November 29, 2006, 9:24 PM CT

Electric Chevrolet Silverado

The Los Angeles Auto Show is truly the biggest thing happening in the Automotive Arena but there are a few more venues which we need to focus on owing to their importance to the automotive industry. Green revolution is the need of the hour thus trucks like the one introduced by UQM technologies at the Electric drive transport association Conference deserve thorough recognition.

The truck I am talking about was a Chevrolet Silverado, which ran on Electricity unlike its conventional versions. This truck was outfitted with a 160 hp UQM motor producing 480 lb-ft of torque. It was powered by a Lithium-ion battery pack. Valence Technology supplied this battery pack, which has a peak efficiency of 96 percent.

The US Airforce funded this project unveiled by the UQM technologies at the ETDA. This conference is running from the 28th to 30th of November and the panel gathered out there is discussing on incorporating such eco-friendly technology into Heavy and Medium Duty Markets , Mass transit and Off-Road vehicles.

Until date, the focus of equipping such technologies has been limited to cars thus this conference adds a much needed dimension/impetus to the Automotive World. It is equally important to equip other forms of transport with such futuristic equipment owing to the collective harm all prevalent forms of transport are causing to the environment.........

Posted by: Jim      Permalink         Source

November 28, 2006, 8:54 PM CT

Venturi Eclectic Car

This interesting article is worth discussion:

I was once called the "Gay Inspector Gadget" (don't ask). You see I have this belief that the perfect car for me will be laden with gadgets, keep me connected to the world and have a neutral impact on the environment. Aside from the gadgets thing, I don't see anything else I have in common with Inspector Gadget. I mean I don't have a little blond girl shadowing me with a brainy dog, so the reference has always eluded me.

Until a friend of mine emailed me a link to a the Venturi Eclectic with the subject heading "Here's your car Inspector!". You're real funny Rui, real funny. I still don't see the reference but the vehicle intrigues me.

The Eclectic is billed as the world's first mass produced energy autonomous vehicle. It's designed for daily driving in urban areas and is powered by electricity via 3 sources; plug-in, solar and wait for it. wind. The roof is equipped with the advance photovoltaic cells to quickly harness the power of the sun keeping you juiced and ready to go. To support that system is a wind turbine that extends up and out capturing the power of wind should there be a gust and both are augmented with an advance plug-in system for those overnight recharges.........

Posted by: Jim      Permalink         Source

November 28, 2006, 5:05 AM CT

Smarter inventory control of spare parts

Smarter storage of spare parts is now possible thanks to a new inventory model, based on extensive cooperation between different warehouses. This method ensures the integration of inventory control for all parts in stock at several warehouses. This way both the number of parts in stock and the waiting time for spare parts can be reduced, with theoretical savings of up to 50%. This is possible thanks to fundamental mathematical models developed by PhD candidate Bram Kranenburg MSc. With his research Kranenburg hopes to obtain a doctorate from the Technical University Eindhoven (TU/e) on Thursday 23 November.

Big Business

The storage of spare parts is big business in the Netherlands, involving billions of euros every year. Every branch of industry or service that works with complex machinery needs spare parts. Just think of electronics, hospitals, industrial machinery, and the car industry. One small, defective part can put a complete machine out of operation for quite some time. That is why there have always been strict requirements for stocking and distributing spare parts.

Pooling storage facilities

A great deal of research has already been done to optimize the entire logistic process. Still, inventory control is commonly done separately for each warehouse. ASML approached the TU/e to find out if there was not a smarter way to do this and this question became a central theme in Kranenburgs PhD research. Kranenburg: "The crux of my model is the pooling of different warehouses. If a local warehouse does not have a certain part in stock, it can contact another local warehouse instead of the central warehouse. If you want to do this on a structural basis, there is much to be won by planning your inventory control around this. But if you want to do this right, it becomes very complex mathematically to work this all out. That is the problem I worked on in my PhD research and ASML has been able to implement my model and algorithms right away.........

Posted by: Jim      Permalink         Source

November 28, 2006, 4:32 AM CT

Brains Respond Better To Name Brands

Your brain may be determining what car you buy before you've even taken a test drive. A new study gauging the brain's response to product branding has found that strong brands elicit strong activity in our brains. The findings were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

"This is the first functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) test examining the power of brands," said Christine Born, M.D., radiologist at University Hospital, Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany. "We found that strong brands activate certain areas of the brain independent of product categories".

"Brain branding" is a novel, interdisciplinary approach to improve the understanding of how the mind perceives and processes brands. Using modern imaging methods, researchers are now able to go beyond marketing surveys and gather information on how the brain responds to a particular brand at the most basic level.

"Brain imaging technologies may complement methods normally used in the developing area of neuroeconomics," Dr. Born said.

Dr. Born and colleagues used fMRI to study 20 adult men and women. The volunteers were all right-handed, had a mean age of 28 years and possessed a high level of education.

While in the fMRI scanners, the volunteers were presented with a series of three-second visual stimuli containing the logos of strong (well-known) and weak (lesser-known) brands of car manufacturers and insurance companies. A brief question was included with each stimulus to evaluate perception of the brand. The volunteers pressed a button to respond using a four-point scale ranging from "disagree" to "agree strongly." During the sequence, the fMRI acquired images of the brain, depicting areas that activated in response to the different stimuli. In addition to the questions asked during the scanning, the volunteers were given questionnaires prior and subsequent to fMRI.........

Posted by: Jim      Permalink         Source

November 14, 2006, 5:03 AM CT

Ice-breaker Polarstern to explore uncharted seafloor

Huge areas of sea floor (around 3,250 km²) have been freed up by the collapse 4 years ago of the Larsen B platform along the Antarctic Peninsula - leaving a blank spot on Antarctic maps. Polarstern, the research flagship of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, will shortly conduct there the first major biological research, studying living communities, from microbes to whales, including bottom fish and squids.

THE ITINERARY

DEPARTURE - NOVEMBER 23, 2006: CAPE TOWN.

The Polarstern leaves Cape Town, South Africa, heading towards the Weddell Sea (1).

DECEMBER 4/5 TO DECEMBER 14, 2006: NEUMAYER STATION.

The Polarstern stops in the Atka Bay in order to supply the German Neumayer Research Station (2).

DECEMBER 14 TO JANUARY 26, 2006: ANTARCTIC PENINSULA.

The first investigations, on living resources (CCAMLR), take place on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, around the South Shetland Islands (3). The subsequent ecological work (CAML) is located around the Larsen A/B area. If the sea ice is not penetrable, an alternative area around Joinville Island will be used instead (4).

ARRIVAL - JANUARY 30, 2007: PUNTA ARENAS.

The Polarstern will end its expedition in Punta Arenas, Chile on January 30, 2007 (5).........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source

November 7, 2006, 7:50 PM CT

One Millisecond After Head Hits Car Windshield

Research by a Sandia National Laboratories engineer and a University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center neurologist shows that brain injury may occur within one millisecond after a human head is thrust into a windshield as a result of a car accident.

This happens prior to any overall motion of the head following impact with the windshield and is a new concept to consider for doctors interested in traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Paul Taylor of Sandia's Multiscale Computational Materials Methods Department and Corey Ford, neurologist at UNM's Department of Neurology and MIND Imaging Center, made the discovery after modeling early-time wave interactions in the human head following impact with a windshield, one scenario leading to the onset of TBI.

Sandia is a National Nuclear Security Administration laboratory.

TBI is associated with loss of functional capability of the brain to perform cognitive and memory tasks, process information, and perform a variety of motor and coordination functions. More than five million people in the U.S. live with disabilities associated with TBI.

"In the past not a lot of attention was paid to modeling early-time events during TBI," Taylor says. "People would - for example - be in a car accident where they hit their head on a windshield, feel rattled, go to an emergency room, and then be released. We were interested in why people with head injuries of similar severity often have very different outcomes in memory function or returning to work".........

Posted by: Sean      Permalink         Source

November 6, 2006, 7:31 PM CT

Silent Eco-friendly Plane

MIT and Cambridge University scientists will unveil the conceptual design for a silent, environmentally friendly passenger plane at a press conference Monday, Nov. 6, at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London.

"Public concern about noise is a major constraint on expansion of aircraft operations. The 'silent aircraft' can help address this concern and thus aid in meeting the increasing passenger demand for air transport," said Edward M. Greitzer, the H.N. Slater Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT.

Greitzer and Professor Ann P. Dowling of Cambridge University are the lead principal researchers on the Silent Aircraft Initiative. This collaboration of 40 scientists from MIT and Cambridge, plus a number of others from more than 30 companies, was launched three years ago "to develop a conceptual design for an aircraft whose noise was almost imperceptible outside the perimeter of an airfield in an urban environment".

While originally conceived to make a huge reduction in airplane noise, the team's ultimate design also has the potential to be more fuel-efficient. In a typical flight, the proposed plane, which is designed to carry 215 passengers, is predicted to achieve 124 passenger-miles per gallon, almost 25 percent more than current aircraft, as per Greitzer. (For a down-to-earth comparison, the Toyota Prius hybrid car carrying two passengers achieves 120 passenger-miles per gallon.).........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

November 6, 2006, 4:39 AM CT

School Bus Safety Decreasing

Each year in the United States, 23.5 million children travel 4.3 billion miles on school buses. A study out of the Center for Injury Research and Policy (CIRP) in the Columbus Children's Research Institute at Columbus Children's Hospital is the first to use a national sample to describe nonfatal school bus-related injuries to children and teenagers treated in emergency rooms across the country.

As per the study, reported in the recent issue of Pediatrics, from 2001 to 2003 there were an estimated 51,100 school bus-related injuries that resulted in therapy in an U.S. emergency room. That is about 17,000 injuries annually.

"The findings from this study indicate that motor vehicle crashes are the leading mechanism of nonfatal school bus-related injury for children in the U.S.," said CIRP Director Gary Smith, MD, DrPH, one of the study's authors and a faculty member of The Ohio State University College of Medicine. "In addition, this study identified several other important mechanisms of school bus-related injury. Further research is needed to determine the relative contributions of structural and operational components of the school bus, supervision, and rider behavior to the occurrence of these injuries and the effectiveness of occupant restraint systems and other strategies to prevent these types of injuries".........

Posted by: Tom      Permalink         Source

October 22, 2006, 9:44 PM CT

EXT Still The Stupid Of Trucks

The Detroit News reports: EXT still the Cadillac of trucks. We're well aware how dim we are, but isn't calling an item "The Cadillac of (whatever)" supposed to mean it's the best at what it is meant for? As in, "The new MacBook is the Cadillac of laptops" or "Google is the Cadillac of search engines" or "Alison Krauss is so smokin' hot we'd fake our own death, move to Tennessee, and change our name to be with her."

Anyway, are aren't trucks meant to carry stuff? You could say it's the most luxurious pick-up truck made. And you can't say "By saying Cadillac we meant luxurious" because you can't equate Cadillac with luxury anymore since it's been trumped by a number of.........

Posted by: Jim      Permalink         Source

October 22, 2006, 9:38 PM CT

Hitting the Road

I'm on the road this week, stopping in Phoenix for a media preview of our new fullsize pickups, the Chevy Silverado and the GMC Sierra. Obviously, these are hugely important vehicles in our product portfolio, and we believe they are the most refined, powerful, capable and efficient pickups on the market. We know exactly what it takes to win in this segment, and we intend to deliver.

But it's not going to stop there.

Our new cars and trucks continue to be the centerpiece of GM's turnaround plan, a turnaround that is really taking hold. Our newest models continue to sell nicely, including the new fullsize SUVs; we now have more than a 70 percent share of that segment. The large utility segment actually grew 6 percent in September, largely driven by sales of our Chevy Tahoe and Suburban and GMC Yukon and Yukon XL.

Other September highlights include a 45-percent growth spurt at Saab, driven by sales of the 9-3 and the 9-7X, and Cadillac sales that climbed by 22 percent. Hummer H3 sales were up 19 percent, helping the brand to enjoy a 10 percent retail hike versus a year ago.

And we will continue to be aggressive with our product assault, with frequent and wide-ranging launches. We'll be in the traditional segments..... we'll be in emerging segments..... high-volume, niche-market..... you name it - we'll be there.........

Posted by: Jim      Permalink         Source