The fourth-to-last Space Shuttle launch has been scheduled by NASA for April 5. Discovery will be on a 13 day mission to the space station, where it will bring various supplies and swap out some station hardware. Discovery will be using the Leonardo multi-purpose logistics module to carry those supplies.
The launch is planned for 06:21 EDT (10:21 GMT), so the sky will still be relatively dark but getting lighter (sunrise is a little after 07:00). It should be very pretty!
Given that they make up 40 of the 50 cars in the fields, the vehicles in the prototype category ruled the road course here Houston for much of yesterday. But as day one rolled on, the urban concept cars—which look a little less like futuristic bobsleds on wheels and little more like what you’d recognize as a car—cruised around the track.
The car above is Concept Zero, by the crew from the Polytechnic Institute of NYU. (They’d be DISCOVER’s home team, as we’re based in New York.) Team members Jonathan Sorocki and Michael Choi say that besides the challenge of trying to build their own car within the span of just months, they ran into another problem: They weren’t allowed to weld on campus.
As it turned out, that minus became a plus. With some funding from Time Warner and Nordan Composites, Sorocki and Choi’s team built Concept Zero from carbon fiber. With only one weld in the car, it weighs in at a slim 227 pounds, Sorocki says, and much of that weight comes from the swank rims they procured from Vespa Soho in Manhattan. Thus, despite the fact that Concept Zero isn’t much smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle, it putters around the track powered by a 1.1 horsepower engine.
NYU made a full run with 144 MPG yesterday. However, shortly thereafter the axle shifted and the disc brake started rubbing against other parts. After a night of little sleep and spare part runs to Home Depot, the car is back together and the crew is shooting for 200 MPG today. And if they don’t win any mileage awards, the team members have their other bases covered: NYU is the most active team lobbying for the people’s choice award. That piece of paper you see on the window lists texting instructions for voting.
At the other end of the funding spectrum lies Durand High, the ethanol-powered Wisconsinites we covered yesterday. After the team repaired the bent bike wheels that car #50 suffered in a morning accident, the vehicle—which contains less than $1,000 of materials and runs on a 5.5 HP Honda engine donated to the school eight years ago—cruised to a 345 MPG run yesterday. Now coach Bill Rieger says the team plans to let the driver give a little more fuel in bursts and do more coasting, to see if strategy can get them up to 500 MPG.
Durand’s 5.5 HP is more than most teams brought to the Shell Eco-marathon, so it’s worth a shot. “We got overkill,” Rieger says. “We’re going to dig in today.”
Thanks to artist Samantha Brooke for contributing this week's stunning watercolor to The Science of Kissing Gallery featuring affectionate behavior among giraffes. Submit your original photograph or artwork for consideration by emailing me at srkirshenbaum@yahoo.com.
NASA's $500 million launcher missing just one thing: the rocket it was made for, Washington Post
"Anyone need a $500 million, 355-foot steel tower for launching rockets into space? There's one available at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Brand new, never been used. The mobile launcher has been built for a rocket called the Ares 1. The problem is, there is not yet any such thing as an Ares 1 rocket -- and if the Obama administration has its way, there never will be."
"STS-130 video highlights as compiled by the SE&I imagery team here at JSC from all of the ground, air, ET and SRB assets."
 ExecutiveGov | Exaflood: Politicians Prop Up Dinosaurs, Ignore Cutting Edge Technology NewsBlaze (press release) Besides the quest for increasing download/upload velocity, the Obama Administration also wants to upgrade online cybersecurity while assisting the FBI to ... Verizon Blasts 'Outdated' FCC Broadband PlanNewsFactor Network |
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Events like Earth Hour do not need corporate partners. For what purpose? The whole point of the event is to turn lights off to get world-wide notice from those who make decisions on how to fight climate change and save the environment. Yet the main sponsor of Earth Hour, Wells Fargo Bank, as you can see from Earth Hour’s website where they were prominently advertised, did not even participate in Earth Hour. At least not in my city. (If there are reports out there anywhere that Wells Fargo participated in the event it was sponsoring, I’d like to see them.) With corporate sponsors like this, who needs deniers:
[Show as slideshow]
The whole point of Earth Hour was to turn off lights to generate awareness about global warming and how we waste energy, but its corporate sponsor couldn’t manage to do that. These photos were taken in central Minnesota at two Wells Fargo locations during Earth Hour. Yeah — the corporate sponsor of Earth Hour couldn’t even manage to shut down for one single hour.
Not everyone was enamored of the idea of turning off light bulbs only to Twitter like mad about the darkness. If you used your phone to Twitter about Earth Hour, you still probably charged up its battery using electricity, often from coal plants, which are killing our environment. Every little thing we do leaves a carbon footprint, which is a fact that Earth Hour tends to de-stress. And by the way, let’s turn off Facebook and Twitter next year for an hour. And let’s also ask people to turn their heat off for an hour and not drive around. Next year, let’s shut down a coal plant during Earth Hour. That’ll get the media’s attention, and it would be a meaningful Earth Hour, for a change.
Someone not so turned on by turning off the lights:
One of many was Ben Ross. He wrote:
“The past decade has ushered an unprecedented interest in environmentalism. We now have hybrid cars, solar power heating, even eco-friendly picture frames. Earth Hour aims to “symbolize” that “each of us can make a positive impact,” and symbolize is exactly what it does. It is symbolic of the bumper-sticker environmentalism which has swept over the world, blinds us from the true causes of environmental degradation, and makes a farce out of the entire movement.”
I’m not totally sure of his sentiments about global warming, but I know that we need more than yearly feel-good stunts to “raise awareness”.
Two of my comments there were these:
“I didn’t boycott Earth Hour, but I did take photos of the two local Wells Fargo banks in my city and they were both ablaze with lights and open for business. Why is that interesting? Because Wells Fargo was an official partner/corporate sponsor of Earth Hour. And somehow they did it with all their lights on when the whole point of [...]
Dropbox: Now one more reason to want a Nexus One ZDNet (blog) Upload files and sync them to your Dropbox – Take a photo, shoot a video, or upload some audio from your Android phone and email its public link to a friend ... |
I like to ask this question every so often because I'm always looking for new sources. Lately, I've been geeking out a lot on Amazon.com's parts site. People generally don't think of going to a book site for car stuff - and the parts department is very much buried on the the Amazon homepage.
Some consider Kate Bingaman-Burt's neatly transcribed list of the 500 worst passwords art, but I just plain consider it confusing. I mean, who is this Bubba and why does he rank higher than boobs? [Kate Bingaman-Burt via Laughing Squid] More »
Labeling on the front of food packages is generally meant to be helpful, but does the intrinsic conflict of interest between the desire to sell more products and wanting to inform the public cause problems for consumers?
The Upside
A lot of foods now come with nutrition fact l
There. Now, your desire to see every object in the world into periodic tables has been granted: A periodic table of all the nerdgasmic, brilliant, and absurd periodic tables in the internets. [Keaggy - Thanks Mike!] More »
DESPITE A COVER that showed an iPhone filled with apps, JOHN ARQUILLA'S cover story for Foreign Policy, "The New Rules of War", is more about the use of infantry and drones in FUTURE WARS and less of a dependence on More »
March often brings strandings of Man-of-War jellyfish on Florida’s Atlantic coast beaches. Visitor Ann McConnell sent in these photos from Miami Beach, taken on March 8, 2010.
She noted that she saw about 30 of these creatures on the beach. In late February several people sent photos of Purple Sea Snails on Fort Lauderdale Beach. The [...]
Making light-transmitting concrete sounds like an impossible and ridiculous task, but it turns out that it's actually a simple project with mesmerizingly beautiful results. You'll just need to grab some craft clay, concrete mix, and fiber optic wires. More »
Earlier we heard that the iPad OS 3.2 was made available to developers, but now we're hearing about the fine print in the licensing agreement of the OS: More »
They may not have laser eyes or butler skills, but junkbots have a charm all their own. That's why I'm so glad someone's finally gotten around to paying tribute to them in this big ol' junktastic gallery. [Dark Roasted Blend] More »
Sure, we associate the iPod and the iPhone with Steve Jobs, but in reality there were of course many people working on these devices' creation. Tony Fadell was one of those people and he played a significant role in bringing the idea of a hard-drive-based digital music player to the market. Now he leaves Apple, the company with whom he managed to realize his vision with these parting words: More »
Want to help save some lions in Kenya? Well, help these guys make some open source lion-tracking collars, complete with GPS and GSM on board. More »
