Truism on War

In war:
The winner is one war behind technologically.
The loser is two wars behind.

You Thought The Smart Cars Were Small

This from Nature:

They measure just 3 by 4 nanometres: a million of them parked bumper to tail would cover the length of a flea. And they are stripped down to the absolute basics: just a chassis and two axles with wheels at either end.

But they move. Using a powerful microscope, James Tour and his coworkers at Rice University in Houston, Texas, have watched their 'nanocars' trundle over a layer of gold¹.

The axles and chassis are made primarily of carbon atoms linked into rigid rods that form an H shape. At each axle tip, the researchers attached a ball-like wheel made from the football-shaped carbon molecule C₆₀.

The key question was whether these diminutive vehicles truly roll over a surface, or just skitter about because of their thermal energy, as many molecules do.

Tour and his colleagues claim that the wheels must indeed be turning. When they used the fine tip of a scanning tunnelling microscope, a device normally used for imaging at the atomic scale, to attract the nanocars and pull them along, the cars moved forward but not sideways. That's just what you would expect to happen if the C60 molecules were rotating on an axis. Occasionally the cars pivoted and took off in a new direction, making zigzag paths.

Three-wheeled nanocars with tripod axles could only turn in circles, again as would be expected if the wheels were revolving.

"This is really exciting", says materials scientist Henry Hess of the University of Florida in Gainesville, who has used biological molecular motors to drive nanoscale objects over surfaces.

Open Source Energy

The Open Source Energy Network is a great resource for all of the freelance power generation concepts. More than that, they talk about current topics. This week, they're all about the Katrina spawned oil shortage and gas price gouging.
There, I learned about this wild device: the Stirling Engine (2). A single wheel driven by part of a piston's action from a heat differential. The rest of the drive comes from the remainder of it's action. It's very smart and it's a centuries old idea:

Devices called air engines have been recorded from as early as 1699 around the time when the laws of gasses were first set out. The English inventor Sir George Caley is known to have devised air engines c. 1807. Robert Stirling's innovative contribution of 1816 was what he called the 'Economiser' now known as the regenerator which acts to retain heat in the hot portion of the engine as the air passes to the cold part and thus improve the efficiency.

During the nineteenth century the Stirling engine found applications anywhere a source of low to medium power was required , a role that was eventually usurped by the electric motor at the century's end.

It was also employed in reverse as a heat pump to produce early refrigeration.

In the late 1940's the Philips Electronics company in The Netherlands were searching for a versatile electricity generator to enable worldwide expansion of sales of its electronic devices in areas with no reliable electricity infrastructure. The company put a huge R&D research effort into Stirling engines building on research it had started in the 1930s and which lasted until the 1970's. The only lasting commercial spin-off from this for Philips was its reversed Stirling engine: the Stirling cryocooler.