High School Students Build Greener, Safer Motorcycle

This article is taken from Green Energy News.

July 26, 2008 – Vol.13 No.18

REVOLUTIONIZING TRANSPORTATION.

Simply put, bicycles and motorcycles are gyroscopes on which people ride. Stopped, without the aid of a rider’s feet (or a kickstand) bikes will flop over on their side. But underway the faster the wheels spin the more stable the two-wheeled vehicles become: Gyroscopic precession of the spinning wheels keeps them upright.

Stable is one of those words that implies safety. By themselves on the road – and under the control of competent riders – both bicycles and motorcycles can be very safe. It’s when the road is shared with other riders and other vehicles that safety takes a turn for the worse.

In the space of a school year a group of 19 students may have revolutionized personal two-wheeled transportation. They’ve built what appears to be perfectly viable, readily marketable, safer, cleaner, motorcycle.

The Experimental Vehicle Team (EVT), 17 boys from Saint Thomas Academy and 2 girls from the Covenant of the Visitation School, have created an electric powered, enclosed, street-legal motorcycle. With crush zones, roll bar and side impact bars as well as some protection from inclement weather, the Safer Electric Motorcycle can travel more than 40 miles on a single charge of its batteries at speeds up to 60 miles per hour.

The hardest part of developing and building the Safer Electric Motorcycle, representatives of the team said in a TV interview, was the sculpting of the composite body. It took a lot sanding, a lot of elbow grease.

(Sanding (like with sandpaper) was harder than designing and engineering the motorcycle’s frame, electric drive and battery pack. Think about this.)

The one-person electric motorcycle features:

— An automatic drive system with a simple twist throttle;

— Roll over, front, rear and side protection;

— An aerodynamic, vacuum-molded carbon fiber/Nomex honeycomb body with Chromoloy frame;

— Three point seat belt;

— A full coverage polycarbonate Lexan(R) windshield;

— Electric power from 5 lithium-phosphate-ion batteries recharged by an on-board 110-volt charger.

Partial funding for the Safer Electric Motorcycle came from the Lemelson-MIT Program InvenTeams initiative. With the program national grants are offered to foster inventiveness among high school students. InvenTeams composed of students, teachers and mentors are asked to collaboratively identify a problem that they want to solve, research the problem, and then develop a prototype invention as an in-class or extracurricular project. Grants of up to $10,000 support each team’s efforts. InvenTeams are encouraged to work with community partners, specifically the potential beneficiaries of their invention.

The InvenTeams initiative was launched in 2002 as a pilot program that awarded grants to three New England high school teams for the 2002-03 academic year. The initiative has expanded each year since its inception, and in the fall of 2007 it awarded 16 InvenTeams grants, including the Experimental Vehicle Team (EVT) at Saint Thomas Academy.

Previous class projects from the EVT include a one-person car that achieved more than 1300 miles per gallon; an electric car that traveled 50 miles on two car batteries and a street legal solar car that raced from Texas to California.

If safer, more people would ride efficient motorcycles. Zero emission, too, that would be revolutionary.(7/25/08)

Links:

Saint Thomas Academy Experimental Vehicle Team
http://www.staevt.com/main.htm

Saint Thomas Academy
http://www.cadets.com

Lemelson-MIT Program InvenTeams
http://web.mit.edu/inventeams/about.html

Police Officer Assaults Times Up! Cyclist

Once a month riders from New York non-profit Times Up! take to the streets to celebrate biking and protest air pollution. Not everyone loves the cyclists, however, and they are often accused of disrupting traffic and being a nuisance. On July 25th a police officer assaulted a cyclist and lied about in an official report. This video captures the incident pretty well, however, and the officer was stripped of his gun and badge pending an investigation.

The incident (and many of the comments in response to the video you will find on youtube) does highlight some interesting problems.  If drivers (and cops) have so little patience and so much hostility towards the minor (comparatively speaking) inconvenience caused by these bikers, regardless of the quality of their message, there may be difficult times ahead in the near future.  The time is not that far off when when there won’t be much choice about “tolerating” the green cause - people are going to have to join in or face catastrophe.

Speaking of bikes, are there any things we can do to make Curious more bike-friendly?  What’s the bike parking situation like?  Do people use the Curious showers when they get here in the morning?  Anything else we could be doing?

For more info about the Times Up! incident, go here.

Brown Univsersity Teams Up with Wal-Mart for Lightbulb Program

This summer students from Brown University are participating in a program called 20/20. Funded by Wal-Mart, they visit low-income communities in Providence, RI and distribute free energy-saving compact florescent light bulbs. For more information, check out this video.

Great inspiration for our list of corporate social responsibility ideas.

More to think about in the LED/Compact Fluorescent Arena

According to this New York Times article, some major light manufacturers see compact fluorescents as an intermediary step on the way to an LED future. LED tech is not quite up to current compact fluorescents in terms of price and availability, but they hold potential for better energy efficiency, longevity, and color choice. Plus they don’t contain mercury. The debate is far from decided though, and compact fluorescent proponents point out that CF technology isn’t exactly stagnant at this point either - more advances are being achieved all the time, and no one knows for sure which will pull ahead in the future.

How Feasible is Composting for Curious?

Biomass (food scraps, yard trimmings, etc.) can make up 65% of the waste sent to a landfill, where it either decomposes (forming methane, a powerful greenhouse gas), or sits in an airless, waterless, microbeless pocket for all eternity (some landfills are specifically designed to prevent things from decomposing - to prevent methane release and contamination of soil and water). Excavated landfills have shown 50+ year old intact hotdogs.

With all that yumminess in mind, is it feasible for Curious to compost? If not to create our own compost (where? the roof? with worms? we are already combating an army of mice - may not be wise…), perhaps to donate to a local park. Several have composting programs, and food scraps can be frozen (to avoid smell) and delivered to the parks when convenient. It’s worth looking into.

[NOTE: add sources for info]

“The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See”

This is a video that shows the creator refers to as the “silver bullet” argument against global warming skeptics. Take a look and perhaps you will also be convinced that, regardless of whether or not global warming is caused by humans, the risk of not taking action against it is too great to be ignored.

“Bacteria that Breaks Down Plastic Bags”

“OK, I’ve written about a terrifying burden on the environment that is plastic bags. Now a Canadian high school student may find a plausible solution to this problem — by isolating bacteria that break down plastic bags in 3 months, instead of millions of years.

Daniel Burd, a 16-year-old student of Waterloo Collegiate Institute decided to do something about the pile of plastic bags that was sitting in his closet. He knew that plastic bags do eventually degrade, and that microorganisms could be behind it. But the degrading microbes are difficult to isolate because they do not exist in high numbers in nature.

To find out which bacteria are more effective as biodegraders, he put together a bacterial culture medium by mixing some household chemicals, tap water and yeast. He ground plastic bags into a powder and added it to the medium along with some dirt. The mixture was placed in a shaker at 30 degree for 3 months. Then he filtered out the remaining powder, transfer the culture into 3 flasks and also prepared a flask of boiled culture as the negative control. He placed strips of plastics cut out from bags into these flasks and compared the weights of the plastic strips after 6 weeks. He observed a 17% decrease, but that’s not good enough for him. Read more »

E-Waste

As a company working in the field we do, we should be concerned about what happens to all of the perfectly safe computers, TVs, and other electronics we use that leak toxic chemicals when smashed up (as might happen if they were sent to a landfill instead of disposed of properly - or as “properly” as is possible at this time). Here is an article about a step New York City is trying to take to make that “properly” easier.

This article, “New York City Council adopts E-waste bill over mayor’s veto,” is taken from the blog Green Daily by Brad Linder.

New York City passed a tough E-waste bill earlier this year that would require electronics makers to get meet recycling benchmarks. Mayor Michael Bloomberg vetoed the bill, saying it violates interstate commerce laws, but City Council yesterday overrode that veto.

Both Council and the Mayor have already agreed on legislation that requires electronics manufacturers to take back used gadgets and appliance. But Bloomberg balked at setting touch penalties for non-compliance. Now that City Council has overridden his veto, the new bill effectively becomes a law — but it’s up to the mayor’s office to enforce that law. And since the law doesn’t actually take effect until 2012, when Bloomberg will no longer be in office, it’s anybody’s guess as to whether the law will actually be enforced or if the issue will be decided in the courts.

If the law does ever actually go into effect, electronics manufacturers would be required to recycle at least 25% of their items that are sold in New York City. If they fail to meet that target, they will have to pay $50,000 for each percentage point they’re off by.

iTunes Free Environmental Channel

The Environment on UChannel is a selection of free lectures on environmental topics.  Contributers include journalists, scientists, governors, and CEOs on topics ranging from Carbon Neutrality to Great Rivers in Africa.  The offerings are a little dry (pretty academic in tone), and many are skewed towards finance, but it is nice to know that layman’s interest in serious environmental issues (not just trendy green issues) has grown to the point that it warrants such a channel.  With the launch of Discovery’s new Channel Green and Sundance’s The Green programming block, along with countless blogs and DIY youtube videos, it seems likely there will soon be a green media outlet for everyone, no matter their taste or level of interest.  Green media saturation - sounds good to me.

The Need to Green Office Printers?

Here is an excerpt from an article about indoor air pollution caused by printers.

THE office printer could pose as much danger to our lungs as a drag on a cigarette, according to air quality tests by Australian scientists

An investigation of dozens of laser printers revealed that almost 30 per cent emit potentially dangerous levels of particles into the air.

These ultra-fine particles were capable of infiltrating the lungs and causing lasting damage on the scale of inhaled cigarette smoke, said researcher Professor Lidia Morawska of the Queensland University of Technology.

“Ultra-fine particles are of most concern because they can penetrate deep into the lungs where they can pose a significant health threat,” Prof Morawska said.

“These (printer) particles are tiny like cigarette smoke particles and, when deep inside the lung, they do the same amount of damage.

Follow the link above to read the whole article.

We should investigate our printers and take basic steps to make sure they are working as safely as possible. Some tips would be to make sure that the laser printers don’t sit too near any people, that the area around them is well ventilated, and that they are turned off when not in use.