Tag Archives: green energy

Premiere of Urbee documentary in Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada) on Aug. 28, 2012 at 7:15 pm (CDT)

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The big news is that a documentary about the Urbee car (which took filmmaker, Doug Howe, 2.5 years to make)  is being premiered tonight in Winnipeg.

I featured the Urbee in a couple of Sept. 28, 2011 postings titled, Manitoba’s Urbee, which described it and mentioned a 3-D printing process used for the car panels, and *an Interview with the Urbee car’s Jim Kor where  I asked if nanotechnology enabled some of the refinements such as the 3-D printing process (it did), and more.

Sadly, I’m not getting to Winnipeg tonight but if you can, here’s more information about the premiere,

The public premiere of the URBEE DOCUMENTARY.  This is the story of the building of the urban vehicle of the future.  URBEE is the world’s greenest passenger car.  And it’s being built right here in Winnipeg!

WHEN is this happening?

Tuesday August 28th doors open at 6:00 PM [rush seating]

6:30 Music by Bucky Driedger/Matt Schellenberg of the Liptonians

7:15 URBEE the documentary premiere

WHERE is it?

The Park Theatre 698 Osborne Street

HOW did they do it?

URBEE is designed and constructed by an elite group of Winnipeg engineers, industrial designers and environmental enthusiasts led by Jim Kor

WHY do we need URBEE?

It’s estimated there are 1 billion cars currently on the road across our planet. By 2050 there will be 2.5 billion.  The rampant consumption of fossil fuels by these automobiles is an unsustainable drain on the world’s energy.  And the resultant dumping of carbon into the atmosphere comes at a grave cost to the environment.  Built right here in Manitoba, URBEE is the prototype for a 21st century approach to automotive design that redefines energy efficiency and minimizes impact on the environment.

Here’s an image of the Urbee on the road at Bird’s Hill Park near Winnipeg,

 

And here’s another angle on the Urbee,

You can see why the car has attracted so much interest here and internationally. Here’s news about the Urbee now that it’s back from Europe (from the Jan. 2012 WOW backgrounder document),

Urbee has just returned from Europe, and is now safely back in our shop on Erin Street. Work continues on the car. This winter [it’s not clear if they mean 2012 or 2013] we plan to drive Urbee during one of our worst Winnipeg snow storms, to demonstrate that Urbee can also be a great winter car!

Congratulations to the filmmaker, Doug Howe, and Jim Kors. I look forward to hearing more about the Urbee (or URBEE).

There will be a DVD of the documentary available soon. If you contact them via jkor@urbee.net, you will be placed on a waiting list.

* ‘and’ changed to ‘an’ Nov. 7, 2013

Alberta and Texas collaborate on nanotechnology and greenish energy; a meta analysis of public perceptions of nanotechnology risks; how scientists think

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The Premier of Alberta (Canada), Ed Stelmach, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Rice University (Texas, US) President, David Leebron, to collaborate through nanoAlberta (Alberta Advanced Education and Technology) and the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology (Rice University). The two institutions will collaborate in the energy, environmental, medical,  agriculture, and forestry sectors. From the news item on Azonano,

Wade Adams, director of the Smalley Institute, said the interests of nanoAlberta and those of his team at Rice are perfectly aligned. “We want to help them figure out how to extract oil from their resources in a more environmentally friendly way, a more efficient way and one that will cause less damage to their own territory as well as provide oil for the needs of the human race, as they become a more important source of it.”

When I read the title for the item I thought they were referring to green or bio fuels but, as you can see from the quote, the intention is altogether different. From a pragmatic perspective, since we have to depend on fossil fuels for a while longer, it’s best if we can find more environmentally friendly ways to extract it while developing other renewable sources.

This reminds me of the recent invite I received from the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) for the Perverse Incentives: The Untold Story of Federal Subsidies for Fossil Fuels event held on Sept. 18, 2009. Unfortunately, the webcast isn’t available quite yet but I think that in light of this memorandum it could be interesting viewing and might provide a critical perspective on the initiative.

PEN is holding another somewhat related event on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2009 at 12:30 pm EST, Nanotechnology, Synthetic Biology, and Biofuels: What does the public think? If you’re in Washington, DC, you can attend the event live but you should RSVP here, otherwise there’s a live webcast which is posted a few days later on their website.  (There’s a PEN event tomorrow, Sept. 23, 2009 at 12 pm to 2:30 pm EST, titled Transatlantic Regulatory Cooperation: Securing the Promise of Nanotechnologies. If you wish to attend the live event, you can RSVP using the link I’ve posted previously. If you’re interested in this event, in June I posted a more complete description of it here.)

One more Canadian development on the nanotechnology front, a meta analysis of 22 surveys on public perceptions of the risks and benefits of nanotechnology has been published at Nature Online as of Sept. 20, 2009. The article (lead author from the University of British Columbia, Canada)  is behind a paywall but you can read more about it in the news item on Nanowerk (from the news item),

Previous studies have found that new and unknown technologies such as biotechnology tend to be regarded as risky, but that’s not the case for nanotechnology, according to this research. People who thought nanotechnology had more benefits than risks outnumbered those who perceived greater risks by 3 to 1 in this study. The 44 percent of people who didn’t have an opinion either way surprised the researchers. “You don’t normally get that reluctance,” says Terre Satterfield of the University of British Columbia in Canada, lead author of the study and a collaborator with CNS-UCSB [Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara].

In almost three years of scanning, I don’t think I’ve ever seen two announcements that both feature a Canadian nanotechnology development of sorts. This is a banner day!

Topping today off, I’m going to segue into How Scientists Think.  It’s a paper about how scientists creatively problem solve.  From the news item on Physorg.com,

Her [Dr. Nancy J. Nersessian] study of the working methods of scientists helps in understanding how class and instructional laboratory settings can be improved to foster creativity, and how new teaching methods can be developed based on this understanding. These methods will allow science students to master model-based reasoning approaches to problem solving and open the field to many more who do not think of themselves as traditional “scientists.”

I’ve been interested in how scientists think because I’ve been trying to understand why the communication with ‘non scientists’ can be so poor. To some extent I think it is cultural. After years of training in special skills and a special language, scientists are members of a unique occupational culture, which has given birth to many, many subcultures. People who are immersed in their own cultures don’t always realize that the rest of us may not understand what they’re saying very well. (Try reading art criticism if you don’t have an understanding of art history and critical theory.) That’s my short answer and, one of these days, I’m going to write a paper with my long answer.

I had every intention of writing another part of my science communication series today but I have a couple of projects to start or finish and these series postings take more time than I have to spare.

Memristors and green energy

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Over the last 50 years or so, researchers have noticed some odd voltage characteristics, meanwhile in 1971, Dr. Leon Chua, noticed an unfilled symmetry in electromagnetic equations having to do with charge and flux and corresponding passive charge elements. He hypothesized that there was a passive element which he called a memristor whose behaviour is history-dependent, it changes its characteristics based on past current-flow history. (I got a lot of this description from Carpe Nano and I’m not entirely sure I understand the explanation. It seems to me that it’s like a chameleon; it takes on the characteristics of whatever environment it most recently enjoyed.)

Up until now, nobody realized that the odd voltage characteristics that have been observed for the last 50 years might be memristors. R. Stanley Williams, Greg Snider, Dmitri Strukov, and Duncan Stewart at HP Labs have associated these observations with Chua’s hypothesis in an article in Nature.

The reason it’s green is because it opens up the possibility of storing information that doesn’t consume energy unless it’s being read or written. (Think about your computer hard drive, it uses up energy even when you’re not actively accessing it). The memristor is a fundamental physical characteristic at the nanoscale which means we’re exploiting a capability inherent in the material. HP Labs is working on practical implementations now.

As for my quest to find Canadian nanotechnology news. I think I’m going to try something different next week because searches are not working.