You’re probably aware that the US government is spending huge amounts of money to support production of biofuel. What they tell you is that this fuel will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and that it is better for the environment. It turns out, at least the way that biofuel is produced now, that neither claim is true. It takes more energy to produce the biofuel than it produces, and our topsoil is taking a beating. Add on top of that the finite amount of water that we’re pulling from wells across the midwest and ask yourself the question: would you rather run out of oil or run out of farmland?

Granted there are many plants that are much better candidates for creating biofuel than corn, the main crop used now, and even corn production could be made more efficient and less destructive to the soil. Still, perhaps it’s time to step back and look at the actual problem we are trying to solve. A better solution just might present itself.

What we are trying to do is make solar energy portable. Plants do that using photosynthesis — they put some carbon dioxide and some water next to each other and wait for a photon to whack the system just right, and out comes an energetic molecule, and some nice free oxygen to boot. It’s a pretty slick system. What we are doing now is using plants as solar collectors. We set them out in the sun, give them access to (lots of) water and carbon dioxide, and later we chop them down and collect the energy. Of course, the form of the energy isn’t quite right (sugars aren’t good fuel), so we have to process the result, using up some of the energy we collected.

The goal, then, is to turn sunshine into gasoline, alcohol, or some other handy hydrocarbon.

Flash back to when you were in grade school science class, watching a movie about how plants work. We zoom down into the animated land beneath the surface of the leaf where the magic is happening. A little wizard is hard at work, gathering the ingredients, then… at the critical moment he gawps at the camera, eyes round, and pulls a screen in front of his workbench. “We don’t know what happens back there,” the narrator says in his happy-narrator voice, “but what comes out is…” (I don’t remember exactly what comes out. ATP? You can look it up.)

Bumblebees. Photosynthesis. Great mysteries when we were kids, but not anymore. (Did no one mention to you that bumblebees can fly now? They have tiny horizontal tornadoes raging just above their wings. Sometimes the explanation is even cooler than the mystery.) Anyway, photosynthesis. Somehow, films made before DNA had been discovered still have us convinced that some things are unknown. I’m no photosyntholigist, but I only have to glance at wikipedia to know that the process is pretty well-understood today.

So I ask you: Do we really need the plant? We know how that stuff works, and we can reproduce it. Can we not create a solid-state device that captures solar energy and puts out an energetic molecule – the exact molecule we want as an end product? We could use such a device to create fuels with absolutely no impurities (no sulfur, for instance), and no net carbon footprint. The system does not have to be very efficient to easily outdistance existing plant-based methods, and it would use land that has much less value in terms of ongoing human prosperity. Farms could go back to growing food.

Picture a gas station on the highway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Behind it there is an array of dark panes stretched over the desert floor. From the array a pipe leads to a holding tank which holds the highest-quality gasoline money can buy. And the cost to the dealer is fixed – he just has to pay to maintain the system.

There would be environmental impact, of course. Vast tracts of desert would be shaded, and somewhat cooler as a result of energy being removed from the system. Although our machine would use a lot less water than a living plant, (or perhaps another source of hydrogen?), there would still be some demand. Overall, though, I think environmentalists would see it as a lesser evil.

I’ve been kicking this idea around for years, now, but apparently I haven’t ever written about it here. The plan is filed under get-poor-quick, but man, if anybody got something like this working, they could become some kind of ridiculously wealthy. As well they should.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about radiators lately. When you’re driving in a very low car, sometimes all you see of the vehicle behind you is the big chrome grille designed to let air through to reach the radiator. Even cars with excellent aerodynamics are forced to have this component that, by its very nature, requires wind resistance to operate. There is even a fan to expend more energy to make sure that air is passing over the radiator at all times. If there was a way to get rid of the radiator, fuel efficiency in vehicles would be increased. Maybe not a lot, but a measurable amount that would certainly add up.

The only catch is that the radiator is really important. Owners of old air-cooled Volkswagens can testify to that; those engines had no radiators and were not terribly reliable — plus, they paid the same aerodynamic  price to have the air pass through the engine compartment.

Internal combustion engines produce a lot of heat; in fact, thermodynamics says that the hotter they burn, the more efficient they are. My clever nephew Gerald, when presented with the Radiator Conundrum, realized immediately that one solution is simply to embrace the heat rather than get rid of it. If one builds the engine out of materials that can withstand much higher heat than modern engines, then you can let that sucker get really, really hot and actually burn more efficiently at the same time. It’s win-win! I know that there are experimental ceramic engines built around this principle, and it’s about time to get them into production vehicles.

Superhot engines may be good, but superhot engine compartments are not. There’s still going to be some waste heat to manage, if only for safety. My thoughts turned to ways to take at least some of the waste heat and make use of it. By converting the heat energy into some other form of energy, say, electricity, we can simultaneously cool the engine and reclaim some of the waste. Perhaps we could even do away with the alternator, which costs a typical car a couple of horsepower. By reducing the load on the engine once again we can increase efficiency.

Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done (or it would be done already). However, with a really hot ceramic engine, I think it would be possible to use the thermoelectric effect. All you need to do is embed series of different metals along the heat gradient within the engine to create thermopiles. (More modern thermopiles are used to power deep-space probes.) Thermopiles can supply large amounts of current, but only at low voltages. With enough of them, however, you would have a cooling system that simultaneously recharged the car’s battery. If the system worked really well, you could even use surplus current to power a small electric helper motor.

So, anyone up for investing in Jer’s Radiatorless Engine? If it works, we’d make a fortune!

Sometimes the road to instant poverty is not in inventing a new device but in recognizing a new market for an existing one. (Actually, since you eliminate much of the research and development costs, the chances of striking it poor are somewhat diminished, but let’s not think about that.

One bit of modern gee-whizzery of which I am fond are noise-canceling headphones. These babies actually pick up the ambient noise around you and generate their own sound waves that cancel the noise out in the location of your ear canal. Pretty dang slick. The most popular place for the technology is on airplanes; it’s amazing how much of the engine drone is cut out by a good pair of noise cancelers. With the background reduced, it’s also easier to hear the people around you.

Pilots use noise cancellers all the time these days, but if I owned an airline I’d outfit all the flight personnel with inside-the-ear noise cancellers. Not only would they be able to hear what is being said to them better, but their ears wold be protected. That constant assault on their ears can’t be good for them in the long term.

So, the technology is without a doubt useful. Yesterday it occurred to me that if you wired up the headphones with a specific signal to cancel, that you could have headphones that virtually eliminated a very specific sound while allowing others to pass. There is one industry in particular that would benefit from such a boon, a group of men and women subjected to the same sound over and over, day in and day out, until it must haunt their dreams. I expect insanity is common among these people.

You know who I’m talking about already, don’t you? That right, ice cream truck drivers. I bet they’d pay a bundle to MAKE THAT SONG STOP! As a bonus, they’d be able to hear traffic and the calls of little children more clearly.

I think about energy a lot. I’m not sure why this is, but often I see little places where energy is being squandered when it should be reclaimable. In general, any time you have something that’s hot, and you don’t want it to be hot, energy is being lost.

Some of this energy can be hard to spot. Take, for example, the fully-loaded truck at the brake-check pullout before going down a long hill. It’s not moving. Its fuel tanks could be almost empty. But it has energy. Lots of it. The driver is checking the truck’s brakes because the truck is about to turn all that energy into heat. If the driver is not careful, that heat could cause brake failure and a very dangerous situation. The driver will inch down the hill, allowing time for brakes to cool and to use the compression of the engine to slow downward progress as well (heating the exhaust).

All that energy, and we treat it like a bad thing. But energy is expensive, even now when we only pay a fraction of its true cost! What we need is a safe way to reclaim the potential energy of the truck, safely and in a useful form.

Introducing TruckGen. TruckGen is a system that uses the truck to turn a generator as it descends. The generator provides resistance to the truck, but rather than turning the energy into heat, turns at least some of it into electricity. (In fact, the generator would have to be able to provide huge resistance to the motion, but that’s OK — that’s where the electricity comes from.) The truck’s brakes are spared, saving wear and tear and making the descent safer, and as a bonus useful power is reclaimed.

I’ve considered several ideas for exactly how this would work; one of my favorites is a chair-lift-like affair with a cable that runs above the road. Descending trucks would attach to the cable with big clamps, and as they descended they would drive a capstan that turned a generator. The cable would have to be quite strong, of course, but if anything went wrong all the trucks would have nice fresh brakes.

An alternate would be  to dispense with the generator and have the uphill trucks attached to the cable as well, and the descending trucks would give them a push. Cutting out the electrical generation makes this system quite efficient. (There would have to be something to prevent some uphill trucks from slacking and forcing other ascending trucks to haul them up as well while they save fuel.) In either case all trucks attached to the cable would move the same speed, improving traffic flow.

If cable strength is a problem (I’m not sure even where to start figuring that out), I imagine an alternate method with a vehicle that latches on to the front of the truck for the descent. It might look something like the tractors that push jets around at an airport, with big tires with good traction (or cogs on a rail?) which would turn a built-in generator. There would be an overhead power line, similar to the ones used to power trains, but in this case they would be receiving the power instead of providing it. The tractors would use some of that electricity to get back to the top of the hill, which cuts into the efficiency of that plan, but the descending trucks would still be a heck of a lot safer.

Next time you see a truck creeping up a steep hill, ask yourself, “what’s going to come of all that work?” With TruckGen, you have the answer.

It’s been downright chilly here the past couple of days. I know when I hear the heater going in the morning despite the thermostat being set on the lower nighttime temperature, that winter is here. I was out and about yesterday and I saw a woman carrying an infant. Is that baby warm enough? I asked myself. It didn’t seem to me that the kid was bundled up enough.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? The amount the baby is bundled up is more based on how cold the mother is, not the comfort of the baby itself. The kid has no way of saying, “Geeze, mom, I’m boiling in here!” If the baby cries, it’s just as likely — perhaps more likely — to be rewarded with a bundleage adjustment in the wrong direction.

Fortunately, I’m here with a solution. You don’t have to thank me; it’s what I do.

What is needed is a way to know what the skin temperature of the baby is. A little research should easily yield a comfort zone for healthy, happy babies. Then all that’s needed is a way for the parent to know what the skin temperature of their kid is. Introducing Baby-Therm clothing for infants. Each shirt has a small temperature sensor over the belly button and perhaps at the back of the neck, and each pair of pants measures temperatures at the thigh. The socks and little mittens each have sensors as well, although for extremities the range of allowable temperatures would be much broader.

The flagship article is of course the Baby-Therm hat, which not only measures scalp temperature, but also has a set of LED’s showing the temperature status of the baby’s various parts. Green, all is well. Red, too hot. Blue, too cold. With no guesswork at all, the baby is cozy and warm, without being overbaked. Plus, you can use the kid as a Christmas ornament!

There are a couple of details to work out, like how best to connect the sensors to the hat, but nothing insurmountable. And think of the market: nervous first-time parents would flock to the Baby-Therm store, ready to plunk down some serious cash if at least one bit of parental guesswork is reduced. I don’t have to tell most of you that people now expect baby products to be very expensive.

Then, of course, there’s Baby-Therm deluxe, which uses little heater elements to automatically keep the kid at the ideal temperature. Oh, yeah.