Blogs / Discoblog

To conserve energy this summer, why not harness the insane amount of heat your car collects to—what else—bake cookies? Instead of warming up your oven (and your kitchen) on an already-too-hot day, it makes sense to use the heat that automobiles naturally store to finagle some freshly baked sweet treats.

The blog Baking Bites tried it out and found that standard-sized chocolate chip cookies took about two-and-a-half hours to bake in the writer’s car, which reached 180 degrees Fahrenheit (the temperature outside, meanwhile, topped 100 degrees).

“I think that they were best hot out of the car,” writes the blogger, who placed the cookies on a baking sheet on her car’s dashboard. The cookies never browned, but apparently they did smell and taste delicious. “They were slightly crisp at the edges and chewy in the center,” she writes.

Those of us without cars will just have to bake our cookies the old-fashioned way (or use someone else’s). Still, if you can manage it, car-baked cookies will also make your car interior smell pretty darn good.

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Image: flickr / foodistablog

We need to figure out a way (besides oil) to fuel cars. This is not news. What is news is the innovative thinking currently being focused on solving this problem. Today’s example is a group of M.I.T. undergrads, who had the idea of harnessing the shock of hitting potholes as an energy source. Sci Am reports:

When a car’s wheel hits a hole or bump, a standard shock absorber disperses the impact energy through hydraulic fluid and moves a piston. In the M.I.T. design, the fluid is instead forced through a small turbine attached to a generator. The generator, powered by the compressions, can recharge batteries or power the vehicle’s electrical equipment. The students say that for heavy vehicles such as Hummers, the system can boost fuel efficiency from 2 to 10 percent, depending on the terrain. They have formed Levant Power Corporation to commercialize a product they are calling GenShock. Right now they are tailoring GenShock for U.S. Army vehicles and big-rig trucks, but it could possibly be adapted for passenger vehicles.

Will it work? Remains to be seen. But either way, it’s still better than ethanol.

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As anyone who’s seen movie Cars knows, the front of an automobile can look suspiciously like a face. Now, scientists in the field of shape analysis, or morphometrics, are exploring how a car’s “face,” or front design, can also give it a personality.

A Volkswagen beetle, for example, has a rounded, childlike face that implies niceness, whereas a Ford Mustang has a mature, angular mug that looks distinctly masculine—and far more aggressive.

What’s more, the ability to see faces in inanimate objects may have served an evolutionary purpose, according to the researchers. The AP reports:

Facial features offering clues about a person’s sex, age, emotions and intentions helped early humans “know whether the guy that just stepped out of the bushes is going to take your head back for a trophy or invite you to lunch,” [shape analysis researcher Dennis] Slice said.

Those identifications are so important that people also tend to see faces even where they don’t exist.

“If you get it wrong and you see a face in a cloud or a stone or a mountain or some burnt toast [ed. note: Or a block of wood] then you might be frightened a little bit, but it’s no real cost to you,” Slice said. “But if you should ever miss a face and that person wants your head, then that’s a serious omission.”

Next, the researchers might examine how other drivers react to cars with faces that project different personalities, or how adjusting the position of the headlights or other “features” can change which types of customers find a particular car appealing.

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Ohio resident Kile Wygle certainly gets points for creativity. He not only converted an old lawnmower into a motorized bar stool, but also drove it drunk, attempting to avoid the associated charges by saying he was driving a bar stool—not a vehicle. But under state law, unfortunately for him, operating any motorized vehicle except for wheelchairs and mobility scooters is prohibited while under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

So how did this particular vehicle come about? Wygle’s homemade stool was powered by a 5-horsepower motorcycle engine, which controlled a chain drive attached to a rear wheel. The front wheels were controlled by an old lawnmower steering wheel. The stool could reach up to 38 miles per hour, and at that speed, comfort is sure to be important—enter the padded seat, which had been welded to the frame.

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While automakers (and magazines) are shrinking their car designs to become fuel efficient these days, one man decided to forgo fuel altogether and tap into wind power. And now, British engineer Richard Jenkins has broken wind-powered car records, reaching a whopping 126.1 miles per hour when he drove his Ecotricity Greenbird in Nevada.

Arguably, the Greenbird doesn’t look anything like a car—people describe it as a “very high performance sailboat.” But while most wind-powered cars use large sails, Jenkins decided to use a solid wing, so that wind could sweep over it and propel the 1,300 pound car into motion. To offset the resulting lift, Jenkins added smaller wings to keep the car on the ground.

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The car of the future may be no car at all, at least in the common sense of the word. Auto trailblazers have been hard at work coming up with designs for just about anything that will move us from one place to another on electricity, and some of the results are nothing short of remarkable. WebEcoist has a fantastic list of the most innovative electric cars that have appeared thus far.

A few of the highlights include a pair of moving pink bunny slippers designed by Tesla, a roadster designed by a Paris fashion house, a compact car made entirely of bamboo (a renewable resource), and a single-passenger electric coach that will protect us from the “post-apocalyptic wasteland” of toxic waste and pollution. There’s also the”Ecooter,” an enclosed scooter intended for short-distance driving in cities. We’re not even gonna touch that one.

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Image courtesy of JapanProbe.

Ever since Henry Ford’s “sky flivver” killed a pilot in 1928, engineers have devoted time and money to building the ultimate flying car. On Wednesday, British adventurer Neil Laughton was hoping to fly the “world’s first bio-fuelled flying car” over the English Channel, and embark on a 42-day trip to from London to Timbuktu in Mali. The flying car is powered by a snowmobile engine, and fueled with a mix of petrol and bioethanol.

Unfortunately for Laughton, he failed to submit the proper paperwork to fly across the English Channel, so his trip began a bit less dramatically: He took the ferry from the U.K. on Wednesday morning, and is now preparing to take off in France.

DISCOVER caught up with Laughton, who says he will take flight on Saturday. He would not tell us the location of his runway, however, because he doesn’t want the French authorities to stop the voyage.

So why use biofuel? “We wanted to make a statement to the world that even a James Bond flying car can save the environment,” says Laughton.

If/when he does start his journey, he’ll need good weather to complete the 3,600 mile trip through the Pyrenees, the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Sahara Desert. The Parajet SkyCar will travel by both land and air, at speeds of up to 110 mph on the ground and up to 70 mph in flight. It takes just three minutes for the car to take off from a field or airstrip that is at least 700 feet long. While in the air, the car is controlled by cables and pedals, and can fly as high as 15,000 feet.

Curious about what it looks like? Then click here to see for yourself.

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Image: flickr/ bossmustanguk

We make snap judgments about strangers based on their faces. We even do this with inanimate objects, conjuring up human-like faces in furniture, appliances, and office supplies. A new study finds that when it comes to cars, we like their “expressions” angry and mean.

Researchers in Vienna asked people to rate “headshots” of 38 cars using a list of 18 traits, including childlike, hostile, happy, and neurotic. The participants were also asked to draw the facial features they saw in the cars. Vehicles with wide stances, tapered windshields, and wide-set, angled headlights were the most liked (Lightning McQueen from Cars seems to qualify—as does Stephen King’s Christine) and scored high on traits associated with power, such as adult, dominant, arrogant, angry, masculine, and hostile. A typical “power” car was the scowling BMW 5 Series, while a smiling Toyota Prius ranked the fourth lowest on the list.

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There are some things that most people think should never be made out of wood—things that produce extreme heat through a combustion process, say, or things that could collide with an oncoming semi at 190 mph while carrying human cargo. But you never know unless you try—so a group of industrial design grad students at North Carolina State are taking on the absurdly ambitious, and very cool, task of building a high-powered, high-speed automobile out of wood, held together mostly by glue.

The specs are impressive—over 600 hp, top speed of 190 mph, zero to 60 in just over three seconds, 2,500 pounds, and 20 mpg—but it’s all pretty hypothetical at the moment (as are, I assume, the Lambo-style doors). But the aptly named “Splinter” isn’t just a bunch of two-by-fours nailed together. The students are using the project to explore the potential of wood as a building material, so pretty much every part contains wood composites, like plywood. The car also contains a fair amount of glass and metal—including the shocks and a Cadillac Northstar sourced V-8 combustion engine.

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