The Curious Cat Science and Engineering blog explores: innovation, technology, research, education, economics, gadgets, health care and scientific inquiry.
The Dutch are bicycle fanatics. Almost half of daily travel in the Netherlands is by bicycle, while the country’s bike fleet comfortably outnumbers its 16 million people. Devotees of the national obsession have taken the next logical step by launching what is likely the first bicycle school bus.
Built by Tolkamp Metaalspecials, and sold by the De Cafe Racer company, the bicycle school bus (BCO in Dutch) is powered entirely by children and the one adult driver (although there is an electric motor for tough hills). Its simple design has eight sets of pedals for the kids (ages 4 to 12), a driver seat for the adult, and three bench seats for freeloaders. The top speed is about 10 miles per hour, and features a sound system and canvas awning to ward off rainy days.
They have sold 25 of the busses so far for $15,000 each.
I wish they provided data for the larger companies, but they don’t. They show a breakdown of 9,461 (CEO or founders) with a business undergraduate major and 9,334 with an engineering degree. For those with advanced degrees 3,337 have an engineering master’s or doctorate and 1,016 have an MBA.
In the latest (2008) data I have for S&P 500 CEO’s 22% were engineers. Engineers seem to make up under 5% of college graduates (based on my eyeballing of this Dept. of Education data). Business meanwhile seems to make up about 20% of the majors.
Mitsubishi completed the conceptual design of a new container ship; this eco-ship achieves a 25% decrease in CO2 emissions over existing ships. Three, of these ships, with the Mitsubishi Air Lubrication System (MALS), are being built now (they should be completed in 2014).
In addition to blowers to create air bubbles under the vessel bottom, the three grain carriers will also feature a newly designed bow shape that will reduce wave-making resistances. For propulsion, the ship adopts a system to effectively convert the main engine power into propulsion power by positioning fins forward of the propellers and placing particular grooves in the propeller boss cap.
Reducing the frictional drag on the hull of a ship saves fuel and lowers CO2 emissions. To achieve this, MHI developed the Mitsubishi Air Lubrication System (MALS), which reduces frictional drag by introducing air bubbles by air blower into the water around the bottom of a ship’s hull, covering the ship in bubbles. By arranging the air blowhole location and shape and controlling the air volume, the lubrication effect has been enhanced, reducing CO2 emissions per container transportation by 10 percent.
This system has already been introduced on module carriers, and has been proven to reduce CO2 emissions significantly.
A disease-fighting protein in our teardrops has been tethered to a tiny transistor, enabling UC Irvine scientists to discover exactly how it destroys dangerous bacteria. The research could prove critical to long-term work aimed at diagnosing cancers and other illnesses in their very early stages.
Ever since Nobel laureate Alexander Fleming found that human tears contain antiseptic proteins called lysozymes about a century ago, scientists have tried to solve the mystery of how they could relentlessly wipe out far larger bacteria. It turns out that lysozymes have jaws that latch on and chomp through rows of cell walls like someone hungrily devouring an ear of corn.
“Those jaws chew apart the walls of the bacteria that are trying to get into your eyes and infect them,” said molecular biologist and chemistry professor Gregory Weiss, who co-led the project with associate professor of physics & astronomy Philip Collins.
The researchers decoded the protein’s behavior by building one of the world’s smallest transistors – 25 times smaller than similar circuitry in laptop computers or smartphones. Individual lysozymes were glued to the live wire, and their eating activities were monitored.
“Our circuits are molecule-sized microphones,” Collins said. “It’s just like a stethoscope listening to your heart, except we’re listening to a single molecule of protein.”
It took years for the UCI scientists to assemble the transistor and attach single-molecule teardrop proteins. The scientists hope the same novel technology can be used to detect cancerous molecules. It could take a decade to figure out but would be well worth it, said Weiss, who lost his father to lung cancer.
“If we can detect single molecules associated with cancer, then that means we’d be able to detect it very, very early,” Weiss said. “That would be very exciting, because we know that if we treat cancer early, it will be much more successful, patients will be cured much faster, and costs will be much less.”
The project was sponsored by the National Cancer Institute and the National Science Foundation. Co-authors of the Science paper are Yongki Choi, Issa Moody, Patrick Sims, Steven Hunt, Brad Corso and Israel Perez.
This is an update on our previous post: sOccket: Power Through Play. This year, Soccket, 3,000 balls are scheduled to be put into use around the world. The college students (all women, by the way) that came up with this idea (harnessing the kenetic energy created while kicking a football [soccer ball] around to power a batter to use for lighting) are continuing to test and develop the product.
That ball has to be able to survive dusty, wet and harsh conditions and continue to provide power. The new, production version of the football powers a water sterilizer, fan, and provides up to 24 hours of LED light. It also can’t be deflated (a side affect of a design that is able to survive the rough environments, I believe).
I love to see engineers focusing on providing solutions for the billions of people that need simple solutions. Creating the next iPhone innovations is also cool, but the impact of meeting the needs of those largely ignored today, is often even greater.
The sOccket inventors also have a talent for publicity, which is always useful for entrepreneurs.
This is a very cool engineering solution. Wheeled locomotion is very efficient on the right terrain. This transformation lets the robot switch to climb stairs and handle rough terrain very nicely. A team of mechanical engineers at National Taiwan University built this energy-efficient leg-wheel hybrid mobile robot. From their description:
Compared to most hybrid platforms, which have separate mechanisms and actuators for wheels and legs, our leg-wheel hybrid mobile robot, Quattroped, uses a “transformation mechanism” that deforms a specific portion of the body to act as a wheel or a leg. From a geometrical point of view, a wheel usually has a circular rim and a rotational axis located at the center of the rim. The rim contacts the ground and the rotational axis connects to the robot body at a point hereafter referred to as the “hip joint.” In general, with wheeled locomotion on flat ground, the wheel rotates continuously and the ground-contact point of the wheel is located directly below the hip joint with a fixed distance. In contrast, in legged locomotion the leg moves in a periodic manner and there is no specific geometrical configuration between the hip joint and the ground-contact point; thereby, the relative position of the legs varies frequently and periodically during locomotion.
Based on this observation, shifting the hip joint out of the center of the circular rim and changing the continuous rotation motion to other motion patterns implies the locomotion switches from wheeled mode to legged mode. This motivated us to design a mechanism that directly controls the relative position of the circular rim with respect to the hip joint so it can generate both wheeled and legged motions. Because the circular rim is a 2-dimensional object, the most straightforward method to achieve this goal is to add a second degree of freedom (DOF) that can adjust the relative position of the hip joint to the center of the circular rim along the radial direction. The motions of the two DOFs are also orthogonal to each other. In addition, the same set of actuation power can be efficiently used in both wheeled and legged modes.
Here I include a list of some of the most popular posts from my blog in the last year. I hope you enjoy them. Only one post was written in 2011. Many of my older posts are consistently popular, while some have huge spikes for a day or two when they are popular on some social site (Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Google+…). For posts that get huge spikes it isn’t uncommon for that pattern to repeat occasionally. I must have been doing something right in 2008 (based on how many of my popular post are from 2008). I’ll try to repeat that in 2012.
Anybots allow remote presence today. They can be rented for just $600 a month. You can purchase your own for just $15,000.
The newest version, just unveiled at a CES has a much bigger screen (which seems very wise to me).
This is another example of robots making it into real use. While I am sure few workplaces are ready for this jump today, 10 or 20 years from now a telepresence robot (that can do much more) is likely I think to be significantly used. Not only will functionality increase, prices will drop dramatically: as the wonderful combination so often happens with technology. There is a great deal of effort going into making commercial viable “personal” robots. I think these efforts will make significant inroads in the next 10-20 years.
My old office wouldn’t have been willing to pay $15,000 but one of our developers looked into creating his own (after he moved and was working remotely). He hasn’t quite gotten it done yet, but may at some point.
I posted on the Toyota iQ a few years ago. It has been successful in Europe for several years and is now available in the USA also as the Scion iQ. Sadly it only gets 37 miles per gallon (the same for city and highway, as it is optimized for city driving). The earlier post discussed the Toyota iQ diesel which achieved 59 MPG (now the UK Toyota sites quotes 64 MPG).
The UK gallon (the imperial gallon) is 1.2 USA gallons – why are we not using the metric system yet 37 MPG would be the highest yield, for a non-hybrid, in the USA, still it is disappointing when compared to the diesel Toyota iQ figures (64 imperial MPG equates to 53 USA mpg).
The base price for the Scion iQ is $15,595. The car is obviously built for city driving: the small size makes it great for finding parking and navigating small streets.
A fully electric Toyota iQ is being planned for 2012 that can be recharged by 4 hours with a normal electric plug. It can be 80% recharged in 15 minutes with a special adapter. It will have a range of about 65 miles.
The Dutch water line was a series of water based defenses conceived by Maurice of Nassau in the early 17th century, and completed by his half brother Frederick Henry. Combined with natural bodies of water. The line could be used to protect the economic heartland of the Dutch Republic behind difficult to cross water barriers, when in danger.
The Fort de Roovere was part of this defense. In 2010 the fort was renovated and the moat revived with a small extra bit of engineering: a sunken pedestrian “bridge.” Where once engineers used ingenuity to use water to keep people out, now engineers used wood to let people experience the moat while still reaching the fort.
Car companies, like aircraft manufacturers, are sharing engineering skills across borders to speed up and cut the costs of technological development. It happened with Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. The American aircraft maker outsourced some of the engineering to Japanese suppliers, admitting that it does not have all the necessary expertise. Likewise, Toyota has agreed to work on hybrid trucks with Ford, and electric vehicles with Tesla, the Silicon Valley sports-car maker. BMW is working on improving the current generation of lithium-ion batteries with France’s Peugeot Citroën. Nissan, as well as joining forces with Renault, has joint projects with Daimler.
There are many reasons to pursue such efforts (as well as drawbacks). My belief is companies would rather not take on the complications of such partnerships but the advantages overcome those desires. The high cost of research into these efforts is a big part of what pushes such collaboration. Also once a company has success they often can build up quite an advantage. The costs of trying to engineer a different solution (that doesn’t violate someone’s patents) often makes buying that technology or partnering attractive.
37 MPG would be the highest yield, for a non-hybrid, in the USA, still it is disappointing when compared to the diesel Toyota iQ figures (64 imperial MPG equates to 53 USA mpg).
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