of the Fortress of Louisbourg between 1731 and 1734. Lighthouses arrived on the Great Lakes seventy or eighty years later.

I visited the Kincardine Rear Range Light, built in 1881, and the Point Clark light, built in the early 1850s.

The Kincardine light is a pretty tower atop the lightkeeper’s house. The Point Clark Light is what most people think of as a lighthouse: a circular limestone tower approximately 27.5 metres tall.

The Point Clark light warns of a dangerous shoal. The Kincardine light is the rear half of a set of “range lights,” with the front range light at the end of a narrow spit further out in the lake. If an incoming ship keeps the front and rear range lights aligned, it will unerringly find the safe channel into the protected harbor.

The first lighthouse lights were bonfires. Candles, whale-oil lamps and kerosene lamps followed, then acetelyne gas and finally electricity. But whatever the source of light, the challenge remains the same: ensuring it is visible many kilometers out from the shore.

The earliest attempt to intensify lighthouse lights were parabolic reflectors, but in the 19th century, Fresnel lenses took over.

Invented in 1822 by French physicist Augustin Jean Fresnel, Fresnel lenses are flat on one side and ridged, in a series of concentric rings, on the other. Each ring focuses the light toward the centre. The result is a relatively light, thin, lens that can focus light as well as a much larger, heavier ordinary lens–and much, much more efficiently (focusing 85 percent of a lamp’s light) than a parabolic reflector (which could only focus about 20 percent).

The lenses were arranged into an array that rotated around the light source, causing a beam of light to sweep the surrounding horizon. When the lenses were aimed toward you, the light looked bright; when the lenses were aimed away from you, the light looked much dimmer. The effect was of a flashing light, and each lighthouse could be identified by the specific pattern of flashes it emitted, created by the design of the lens assembly.

Before electricity, the lens assembly was rotated by weight-driven clockwork, just like in a grandfather clock. The lighthouse keeper had to keep the assembly wound, sometimes as often as every two hours. To reduce friction, the lens assembly often floated in mercury.

As time went along, electric lights and motor drives powered by diesel electric generators came into use. Both lighthouses I visited still have rotating lens assemblies, using Fresnel lenses, although thankfully no pools of mercury were to be seen.

Modern navigational aids, like the Global Positioning Satellite system, have almost killed off lighthouses. There are only about 1,500 working ones left, and the newest ones very different from the classic examples I climbed: they’re typically just skeletal steel towers topped by either the kind of rotating lights you see at airports or flashing strobe lights, and often powered by solar-charged batteries.

I’m glad I had the chance to climb classic examples, now protected as heritage sites. But as I puffed my way up the increasingly narrow and steep steps of the Point Clark lighthouse, I was even more glad I only had to climb it once.

Lighthouse keeping, it seems, like much of the past that sounds romantic to modern ears, consisted mainly of backbreaking work.

I think I’ll stick to writing.