challenger

Peeking under the hood at the EcoCar Challenge

It's hard enough building an electric car from the wheels up, carefully selecting lightweight materials and creating an efficient yet robust power train with commercial appeal. But it's arguably tougher to take a stock approximately 4,000-pound hybrid SUV, remove its internal bits, design and squeeze in alternate components not designed for automotive uses around an existing infrastructure, put everything back together, and hope it passes a 300-point safety check.

Now try tackling all this during finals.

As part of the GM's EcoCar Challenge, a program sponsored in conjunction with the Department of Energy and several automotive suppliers, 16 university teams of undergraduate and graduate students are competing in a three-year competition to plan, develop, and refine an alternative fuel SUV that meets commercial and consumer standards.

Competing for more than $100,000 in prizes each year, teams are required to replace the SUV's existing hybrid engine and transmission with an extended-range, plug-in electric, fuel-cell, or all-electric power train using their choice of B20, E85, or liquid hydrogen fuel. The vehicles are judged on fuel economy, well-to-wheel emissions reduction, performance, and towing, to name a few factors.

On May 20, I visited GM's Desert Proving grounds in Yuma, Arizona as the teams prepared to test their vehicles in the second stage of the competition. Seeing these modified SUVs in various stages of undress and watching students racing to troubleshoot and reassemble their vehicles like young Nascar pit teams, I quickly realized that my college experience was a waste of time. … Read more

Mississippi takes top prize in EcoCar challenge

Students from Mississippi State University placed first in the 2010 EcoCAR: The NeXt Challenge finals in San Diego Friday after designing and building a biodiesel extended-range electric vehicle (EREV).

Teams from 16 universities competed in the Year Two Finals of the three-year competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and General Motors. The competition challenges engineering students to re-engineer a GM-donated vehicle to minimize the vehicle's fuel consumption and emissions, while maintaining its utility, safety, and performance. The teams have been preparing for the final testing and inspection of the competition for the past week.

"This … Read more

Testing, inspections underway for EcoCAR teams

For the next five days, 100 college engineering students from universities across North America will be making last-minute preparations on their eco cars before the vehicles are judged.

This is the end of the second year of the EcoCAR: The NeXt Challenge, hosted at the General Motors Desert Proving Ground in Yuma, Ariz. EcoCAR is a three-year competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and GM that challenges each team to re-engineer a GM-donated vehicle using a range of alternative technologies and integrating them together to make their own unique architecture.

"The students spent two years designing … Read more

Gates Foundation to fund 78 more health projects

In its fourth round of funding, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenges Explorations grants have been awarded to 78 science projects, with each collecting $100,000.

Through its grants, the five-year, $100 million initiative aims to foster "creative projects that show great promise to improve the health of people in the developing world," and as part of the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative is supported by the Gates Foundation.

This latest round of grants brings the total number of Exploration projects receiving funding to 340. Although the group originally anticipated funding roughly 60 projects … Read more

Multimedia notes and 2D Motocross racing: iPhone apps of the week

Is Apple really the next big gaming-hardware company? I mean, sure, I'm aware there are thousands upon thousands of games in the app store and that the iPhone and iPad are changing the way we think of touch-screen games, but I never would have guessed Apple would be in the same conversation with Sony's PS3, Microsoft's XBox 360, or the Nintendo Wii.

Apparently, Apple is making a much bigger splash in the gaming market than I thought because now, according to the Times Online UK, Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata, is calling Apple the "enemy of the future." … Read more

Washington to award $1 million in tech challenge

In a bid to stimulate future jobs and industries, the U.S. Department of Commerce is offering a million dollar incentive for people who can come up with the best ideas to commercialize technology.

Announced on Monday, the new i6 Challenge will award up to $1 million to each of six winning teams with the most creative ideas on how to make different innovative technologies profitable in their regions. Washington's goal is to ensure that the right technologies make the leap from the test lab to the marketplace to help the U.S. economy stay alive and competitive.

Run … Read more

Self-help snake oil

Mystic Board is at it again, providing useless, atrociously designed software under the guise of offering personal insight and self-improvement. MB Motivation And Self Help is a suite of Mystic Board programs that we've encountered before individually, and we're sorry to say that packaging these programs together did not make them any less ridiculous.

The three programs included in MB Motivation And Self Help are Subliminal Message Software, Hypnosis, and Color Therapy. All three of these are encased in horrible interfaces that are cluttered with Mystic Board advertising. We started with the Subliminal Message Software, which was laughable. … Read more

How it's made: Dodge Challenger

Check out a behind-the-scenes look at the Brampton Assembly Plant, in Ontario, Canada, as a Dodge Challenger rolls off the line. This video covers different aspects of assembly: from paint to the installation of a Hemi.

Slide the blocks to unblock

Unblock Me Free is the free version of Unblock Me, a simple but stylishly made puzzle game in which you solve spatial challenges involving rectangular wooden blocks.

The gameplay and interface are fittingly simple: you use your touch screen to slide blocks back and forth inside a tight grid (only left and right, or up and down, depending on the block's placement), maneuvering them around in sequence so that you can slide a red block out of the grid. This setup is the same on every level, but each time you have to move a different set of blocks … Read more

MIT floats ideas in DARPA balloon challenge (Q&A)

MIT's Riley Crane only found out about DARPA's red balloon challenge a few days before it started. Yet his team went on to win the contest through its savvy use of the Internet.

The challenge posed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency asked people to find the coordinates of 10 red weather balloons floating above the U.S. in one day. Since no one individual could plot the location of all 10, participants had to figure out how to work with others to solve the puzzle.

Team MIT's strategy was to build a Web site designed … Read more