This is my last posting for the next few days. I will be taking my office apart so that we can move to our new apartment downtown next Tuesday. I will be unplugged and disconnected except by tablet. Expect me to be back in the saddle before the end of next week probably in time to pro

In this month’s Report on Business Magazine, a  supplement that comes with The Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s national newspapers, Stanford University’s Mark Jacobson provides a best case scenario for powering our planet in the year 2030. A civil and environmental e

One of my readers recently asked me to write about flying cars. I have looked at this technology in the past and considered it of little value as a common mode of transportation. Cars drive on roads. Airplanes take off from private or commercial airports. When you fly you file a fligh

Another interesting week of technology and science announcements has led me to pick the following five stories:   World’s Biggest Companies Tackling Climate Change; Idaho Potato Gets Better by Mixing Genes from Five Spud Varieties; Google Timelapse Shows Decades of Planetar

It lasted a mere five minutes, but the X-51A Waverider Scramjet last test flight on May 1st reached speeds of Mach 5.1 before crashing into the Pacific Ocean. Scramjets are seen by many aviation engineers as a less expensive alternative to rockets for launching payloads from Earth to

Last week I finished reading Al Gore’s latest tome, a follow up to his well publicized “An Inconvenient Truth,” probably his most significant contribution to the global climate change debate, although I would think “debate” is an over statement at this st

Quebec-based Lito Green Motion has developed an all-electric motor bike that comes with a 12 Kilowatt lithium-polymer battery. Called the Sora which means “sky” in Japanese, the bike has a range of 300 kilometers (185 miles) per charge. Using a conventional outlet it takes

A veritable cornucopia of gadgets can be found at Open Source Technology, featuring the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), a modular, low-cost technology platform from which you can manufacture 50 different types of machines including: 3D printer 3D scanner 50 Kilowatt wind turbi

Waste sulfur, seen below in the image of an Athabaska oil sands production site, is being transformed into lightweight plastic for use in electric batteries. The research into a new chemical process has been headed up by University of Arizona and involves contributions from Seoul Nati

It may seem counter intuitive but RoWheels has reinvented the way you use a wheelchair by using a rowing motion to move forward. The inventor is Salim Nasser, a mechanical engineer at NASA in Florida. Salim, who suffered paralysis from an accident a number of years ago, studied wheelc