Transportation

Faster and Greener Flying

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Not only is the proposed A2 aircraft fast (really fast! London to Sydney in 5 hours), it would be one of the greenest in the sky!
Perhaps this plane will even land at the green airports.

Because it is fuelled by liquid hydrogen, the aircraft only produces water vapour and nitrous oxide as exhaust and has a negligible carbon footprint.

Despite its length, the aircraft will also be able to land on current international airport runways.

Mr Bond, managing director of Reaction Engines Ltd, said that from a standing start and with the requisite political will, the plane could be flying commercially within 15 years.

Driving ZENN

- Adam Clare

Here’s a fun video on the ZENN car by Rick Mercer of the CBC.

Thanks Shea!

More on Green Flying

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

Singapore is going green too, the FAA is trying to green American planes, and don’t forget that you can also travel green!

To add to this list of good news, Christchurch airport is going carbon-neutral, which is really good news!

At a meeting in Christchurch the company received its carbon zero certificate from Landcare Research which chief executive Rene Bakx says comes after a detailed measurement and analysis process.

“We are the gateway for the best of the South Island, and, with an agreed focus on tourism and sustainability, the decision to work towards this goal was a straightforward one for the company to take,” he says.

He says the status has been achieved by the reduction and offsetting of greenhouse emissions by the airport company operations. Emissions from planes are not included in the calculations.

Be Lazy When Waiting for the Bus

- Adam Clare

Waiting for a bus that never seems to come can be one of life’s more aggravating moments. No need to sit around getting all frustrated with underfunded services though. Thanks to the power of mathematics we now know that you should justbe lazy and sit and wait for the bus.

Scott Kominers, a mathematician at Harvard University, and his colleagues derived a formula for the optimal time that you should wait for a tardy bus at each stop en route before giving up and walking on. “Many mathematicians probably ponder this on their way to work, but never get round to working it out,” he says.

The team found that the solution was surprisingly simple. When both options seem reasonably attractive, the formula advises you to choose the “lazy” option: wait at the first stop, no matter how frustrating (www.arxiv.org/abs/0801.0297).

A Future Never Seen

- Cam Proctor 1 Comment

Carectomy.com, who tries to remove people from their cars, has posted a great video from 1958 Disney animation studio. As you can imagine, Disney’s futuristic vision for the car is quite dreamy, far fetched and would just be inconceivable considering todays energy situation. Heated highways, tubes and vast sprawl are all promoted in this movie and I for one would like to take a moment and celebrate that not all things turned out the way Disney predicted.

Scroll To Top