Note to self: the next time you need to carry a container filled with hydrochloric acid to work, take a cab.
Tokyo got a scare this morning after a man dropped his bottle of the toxic liquid on a subway train. Several people when to the hospital with minor injuries, but thankfully this chemical clumsiness didn’t cause a major disaster.
Police didn’t arrest the man in question, a 20-year-old stone mason, deciding he didn’t intend to spill his chemicals on the train. Hydrochloric acid has a number of industrial uses, though perhaps carrying it in a bottle on a crowded train isn’t the best transportation strategy.
And because of his butterfingers, New Yorkers aren’t alone in revisiting unpleasant memories of terrorist attacks (as a 9/11 conspirator’s trial comes to Manhattan). Reuters says:
Japan is particularly sensitive to hazards on its trains after a 1995 incident in which members of [the Aum Shinrikyo] religious cult released highly toxic sarin gas on the Tokyo subway, killing 12 and injuring thousands, some permanently.
Related Content:
DISCOVER: Nerve Gas in the Subway, revisiting the 1995 attack
DISCOVER: What Invisible Things Are in the Surfaces You Touch and the Air You Breathe? (in a which a DISCOVER editor finds out how dirty the New York subway system really is.)
80beats: MIT Students Who Hacked Boston Subway Silenced; Report Gets Out Anyway
Image: Wiki Commons / Fg2
Meet SkyTran, a proposed rapid transportation system that uses computer-controlled vehicles that use magnets to “levitate” from their rails. A passenger would enter a pod, type in where he or she wants to go, and the computer system would do the navigating (and driving). The pods would carry up to three people and travel up to 150 mph. The system would be computerized to deploy the pods to crowded areas, and smart enough to re-route to avoid traffic jams.
Discovery Channel reports:
The pods are designed to hang beneath an elevated guideway. They are propelled by the interaction of electromagnetic fields. Unimodal expects the pods to eventually be capable of traveling at speeds of up to 150 mph.
The California based company that came up with the design, Unimodal Systems, wants to make SkyTran a reality. According to their Web site:
The internet allows more throughput and better connectivity than the circuit switching method of the classic telephone network. SkyTran does the exact same thing for transportation – individually switched SkyTran vehicles rather than single-destination trains.
First, the company would like to build the systems in crowded areas like airports or downtown. The next step would be to hook the pods up with public transportation systems like San Fran’s BART. And ultimately, the company plans to break into the consumer market and reduce our reliance on cars.
Anyone curious about how the system would look can check it out when it goes on display in NASA Research Park at Ames (sometime in the near future).
Related Content:
Discoblog: First Green Car
DISCOVER: Future Car Ideas
Images: SkyTran
Bathroom time may not be wasted time after all: A year’s worth of your poop can be turned into 2.1 gallons of useable diesel. And the Norwegian capital of Oslo plans to put all that waste to work powering 80 of its buses with fuel made from the Bekkelaget sewage treatment plant, which houses the waste of 250,000 people.
If all goes as planned, the city’s other waste treatment plant, as well as biofuels made from food waste, will eventually contribute to the total supply—and with serious results: Fueling 400 or so buses this way would reduce 30,000 tons of carbon emissions a year.
While the idea certainly has an “ick factor,” it’s not like gas-station attendants will have to start shoveling sewage directly into a bus’ fuel tank.
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If you ever thought driving the same bus route over and over would be a boring job, just imagine if you weren’t even steering.
University of California, Berkeley researchers ran the first public test of their magnetically-steered bus system last week on a public street in San Leandro, Calif. While a human driver controlled braking and acceleration, a series of magnets embedded in the road guided the bus along its route. With the driving out of human hands, the scientists say, the bus runs its route more efficiently than ever—effortlessly pulling up to within a finger’s width of the curb to allow passengers easy access.
(more…)
