Top Inventions of 2007

Gibbs-Duhem writes "Time Magazine is reporting on the best inventions of the year. The top invention is the somewhat well-known iPhone, but there are some extremely cool projects included that I had certainly never heard of, including a device for capturing waste heat from car engines to increase efficiency up to 40%, a novel car designed to run entirely on compressed air claiming to have a range of 2000km with zero pollution, a James Bond style GPS tracking device that police can use to avoid high-speed chases, a small-scale printing press capable of printing and binding a paperback book in 3 minutes for under $3/book (and $50k per machine), a microbe-based technology for turning soft sand into sandstone, a water-based display which uses computer controlled nozzles to produce coherent gaps in the water, and a way to convert type A, B, and AB-negative blood into type O."

Comments

Ignore the iPhone

[mcrbids]

If you ignore the over-hyped (and still pretty damned cool) iPhone as 1st place, this list is pretty amazing. The water-injected engine at first glance sounds alot like the water-injection that was hyped back in the 1970s, but it's not. A little bit of digging (thanks, Google!) reveals that it's actually a 6-stroke engine that uses the heat that would normally be radiated away. If done right, there's no need for a radiator or other cooling system!

My first thought is about what this could mean for General Aviation - having the fuel burn rate cut by 40% WITHOUT needing any cooling gear (think: reduced weight) could be a real boon... already there are diesel aviation engines already that are significantly more efficient ( but need radiators, and already have a high compression ratio) this could help out even more - imagine a diesel engine that reduces fuel consumption by 60%, maybe even 70%?!?!?

Pipe dream? Yes. But I sure do hope. And it would likely happen in cars before airplanes, thanks to the glacial pace of technology advancement in aviation. Everybody's so terrified of risk that innovation is radically reduced. The reality is simply that (Private Airplanes) == (Money) == (Lawyer Bait) == (an industry that is forever on the edge of shutdown).

If you want to see the crippling effect that excessive lawyering can cause to industry, you need look no further than private aviation.

-Ben

Air-car bullshit

[Eivind]

The "air-car" is bullshit.

First, all they have is blurry cad-drawings, and still they claim it'll be on the market in 2008. That's not possible, if that where to actually be the case they'd have to ALREADY have several completed prototypes of the car at the minimum for safety-testing and similar.

Second, there's just not enough energy there.

If you believe the claims of the aircar-makers themselves, (which ain't a safe thing to do, because they assume near termic equilibrium, among other things, but nevermind) then, and I'm here quoting their website: 300 litres at 300 bars results in 46 MJ (Y 52.1 MJ with 340 litres at 300 bars ).

Okay, so a 340lite (90 gallon!) air-tank can hold the same amount of energy as 0.4 gallons of petrol. Really

So, after you've refilled this gargantuan 90 gallon tank with air, you'll have the equivalent of 0.4 gallons petrol worth of energy. Thereafter you have to refuel again. Who wants to refuel every 10 miles ? This think makes electric cars look EXCELLENT by comparison.

Re:not 2000km!

[Rei]

[quote]A single coal power plant is a large ugly brick building stuck near a rail yard with a single or short series of tall smokestacks all located on the same campus, not a tens of miles long stretch of hideous moaning machines interrupting your previously uninterrupted property.[/quote]

You've apparently never seen a fossil plant up close. It's not just "a railyard", but a whole coal depot that they have near them. It's like a giant's sandpit; the machinery that moves the coal around looks like little ants. They have to spray it all the time to keep the risk of a fire down.

And that's not the problem.

The problem is the huge plume of pollution that comes off of the plants. Apparently you don't care about your lungs. I care about mine. How pretty do you find hospitals and dead trees?

How come we don't wind turbine farms on the tops of buildings in large cities

Because the building has to be built extra strong for that. You can't just add a turbine on top of a building like that. Extra strength means extra cost. Big cities build their turbines offshore. Like, for example, the London Array.

or in Central Park

Apparently the term "high property values" means nothing to you. How much does an acre in rural New York cost? Now how much does an acre in Manhattan cost? Prices aren't irrelevant. In fact, they're the most relevant issue at hand.

Long Island Sound

There was one. It was going to cost too much compared to how much power it would have provided..

off Martha's Vineyard etc etc

You mean like Cape Wind?

And yes, there are some people like you who've been protesting it. Apparently they'd rather breathe heavy metals from coal burning (like the unopposed Canal Electric plant) than have a barely visible turbine on the distant horizon.