The Chinese Government has blocked General Motors attempt to sell Hummer to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery, a private Chinese company that manufactures heavy vehicles and road-building equipment. As a result, General Motors will now dismantle the brand.

John Smith, General Motors’ Vice President of Corporate Planning and Alliances, said that "GM will now work closely with Hummer employees, dealers and suppliers to wind down the business in an orderly and responsible manner."

The Chinese Government did not give details of its reasons for blocking the purchase but according to Yale Zhang, a China auto-industry market analyst "The purchase of this brand is not a match for China. The Government’s general policies about efficiency and environmental protection …  This purchase does not match those."

 (Public domain photo via Wikimedia)

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American 60 Minutes has shown this segment on teh Bloom Box, a new fuel cell system that its makers say can cost-effectively generate electricity on the spot, without being connected to the electricity grid. Large corporations are already testing the device; the manufacturer foresees one in every home.

(The segment begins with an advertisement.)

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UCLA graduate student Hexian Deng and biochemistry professor Omar M. Yaghi, have developed synthetic crystals that can be used to trap carbon dioxide. Their “designer crystal” approach opens the door for low cost, scalable applications, such as trapping carbon dioxide from factories or vehicle exhaust pipes.

The new synthetic crystals can code information, just as DNA does, but in a more simple form based on the sequence of pores in the material. The result is a material with a sponge-like ability to trap gasses with a high degree of selectivity that results in highly efficient carbon capture. The researchers claim that they were able to achieve a 400% improvement in carbon dioxide capture by manipulating the sequence.

Professor Yaghi said that "What we think this will be important for is potentially getting to a viable carbon dioxide–capture material with ultra-high selectivity… I am optimistic that is within our reach. Potentially, we could create a material that can convert carbon dioxide into a fuel, or a material that can separate carbon dioxide with greater efficiency."

Other researchers are studying different carbon-capturing crystals such as zeolite, which is being investigated by Australia’’s CO2CRC.

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General Motors has released the newest version of its hydrogen fuel cell  engine and says that hydrogen fuel cells could be cost cometitive with other technologies by 2015.

General Motors’ "second generation" fuel cell is half the size of previous "Project Driveway" stack. Although significantly smaller in size and weight it is capable of generating more electric power than the previous version. The weight has been reduced to 130kg, the number of parts has been cut nearly in half and the amount of platinum catalyst has been reduced from 80g to just 30g.

A GM Hydrogen Fuel Celll Test Vehicle

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In an interview with BBC, Carlos Ghosn, the head of Renault-Nissan, has outlined how he is pinning the future of his company on the electric car.

"I think the trends we’re seeing are all pointing in the same direction," he said. "Oil is a challenge, both price and availability. Regulations about environments are going to get tougher and tougher. I think the new generation is much more demanding about respect for the environment than we have ever imagined."

Mr Ghosn believes that the only technology which could compete with electric cars is the hydrogen fuel cell car but these are currently too expensive. On the other hand, he thinks that the cost of electric cars can eventually be reduced to one third of the present price.

Renault-Nissan is planning to build 500,000 electric cars per year - and will begin mass marketing in 2011. Renault and Nissan will each have a selection of four electric cars meeting different requirements. But he says that Renault-Nissan is the only company investing in that kind of capacity.

He believes that this will result in American, European and Japanese car makers having to merge while at least one Chinese and one Indian company will become a major supplier on the world market within a decade.

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Scientists at Northwestern University in Chicago have developed a new material which permanently traps only the radioactive ion cesium and not other harmless ions like sodium.

The material is made from layers of a gallium, sulfur and antimony compound. It has been found to be extremely effective in removing radioactive cesium - which found in nuclear waste but is very difficult to clean up - from a sodium-rich solution, similar to real liquid nuclear waste. The cesium triggers a structural change in the material, causing it to snap its pores shut, like a venus flytrap, and trap the cesium ions within. The material sequesters 100 percent of the cesium ions from the solution while ignoring all of the sodium ions.

The research was described in an article in the Nature Chemistry journal. The paper’s senior author, Mercouri G. Kanatzidis, Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences commented that "Seeing the windows close was completely unexpected, We expected ion exchange — we didn’t expect the material to respond dynamically. This gives us a new mechanism to focus on….A new class of materials that takes advantage of the flytrap mechanism could lead to a much-needed breakthrough in nuclear waste remediation."

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One of the biggest challenges for architects and developers wanting to integrate solar power generation with building materials is aesthetics. Many building-integrated solar technologies are also somewhat inefficient, which means that large parts of a building have to be covered with solar energy-gathering materials to get significant benefits.

The Center for Architecture and Science, which is a research and development collaboration between Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and architecture and engineering companies, including the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, thinks that its "Dynamic Solar Facade" can overcome these challenges.

The Dynamic Solar Facade is a glass frontage with rows of transparent, pyramid-shaped concentrators configured in a honeycomb pattern and hung on wires that move up and down, or twist side to side, to track the sun. Each concentrator has a lens that magnifies light nearly 500 times and directs it onto a solar cell made of gallium arsenide. The concentrators also bring light into the building while deflecting heat and glare, reducing the need for artificial light during the day.

The group claims that the Dynamic Solar Facade uses the sun’s light and heat with 60 to 80 percent efficiency.

The first full-scale demonstration project has just been installed  at the Syracuse Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems, which is scheduled to open in March. It comprises 64 concentrators in an 2.4-by-3-metres glass installation.

The Solar Facade is apparently stylish enough to satisfy the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.which plans to include it in a new student centre.
 

(Image: Centre for Architecture and Science)

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Swedish and American researchers have succeeded in producing a new type of lighting component that is inexpensive to produce and can be fully recycled. The invention paves the way for glowing wallpaper made entirely of recylclable plastic.

OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes) have recently been introduced commercially in some mobile phones, cameras and TVs. These consist of a light-generating layer of plastic placed between two electrodes, one of which must be transparent and is currently made from indium tin-oxide alloy.  OLEDs are relatively expensive because indium is rare and expensive and is difficult to recycle.

Now researchers at Linköping and Umeå universities in Sweden, and Rutgers University in New Jersey, have developed an inexpensive alternative to OLEDs - an organic light-emitting electrochemical cell (LEC) in which the transparent electrode is made of the carbon material, graphene.

Graphene consists of a single layer of carbon atoms. It has high conductivity, is virtually transparent and can be produced as a solution in the form of graphene oxide.

Because all of the LEC’s parts can be produced from liquid solutions, it is possible to make LECs in a roll-to-roll process, for example, on a printing press in a highly cost-effective way.

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