Ferrari Plans to Build Hybrid Sports Car

Ferrari is planning on building a hybrid race car that will compete with its gas-guzzling cars. Other car manufactures are building (or going to build) hybrid cars, but the reason I post that Ferrari is shifting gears is because in my impression this is significant. When expensive race cars go green it truly means that the future could use less oil.

In a recent interview with German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo said that they are planning to reduce CO2 levels by 40% before 2012. They will make it possible thanks to a new hybrid technology and Ferrari might build cars powered by turbocharged V6 engines which are smaller and more fuel-efficient.

“We are currently working on the development of a Ferrari that will use alternative energy sources and which will be based on what we are doing at the moment in Formula 1″, he said. KERS or Kinetic Energy Recycling System is a technique based on the brake-energy-regeneration principle and it consists of a super-efficient CVT gearbox which uses a spinning flywheel to harness energy when the car brakes. This energy will be perfect to increase the acceleration needed when overtaking or cornering.

Wave Powered Boat Succeeds

We first looked at the wave-powered boat back in March, before Kenichi Horie set sail (or is that set wave?). Now he has become the first person to cross the Pacific in a wave-powered boat.

Weak waves and opposing ocean currents delayed his arrival, which was originally set for late May.

“When waves were weak, the boat slowed down. That’s the problem to be solved,” the adventurer told reporters Saturday from aboard his catamaran Suntory Mermaid II off the Kii Peninsula in western Japan.

The 9.5 metre (31-foot) boat is equipped with two special fins at the front which can move like a dolphin’s tail each time the vessel rises or falls with the rhythm of the waves.

Horie, who will turn 70 in September, reached his destination in the channel between the main Japanese islands of Honshu and Shikoku just before midnight (1500 GMT Friday) after covering some 7,000 kilometres (3,780 nautical miles) from Hawaii without a port call.

“The feeling is yet to sink in,” Horie added, according to the Jiji and Kyodo news agencies. “I want to go home as soon as possible and eat home-cooked meals.”

Horie first made world headlines in 1962 when, at the age of 23, he became the first person to sail solo across the Pacific.

Cold Sores No Mores

Luckily I don’t suffer from cold sores, but a lot of people do. Based on some new research a cure for cold sores could be just around the corner. Researchers have found some key information about how cold sores go away and then come back.

By examining the interplay of various molecular substances the virus produces, researchers at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., have found how it hides and then emerges periodically.

One such substance is called latency associated transcript RNA, which the study reveals blocks the formation of proteins that “turn” on the virus and make it replicate. It does this by splitting into strands of microRNAs, which essentially keep the virus in check.

However, in stressful situations, the virus makes more messenger RNA than the microRNAs can handle and eventually viral replication occurs.
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“In principle, you could activate and then kill all of the virus in a patient,” said Cullen. “This would completely cure a person, and you would never get another cold sore.

B.C. Carbon Tax Begins

Burning gas is a sure way to destroy the environement, and the province of British Columbia is joining other parts of the world by taxing this bad practice. B.C. has started to tax gasoline purchases at the pump – the first Canadian province to do so.

The carbon tax, introduced in the Feb. 19 budget, taxes carbon-based fuels — including gasoline, diesel, natural gas and home heating fuel — at a rate of $10 per tonne of greenhouse gases generated. The carbon tax will rise $5 a tonne for the next four years until it hits $30 per tonne in 2012.

Grin to Win

If you want to meet happy, fun people online all you have to do is smile. Putting a picture of yourself smiling on a social networking site (Facebook, Bebo, etc.) will attract people who are fun!

Happy people cluster together, the research suggests. And the opposite also seems to be true — so if you are miserable, you are more likely to have miserable friends.

The effect holds in both the real and virtual worlds. People who put smiling photos on their profiles for social networking sites such as Facebook tend to link to one another. Frowners do likewise.

But it’s not just direct contact that counts. The link is significant to three degrees of separation — that is, your own emotional state is connected to that of your friends’ friends’ friends.

“Your happiness depends on the happiness of individuals beyond your own social horizon,” says sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University in Cambridge, who carried out the study. “You can understand happiness by studying individuals, but that only gets you so far. There’s more to be learned by studying the group.”