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Dutch Town Lays Air-Purifying Concrete
eldavojohn writes "In an effort to combat air pollution, a Dutch town has paved some of its streets with air-purifying concrete. It contains a titanium dioxide-based additive that utilizes sunlight to turn car exhaust into harmless nitrates. It was shown to do this in a lab and now the scientists are interested in just how much this will affect the air quality around the road. They will sample the air quality by a normal road and by this newly paved one."
The scientists driving around to check their air sampling monitors negates any positive effect produced by the concrete.
Maybe we could do even better.
Hmm, since we're being green anyway, lets eliminate some of the cars--then perhaps we could make the concrete softer to walk on.
We could use some other color but grey--yuck. Maybe green to represent the fact that it purifies the air.
Being softer, it would be nice if it had some kind of self-patching mechanism...
As long as it's going to be self-patching, let's get really sci-fi and have it create itself using some kind of a system involving materials from underneath itself in some kind of a synthesis process.
Damn, I'm thinking way too far ahead--our science will never get to the point where it can do this stuff. Guess I'll have to be happy with air-purifying concrete.
What do you suggest paving the road with? Grass? Good intentions?
Comment of the year
Everyone knows that hubris is the best paving material, duh.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The nitrates can't run off into the oceans, because Holland is below sea level.
At the bottom of the
Al? He's putting on his wizard hat and robe. He'll be unavailable for a while.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Bonus points for using an IT analogy in a car discussion ;)
It's more like bumping up the speed of your front side bus on your CPU. If you have a slower FSB, you might not ever notice it if you aren't racing your ca... CPU. But when you need that speed, it sure would be nice to remove the FSB limitation.
Did you just use a computer analogy to explain a car problem?
Aha! The foot is on the other shoe now!
Wait... what?
:-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Rendering them... what exactly?
Or did you mean to suggest that buildings we can't see don't get rendered even though they exist?
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
no but i do see signs every day that read "DOT road sign test in progress" - it is there everyday.. for about 4 years now... wonder if i should give them acall and see how the test is going
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
"An exhaust-eating road surface is never going to be as efficient as a guy just chasing your car down the street with a big vacuum cleaner hose."
I dunno, that seems pretty energy-inefficient to me. Unless he was on a segway...
My asplode just headed.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Now we know why the chicken crossed the road!
bad-duum-tish!!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.