fuel

Lighters Show Fuel Supply

Tired of trying to coax flame from an empty lighter? The end is in sight

Two cigarette lighters with clear plastic fuel reservoirs are new to the market. Each sells for about $5. At left is the Ritepoint Liter, made by the Ritepoint Co., St. Louis, Mo. It is available in four different colors. The fuel supply is transferred to the wick as needed by a finger-touch valve.

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Charging Ahead - The Tesla Electric Car Story

Why Dot-com billionaire Elon Musk is banking on American-made electric cars

If there’s a gene for entrepreneurship, Elon Musk has it. From his first project at age 12 creating and selling a video game called Blaster for $500, to his $1-billion-plus sale of PayPal to eBay in 2002, the 37-year-old South African is every bit the born mogul. These days he’s chairman of Solar City, the largest residential solar-power provider in California. He’s also the founder and CEO of Space X, a space-exploration company that made headlines last September when it launched the first privately developed rocket into orbit.

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Algae Makes Cheap, Green, Fuel

The production of biodiesel from algae could reduce greenhouse gas emissions, help to address future fuel shortages and create jobs in rural Australia

CSIRO Energy Transformed researcher Dr Tom Beer and his team discovered the humble organisms’ green credentials during a detailed life-cycle analysis of the benefits of algal biodiesel.

“Our research has shown that under ideal conditions it is possible to produce algal biodiesel at a lower cost and with less greenhouse gas emissions than fossil diesel,” Dr Beer said.

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Qantas A380 Grounded

UPDATE: ALL QANTAS A380S HAVE BEEN GROUNDED

Update: Qantas has now grounded it's A380 fleet of three planes. One in London, the other two in Sydney.

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Obama Puts the EPA to Work

The New York PopSci.com.au team reports on the first tasks of President Obama. The Sydney PopSci.com.au team tries to track down K-Rudd after the Today Tonight report on his travel expenditure (joke, we're too lazy to do that!)

Having spent his first week in office focusing on the global economic crisis and America’s many wars, Obama began his second week by tackling another looming problem: climate change. On Monday, President Obama signed two memos urging the EPA to begin moving on both emissions standards and fuel efficiency standards for cars.

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World's Smallest Fuel Cell Could Power Your Gadgets

Seriously, this photo isn't doctored at all!

Story from Gizmodo Australia

Chemical engineers working at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the States have developed a hydrogen fuel cell that measures only 3 millimeters across. That could mean longer lasting, eco-friendly power for your gadgets.

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Making the Most of **it

Toilet turns human waste to biofuel for sanitation-strapped cities

In José Saramago’s novel Blindness, when an epidemic of sightlessness sweeps the city, among the foulest signs of civic breakdown is its inability to handle its own excrement. Human waste piles where it lands, left to the elements and not modern plumbing. To newly minted industrial designer Virginia Gardiner, we might as well be blind to our own waste. Her plumbing-free toilet project, the Gardiner CH4, makes us personally responsible for our intimate product—and makes it useful.

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Who Killed the Electric Car? Not the Army

U.S. Army buys 4,000 electric vehicles—the biggest acquisition in the country

Soldiers may soon get greener rides on-base, after the U.S. Army announced the acquisition of 4,000 neighborhood electric vehicles.

The plug-and-chug vehicles come in both sedan and light truck models, and can charge their batteries at any three-pronged household outlet. Estimates put the savings over a six-year service lifetime at 11 million gallons of fuel, not to mention 115,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

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Burning the Tide

Alan Burns made a fortune in the oil business. But as oil wanes, he’s convinced that clean energy will be—must be—the next big thing. And so this inventor has poured his fortune into a challenge far greater than finding new oil deposits: extracting energy from the ocean

Alan Burns breaks the surface with a huge grin on his face, his baggy black wetsuit hanging off his body like walrus skin. It’s a scorching February afternoon, and we’re floating in the clear blue water of the Indian Ocean. To our left is the Australian resort island of Rottnest. To our right—just beyond Burns’s dazzling white yacht—is several thousand miles of open sea. And beneath us, the kelp forest where we had been diving moments before is swaying to the rhythm of the waves.

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The Stinkiest Fuel on Earth

As energy prices spike, even smelly fuel sources look attractive

Will Brinton, the founder of Woods End Laboratories, a bioenergy consultancy, predicts a future without landfills. Instead we’ll use table scraps and sewage to power our homes. Just dump the waste into a household digester, and bacteria will break it down and release the natural gas methane. Farms could sell their copious poop-based energy supplies back to the grid. But how much energy do animals yield? We ran the numbers and found that you might want to consider a pet elephant.

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Mission to the North Pole

In anticipation of opened oil wells beneath the melting arctic, an ownership-mapping mission makes its way across the seabed

Ever since Russia planted a flag under the North Pole last year, the issue of sovereign rights under an increasingly slushy arctic has tensed. In a race to claim ownership of some of the arctic seabed, a two-ship caravan of Canadian and U.S. scientists is sailing around the Arctic Ocean right now. Their mission, which will last from September 6th to October 1st, is to measure the seabed and the continental margins in an attempt to solidify our possible rights over the far north—an area that will become accessible to oil drilling and mining as the earth warms and arctic ice melts.

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There May Be Blood

A new map shows conflicting claims to Arctic territories—and its billions of gallons of oil

As the earth warms and our hunger for oil and other natural resources grows, the Arctic—once a peaceful repose for Santa—is already a crisscross of territorial claims that could get even more complicated in coming years according to a new map drawn up by researchers at Durham University, who say it is the only geographically accurate map of its kind.

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A Car That Drives You (to Save Gas)

Nissan's ECO-pedal provides tactile feedback whenever drivers accelerate in a fuel-wasting manner

Your car is going to drive you to work someday. Until then, car makers are experimenting with ideas that take control away from you in subtle, helpful ways – mostly to help increase fuel efficiency.

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Prehistoric Explosions Wiped Out Ocean Life-- And Created Petroleum

Much of Earth's oil reserves can be traced to a single volcanic eruption, scientists say

A new study by the University of Alberta suggests that a massive undersea volcano eruption 93 million years ago was the source of much of the world’s oil.

Researchers Steven Turgeon and Robert Creaser were alerted to the prehistoric blast when they found specific levels of osmium isotopes (indicators of volcanic activity in sea water) in black shale rocks off the coast of South America and in the mountains of central Italy.

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BMW Planning Electric Minis for California

The auto-manufacturer aims high with a limited run of Cali-bound e-Minis

As California returns to requiring automakers to sell zero-emissions vehicles, BMW is apparently aiming to get in first on the gold rush. Automotive News reports BMW will export an electric version of its Mini to California. The state's zero-emissions vehicle program will require nearly 60,000 plug-in cars to be sold in the state between 2012 and 2014.

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