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LCROSS Burns Half of Fuel, Avoids Disaster

The Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) instrument recently gave its mission controllers quite a fright, when it had to perform some emergency maneuvers, in order to maintain its correct course. The unplanned movements took up almost half of the craft's remaining fuel, and mission controllers...

26 August 2009
05:03 GMT

FUEL Is Delayed, Gets Record

Codemasters is playing good cop, bad cop with gamers. On the one hand, it has announced that its FUEL racing game would be released for the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 on June 5, which is later than initially announced. On the other hand, it has revealed that the title, even before release, has been recognized as ...

25 May 2009
04:43 GMT

Codemasters Presents First Gameplay Video of FUEL

Codemasters has released the first in game footage taken from its upcoming racing title called FUEL. If you want to watch it in its full High Definition glory, then get it here from Softpedia. It's no less than 63 MB of data for about one minute of content, but we're gaming enthusiasts and we'll take w...

11 February 2009
17:01 GMT

Obesity Accounts for Higher Gas Consumption Levels

The fact that 66 percent of all American citizens are considered to be overweight, and that 32 percent of those people are obese – with a body mass index of over 30 – did not go without repercussions on the automotive industry, and especially the cars most US residents drive. Over the past two to three de...

17 December 2008
06:53 GMT

Laser Could Soon Refuel Aircraft

All flying vehicles share a common problem – fuel. Their flight duration ability is severely limited by the amount of fuel they can carry, which forces designers to resort to annoying compromises in order to develop craft models with reduced consumption that have enough room for giant fuel reservoirs. But this ...

10 December 2008
04:39 GMT

Ionic Liquids as Rocket Fuel

Mark Gordon, a chemistry researcher from the Ames Laboratory in Iowa, has been striving to develop a more efficient rocket fuel type for more than a decade now. After many attempts and unsuccessful guesses, he now believes his current approach can be the lucky one. His attention is mainly focused on ionic liquids, th...

2 December 2008
17:41 GMT

Recycle Your Car

The recent Automotive News Green Car Conference held at The Diamond Center at Rock Financial Showplace in Novi, Michigan, stressed on the fast pace of gas cost and on the decrease of vehicles' carbon footprints. Major automotive issues related to lower emissions, fuel saving, enhanced safety or higher degrees of...

19 November 2008
07:51 GMT

Microbes as Biofuel Sources

A microbe that thrives inside the trunk of a tree could prove to be the future source of biofuels. It was discovered by mistake in an undisclosed location in the northern Patagonian woods. The team of researchers who came upon it and who tapped the potential of their finding have dubbed the resulting hydrocarbon com...

7 November 2008
02:43 GMT

Prepare Yourselves for Air Cars

Carbon dioxide emission gets a new bump from the vehicle industry that takes a major step into adding air among the alternative sources of fuel. Based on the idea of Guy Negre, founder and CEO of Luxembourg and France-based MDI SA company, who invented the car and had it developed in his French factories, the America...

4 November 2008
09:16 GMT

China as an Electrical Vehicle Market

It is a well-known fact that China is the largest and most populated country in the world. Statistics for this year show that more than 1.3 billion people (1,330,044,605 in mid-2008, to be more specific) can call China their home. With a rate of 3 cars to every hundred people, although pretty far behind the worldwide...

29 October 2008
07:40 GMT

Biggest US Fuel Cell Plant Built by Pepperidge

The Bloomfield, Connecticut-based Pepperidge bakery now relies on its recently-built fuel cell power plants for 70% of its electrical energy requirements. The excess heat generated in the process is also used for baking purposes, reducing the pollution generated by CO2 emissions in the process. The recent partne...

16 October 2008
04:57 GMT

New Technology Transmutes CO2 into Fuel

A company from California, Carbon Sciences, has managed to effectively turn CO2 emissions into chemical compounds that could be reused in fuels or other such useful industrial products. It seems that the recent successful technological discovery concerning the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is not...

13 October 2008
08:33 GMT

Chinese Develop Algae Biodiesel Company

Following the success registered by the opening of their first commercial scale algae biodiesel factory in the United States, PetroSun has recently made a deal with a Chinese firm in order to help it build a similar plant in their country.Shanghai Jun Ya Yan Technology Development Company has reached an agreement wit...

2 October 2008
05:13 GMT

Fuel Will Have 5000 Square Mile Map

Codemasters is showing off the map that will be featured in its upcoming Fuel, saying that it will cover more ground than any other racing game ever launched.David Brickely, one of the developers at Codemasters, told Videogamer that the 5000 square mile map which would be the bedrock of racing game Fuel had taken fou...

26 September 2008
03:24 GMT

Bill Gates Funds Algae Fuel Development

Sapphire Energy, a San Diego company set to come up with an algae fuel for cars, has recently received financial support from Bill Gates.  The company announced that it was on the verge of reaching $100 million in the next round of collecting. Prior to Gates, Arch Venture Partners, Wellcome Trust, and ...

18 September 2008
04:28 GMT

Some Vital Chemical Elements May Soon Become Extinct

Peak oil (lowering oil supplies), once ignored as a problem for a distant future, is bound to happen soon. Although this fact is far less known, copper, phosphorus and some rare chemical elements face the same impending doom. Actually, it's us who are facing it. You may not be aware of what the disappearanc...

13 September 2008
07:41 GMT

iGas iPhone App Uses GPS to Show the Cheapest Oil Stations Around

Oil Price Information Service (OPIS) has launched its own application and GPS-based service for iPhone owners. iGas helps drivers shop for the cheapest fuel by displaying the ten nearest gas stations with the prices in low-to-high order.Oil Price Information Service specializes in supplying retail gasoline and diesel...

27 August 2008
00:44 GMT

Codemasters Plans to Revolutionize the Racing Genre Again

Previous racing titles from Codemasters, such as Colin McRae: DiRT or Race Driver: GRID, were considered by many truly revolutionizing, but the publishers seem to want even more. Therefore, they have signed an agreement with Asobo Studios to publish Fuel, a game that apparently will also revolutionize the genre by b...

20 August 2008
05:17 GMT

Volkswagen Rolls Out the 'One Litre' Prototype

Well, it doesn't really look like the car of my dreams, but it does bear some resemblance to the flying cars from 'The Jetsons', and best of all, it can run more than 100 kilometers with only one liter of fuel. Too bad it doesn't fly, though. Volkswagen's One Litre is currently the most econo...

14 July 2008
10:31 GMT

More Food and Fuel, Less Forests

The Rights and Resource Initiative warns that by 2030 yet another massive chunk of the tropical rainforest will be gone in favor of agriculture as the demand for food and biofuels increases. The organization also points out that the governments of developing countries are rather reluctant in applying any reforms at a...

14 July 2008
09:46 GMT

Oil Peak and the Renewable Abiotic Petroleum

We are living in a civilization based on oil. It is an issue that makes us extremely vulnerable. That's because of the global "Peak Oil." The oil production follows a bell curve. Its peak is the moment when oil has been 50% depleted. After the peak, oil production decreases while its price starts to go up.Many s...

10 May 2008
06:48 GMT

Improved Technology to Achieve Hydrogen Fuel by Mimicking Photosynthesis

This is exactly what plants do during the photosynthesis: stealing the hydrogen of the water using light. Hydrogen would be a very clean fuel, and a recent Penn State research has made a step further towards this direction. "This is a proof-of-concept system that is very inefficient. But ultimately, catalytic systems...

18 February 2008
04:15 GMT

BipiColumbo Equipped with Star-Trek-like Engines

Well, not exactly... I mean they will not reach superluminal speeds or something, not to talk about the high acceleration capabilities or thrust. Astrium, the contractor of the construction of the BepiColumbo spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch in 2013 in a mission to planet Mercury, stated that the probe will r...

21 January 2008
04:53 GMT

How Do Trucks and Buses Work?

Horse pulled vehicles dominated roads until the development of viable inner combustion engines, around 1900. The first self-propelled truck was presented in Paris in 1769. This vapor vehicle was designed for carrying heavy weaponry and traveled with 4 km (2.5 mi) per hour. But the slow speed turned it rather into a c...

18 January 2008
07:08 GMT

How Do Rockets and Missiles Work?

Missiles were first launched 8 centuries ago by the Chinese, during their battles with the Mongols. The first Chinese missiles were propelled by gunpowder. When arrows and spears were stuck to it, the missile made a dreadful weapon. The Mongols were so impressed, that they made their own missiles employed against the...

17 January 2008
14:06 GMT

Motorola and Angstrom Bring the First Fuel-powered Mobile Phone

Angstrom Power Inc., a company based in Vancouver, Canada, together with Motorola, the US mobile manufacturer, have completed a six-months trial using a new technology that promises to reinvent the way mobile phones are powered. Angstrom developed a revolutionary mobile solution intended to replace the standard Lith...

16 January 2008
07:59 GMT

The New Air-Compressed Car: 200 Km (125 mi) with Just $ 2 (1.5 Euro)!

We are in the middle of a dreadful global warming that could melt all the Arctic glaciers by the middle of this century. Humankind is in a struggle to find all kind of technologies reducing the emissions of greenhouse effect gases. And one of the main emitters of these gases are cars. Sun-powered cars would emit no p...

7 January 2008
02:50 GMT

How to Fly Without Engines

When technology advances made humans to attempt flying during the 19th century, motorized flight proved impossible as the engines of those times were too heavy. The German engineer Otto Lilienthal tackled the issue differently: he first decided to perfect the art of gliding through air, achieving the required ascenda...

5 January 2008
05:48 GMT

Top 10 Unusual Ecological Sources of Fuel

We live in an oil dominated world: who gets it holds the power. That's why the western world is struggling to find new fuels that would free it from an oil-and-gas based economy, which renders them vulnerable to the blackmail of some oil-and-gas rich countries, like many in Middle East, Russia or Venezuela, wher...

12 December 2007
14:06 GMT

The Ultimate Boat: The Spider-like Proteus

It may look like a 100-foot-long (33 m) noisy water spider coming from a science fiction movie but Proteus, a so-called Wave Adaptive Modular Vessel, is real and the latest in the navigation. It was developed for many purposes: from military uses to biological research, ocean exploration and sea rescue. "The lightwei...

11 September 2007
03:51 GMT

The First Hydrogen-powered Bike!

We hope this is of a better quality than the Chinese T-shirts, but they also did it. Shanghai Pearl Hydrogen Power Source Technology Co revealed the first environmentally clean hydrogen fuel-cell bike at the 9th China International Exhibition on Gas Technology, Equipment and Applications which took place last week at...

11 September 2007
02:43 GMT

Why Does Drinking Bottled Water Represent an Environmental and Health Risk?

Plastic is everywhere around us, and nowadays we almost drink from nothing else than plastic containers. It's so fancy to carry with you a plastic bottle and drink your water / juice / soda little by little. But while US bottled water sales are going up by an annual 9.7 %, on a market estimated at approximately ...

16 August 2007
07:06 GMT

New World Speed Record for Cell-Powered Vehicle

There are many advocates for the cell-powered vehicles as an environmentally friendly alternative to the standard gas and other oil-based fuel burning vehicles. But others say that the market won't embrace this variant as these vehicles would be too slow. Now, a group of Japanese students has come to prove the c...

6 August 2007
05:36 GMT

You Can Buy a Flying Saucer Right Now: $90,000

Did you grow up with "E.T" and "Star Wars"? Now, the only thing that stays between you and your own flying saucer are $90,000. But unlike in the SF movie, the current flying saucer is just a car-sized hovercraft that won't take you to another planet: it will fly just up to 10 feet (3 m) high. The hovercraft is n...

6 August 2007
02:48 GMT

What Is The Link Between Termites, Cows and Cars?

Although not very obvious, there is a link between termites, cows and cars: bacteria. Some of these little critters are helping cows and termites digest cellulose, and some can produce electrical current and could be used in fuel cells that could power up future ecological cars.A group of researchers at Penn State Un...

28 July 2007
04:32 GMT

How Can a Spark Engine Operate Without the Spark?

Currently available internal combustion engines must achieve ignition in their cylinders to create combustion. Typically engines use either a spark ignition (SI) method or a compression ignition (CI) system.So far, no engine could switch from one ignition type to the other, which is what gave the current gasoline/di...

27 July 2007
10:03 GMT

Space Solar Power Fans: The Pentagon Wants Your Ideas!

The Pentagon opened up a web-based system for soliciting ideas on space-based solar power and it wants as many citizens as possible to participate to the quest for potential applications of the technology, according to one of the officials leading the effort.Although the idea isn't exactly new, it's the fi...

26 July 2007
06:33 GMT

How Does the World's Most Efficient Internal Combustion Engine Work?

Internal combustion engines are now powering the vast majority of automobiles, motorcycles, trucks, boats and are also used in various industrial applications. They are so widespread because they can provide high power to weight ratios together with excellent fuel energy-density.However, their efficiency is relative...

19 July 2007
10:53 GMT

Wind Energy Can Produce One Third of the Needs of a Big City

The race to find new alternative energy sources is fully underway and some cities and even countries are seriously involved in the issue of cleaning up the air we breathe. In order to avoid being caught by surprise by the upcoming fossil fuel shortage, some people want to switch to ecological ways of producing elect...

17 July 2007
11:26 GMT

The New Ford Hybrid Cars Will Be Plugged in Next to Household Appliances

Electric cars are an environmentally friendly alternative to old internal combustion engines that use fossil fuels and pollute the atmosphere. For now, they have their limitations regarding the autonomy, because electricity is very hard to store in conventional batteries and because recharge stations are still rare....

11 July 2007
05:49 GMT

Nanocrystals Made of Diamond-like Cubic Zirconia Could Produce More Efficient Fuel Cells

A new invention could make fuel cells much more reliable and less expensive, using very small crystal sizes to create cubic zirconia and greatly decreasing the temperature at which fuel cells can operate.Though fuel cells could one day replace the internal combustion engine, there are still some technological proble...

10 July 2007
11:22 GMT

Shape-shifting Robot Will Mimic the Swiftest Flying Birds

A new prototype robot will mimic the shape-shifting swifts, the most agile flying birds in the world and will infiltrate their flocks to spy on them with miniature cameras. There is hope that they will go unnoticed by real birds.Swifts (Apus apus) are some of the most efficient birds when it comes to active flying (...

9 July 2007
02:49 GMT

Boeing Presents the Ecological Dreamliner Passenger Jet

This weekend, Boeing, the largest global aircraft manufacturer by revenue, the second largest by deliveries and the second-largest defense contractor in the world, will unveil the latest creation, the 787-9 Dreamliner, an environmentally friendly aircraft it hopes will revolutionize the industry of air travel.It...

6 July 2007
11:25 GMT

How to Find Platinum in Road Dust

That's exactly what a scientist is doing: she digs for platinum. In fact, she's not even digging, she's just searching for the precious metal in the dust on the roads and she estimates many kilograms of platinum are being sprayed onto streets and roads each year.Platinum comes from an unexpected sourc...

6 July 2007
09:47 GMT

New Catalyst Brings Breakthrough in Biodiesel Production

Biodiesel is one of the green alternatives and US production of this fuel is at an all-time high, with new biodiesel plants being constructed in record number. However, there is one problem, the fact that this process is still costly, takes a lot of time and produces toxic byproducts.A new, revolutionary catalyst c...

3 July 2007
05:37 GMT

Enzymes Could Convert Chemicals to Energy

Many people are beginning to realize that global warming is not going to go away by itself, as engines that burn gasoline emit pollutants, such as carbon dioxide, that cause global warming. The US Department of Energy is very interested in a new proposition that involves using enzyme emulations to transform chemica...

2 July 2007
08:17 GMT

New "Quantum Alloy" Could Improve Hydrogen Storage for Fuel Cells

Hydrogen fuel-cell technology sounds almost too good to be true. You combine cheap and plentiful hydrogen and oxygen gas, the fuel cell generates electricity and the by-product is simply water. But there's something more involved.So far, the biggest downside of hydrogen-powered cars is the fact that it is very...

2 July 2007
03:38 GMT

Biotech Breakthrough Produces Ethanol from Waste Glycerin

Doing something about global warming and the rapid depletion of the world's non-renewable energy resources has recently become an important topic on some companies' agendas. The search for viable biofuels is well on its way and more and more car manufacturers are presenting concepts and prototypes of "gree...

27 June 2007
11:13 GMT

New Device Makes Biofuel Much More Efficiently

The search for viable biofuels is well on its way, as more and more car manufacturers are presenting concepts and prototypes of "green cars" that use alternative fuel sources. Making cellulosic ethanol seems to be a good idea. Making cars run on this fuel instead of the polluting fossilized fuel is an even better on...

26 June 2007
10:33 GMT

Cars That Run on Smuggled Alcohol, Feces and Carcasses

The race to find new alternative fuel sources is fully underway and some countries are seriously involved in the issue of cleaning up the air we breathe. Ethanol is a good example of such an application, diesel engines can very well run on used cooking oil and even newer sources are being taken into account, like c...

26 June 2007
02:56 GMT


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