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The manufacturer of a hydrogen car unveiled in London on Tuesday will make its designs available online so the cars can be built and improved locally. The Riversimple car can go 80km/hr (50mph) and travels 322km (200mi) per re-fuelling, with an efficiency equivalent to 300 miles to the gallon.
The Riversimple car can go 80km/hr (50mph) and travels 322km (200mi) per re-fuelling, with an efficiency equivalent to 300 miles to the gallon.
The cars will be leased with fuel and repair costs included, at an estimated £200 ($315) per month. The company hopes to have the vehicles in production by 2013.
The company hopes to have the vehicles in production by 2013.
Ants, Battenberg cake and 37 years of heroic labour by one scientist will be celebrated today as the ingredients that brought the large blue butterfly back from the dead. This rare and mysterious insect became extinct in Britain 30 years ago but conservationists, led by Sir David Attenborough, will pay tribute to its remarkably successful reintroduction by visiting grassland in Somerset where the butterfly now flies in larger numbers than anywhere else in western Europe.
This rare and mysterious insect became extinct in Britain 30 years ago but conservationists, led by Sir David Attenborough, will pay tribute to its remarkably successful reintroduction by visiting grassland in Somerset where the butterfly now flies in larger numbers than anywhere else in western Europe.
Some 3.9 billion years ago, a shift in the orbit of the Sun's outer planets sent a surge of large comets and asteroids careening into the inner solar system. Their violent impacts gouged out the large craters still visible on the Moon's face, heated Earth's surface into molten rock and boiled off its oceans into an incandescent mist. Yet rocks that formed on Earth 3.8 billion years ago, almost as soon as the bombardment had stopped, contain possible evidence of biological processes. If life can arise from inorganic matter so quickly and easily, why is it not abundant in the solar system and beyond? If biology is an inherent property of matter, why have chemists so far been unable to reconstruct life, or anything close to it, in the laboratory? The origins of life on Earth bristle with puzzle and paradox. Which came first, the proteins of living cells or the genetic information that makes them? How could the metabolism of living things get started without an enclosing membrane to keep all the necessary chemicals together? But if life started inside a cell membrane, how did the necessary nutrients get in? ... In the last few years, however, four surprising advances have renewed confidence that a terrestrial explanation for life's origins will eventually emerge.
Yet rocks that formed on Earth 3.8 billion years ago, almost as soon as the bombardment had stopped, contain possible evidence of biological processes. If life can arise from inorganic matter so quickly and easily, why is it not abundant in the solar system and beyond? If biology is an inherent property of matter, why have chemists so far been unable to reconstruct life, or anything close to it, in the laboratory?
The origins of life on Earth bristle with puzzle and paradox. Which came first, the proteins of living cells or the genetic information that makes them? How could the metabolism of living things get started without an enclosing membrane to keep all the necessary chemicals together? But if life started inside a cell membrane, how did the necessary nutrients get in?
...
In the last few years, however, four surprising advances have renewed confidence that a terrestrial explanation for life's origins will eventually emerge.
