Lifeboat Foundation

It was a freezing cold morning just before Christmas 1980 when cattle rancher, Wally Nelson, came across the frozen form of a woman in his front yard.

Wally knew who the woman was. It was his friend, 19-year-old Jean Hilliard who had been dating his best friend at the time. The night was 22 below zero, and the teenager had fallen while looking for shelter after a car accident.

Continue reading “Woman Found Frozen Solid Makes Incredible Full Recovery” »

Elon Musk has tweeted that Tesla will make a quiet electric leaf blower.

In 2017, the California Air Resources Board, said that by 2020, the biggest single ozone polluter in California is going to be all this gardening equipment.

California has 16 million gas-powered garden machines from leaf blowers to mowers.

Continue reading “Telsa Will Make an Electric Leafblower As Garden Equipment is a Big Pollution Source” »

The city’s new green building legislation will result in the equivalent of taking more than one million cars off the road by 2030.

Is our take on the next-generation tandem-duct platform. Flying up to 10 feet off the ground at 45 miles per hour, the Aero-X is a surface-effect craft that rides like a motorcycle — an off road vehicle that gets you off the ground.

The Aero-X can be adapted for a variety of uses: surveying, search and rescue, border patrol, disaster relief, agricultural, ranching, rural transportation and…

Because it responds to your movements just as a motorcycle would, the Aero-X is intuitive to fly. And as it is built with very few moving parts, its cost of ownership is a fraction of even the most basic airplane or helicopter.

Imagine that instead of adding a motor to a bicycle, parts of the bicycle are designed to function as the motor.

In this case the wheel rim contains the motor magnets and the frame houses the inductive coils. The inductive coils use energy from the battery (hidden in the frame downtube) to repel the magnets on the rim to make the wheel spin.

Lightweight calls this “Maglev Transrapid technology” and they claim that this Velocité eBike can go up to 100 kph (62 mph) with its 500 watts of power! They are currently limiting it to 45 kph (28 mph) to fall with in the limits of a speed pedelec.

Continue reading “Lightweight Velocité‘Maglev’ Hidden Motor Electric Bike” »

Circa 2017

Researchers are looking at advanced materials for roads and pavements that could generate electricity from passing traffic.

Engineers from Lancaster University are working on smart materials such as ‘piezolectric’ ceramics that when embedded in road surfaces would be able to harvest and convert vehicle vibration into electrical energy.

The research project, led by Professor Mohamed Saafi, will design and optimise energy recovery of around one to two Megawatts per kilometre under ‘normal’ traffic volumes—which is around 2,000 to 3,000 cars an hour.

Continue reading “Developing roads that can generate power from passing traffic” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8NAHqBXoCZs

The method behind the madness is actually quite sound.

Circa 2015

I’m sure many of you have experienced that sinking feeling when you’re running out to your car to drive to work only to discover a flat tire. The cause: usually a nail your drove over the night before. It’s 2015, tires shouldn’t suffer punctures anymore, right? Well, they may not for much longer if this prototype tire from Japan makes it to mass production.

The tire is called Coreseal and it has been developed by Japanese company Sumitomo Rubber Industries Ltd. It looks like any other tire fitted on vehicles today, but it has one big advantage. If you drive over a nail and cause a puncture, the tire won’t deflate. In fact, it will repair itself and you’ll likely never know it happened.

Continue reading “Prototype tire repairs itself instantly when a puncture occurs” »

While studying the chemical reactions that occur in the flow of gases around a vehicle moving at hypersonic speeds, researchers at the University of Illinois used a less-is-more method to gain greater understanding of the role of chemical reactions in modifying unsteady flows that occur in the hypersonic flow around a double-wedge shape.

“We reduced the pressure by a factor of eight, which is something experimentalists couldn’t do,” said Deborah Levin, researcher in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “In an actual chamber, they tried to reduce the pressure but couldn’t reduce it that much because the apparatuses are designed to operate within a certain region. They couldn’t operate it if the pressure was too low. When we reduced the pressure in the simulation, we found that the instabilities in the flow calmed down. We still had a lot of the kind of vortical structure—separation bubbles and swirls—they were still there. But the data were more tractable, more understandable in terms of their time variation.”

Continue reading “Controlling instabilities gives closer look at chemistry from hypersonic vehicles” »