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Futurology #132: nice smells supercar
Monday, 22 February 2010
Nice smells make us act more kindly: Want to promote an atmosphere of honesty and teamwork? Bust out some citrus candles and turn on all the lights. New studies show that little touches like these really can make a huge difference.Chen-Bo Zhong, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the University of Toronto, recently concluded that people in lightly scented rooms show a greater willingness to act selflessly. In a series of experiments, Zhong found that people in rooms that had been sprayed with an air freshener were more likely to show an interest in volunteer work, and more likely to distribute money fairly in a trust-based investment game, than people in unscented rooms, reports IO9, from Science Blogs.
Comment — douche up with scent when you go and see your lawyer or tax officer, maybe?
Off-the-shelf parts make camera to photograph your innards: A new medical camera designed to take pictures of internal organs is about to revolutionise the way you take snapshots. Soon you'll be able to take simultaneous video and stills of events that your naked eye could never see.
The camera was invented by two Oxford medical researchers out of off-the-shelf parts. IO9 has more plus embedded video.
Comment — doctor to liver: 'smile!'
Special car to get 2752 miles per gallon: A team of California Polytechnic State University mechanical engineering students is prepping an ultra high-mileage, three-wheeled car for the upcoming Shell Eco-Marathon student competition. If all goes well, they’ll take first place with fuel economy more than 13 times higher than the 230mpg General Motors claims the Chevrolet Volt will deliver – and Cal Poly car doesn’t even need batteries.
The Cal Poly Supermileage Team, launched in the late ’80s and resurrected in 2005, combines students from a senior project team and a department club to work on vehicles that deliver numbers that make hypermilers and plug-in hybrid enthusiasts weep.
The car uses a modified 3 horsepower Honda 50cc four-stroke engine and super-light frame, plus the drivers have slimmed down.
Comment — 3.79 litres takes you 4428.91kms – that's Auckland to Wellington nearly seven times!
A new sugar-based plastic composts: This stuff, unlike current "biodegradable" plastics, breaks down in a matter of months, instead of centuries. The new type of plastic was developed by researchers at Imperial College London from glucose polymers extracted from trees and grasses. Not only is it faster to decompose, but it would halt dependency on fossil fuels, which are used to make 99% of today's plastics, and is apparently more energy efficient to produce than typical plastic.
The development team is currently engaged in creating a market-ready version of the tech, but is optimistic that it can be done. Hopefully sometime soon we'll be able to toss plastic wrappers and packaging into the compost bin along with our banana peels, writes The Telegraph in the UK.
Comment — is it edible? What's it like on your Weetbix?
Power your house from your curtains: Imagine recharging your iPad from the jacket on your back, or running your Mac from the curtains covering the window.
Writing in Nature Materials, CalTech scientists say they have the underlying technology. Silicon nanowires (pic), arranged in arrays, have been engineered to not only grab power from visible light but from infrared too.
In immediate practical terms, this means “a cell geometry that not only uses 1/100th the material of traditional wafer-based devices, but also may offer increased photovoltaic efficiency owing to an effective optical concentration of up to 20 times.” (Via Smart Planet).
Comment — how about tents?
Brains work eerily well and adapt, hooked up to computers: A group of physicists, engineers, physiologists, and neurosurgeons at University of Washington discovered that brains hooked up to computers quickly adapt, and even grow stronger. For the study, published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers tested what happened to people who learned to harness the electrical signals in their brains to control a computer cursor.
Comment — what about the other way around; would computers adapt to us and control us, too? Oh, they do that already ... (my computer made me write that)
