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That iconic motoring program on the BBC – Top Gear – is a truly wonderful combination of British humor, motoring information, and slavishness to gas-engined vehicles. Even diesel power plants get short shrift from the three presenters: Jeremy Clarkson is the leading, highest paid, member of the trio who has a house in the Home Counties west of London but is also a tax exile, living on the Isle of Man for a proportion of the year in fear of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs; Richard Hammond is the height-challenged one who appears to have death as one of his primary wishes and dresses like an Hawaiian refugee; James May is the smart one with a degree in music, a sensible attitude to life, and a feeling for the comfortable things in this world. In one of their episodes the dynamic trio went to San Francisco to drive three quasi-supercars to Bonneville, UT. Two of the vehicles were on loan from their manufacturers but Dodge determined at the last moment that as the program kept trashing their ...

It’s hard to imagine a high-speed auto race without the roar of powerful engines and the perfume of exotic fuel hanging in the air, but that’s precisely what the promoters of the EV Cup, a sort of a Grand Prix for electric vehicles, have in mind when they kick off their inaugural series this summer. It’s not like there haven’t been other electric vehicle races, but most of them (like the Tour de Sol and the Solar Challenge) focused more on squeezing the most miles out of a kilowatt than seeing how quickly you could get between point A and point B. But now that batteries, drive trains and other EV technologies are maturing, it’s about time that adrenaline junkies like me got a little electric stimulation. In comparison to the 200+mph fossil (or methanol) burning behemoths that inhabit today’s tracks, the 115mph top speeds of the Westfield-built formula cars that will be the primary vehicle for this first EV race series won’t be the sort of thing to get a hard-core NA...

The choices in materials and technologies that Catherine and I had to make when we overhauled our aging kitchen were a good reminder of the kinds of challenges we all face in moving our society towards a sustainable future. Weighing the cost/benefit ratio of bamboo versus engineered flooring, LEDs versus compact fluorescent lighting, and various insulation schemes also reminded me that many of the important choices we will make involve at least as many economic issues as technological ones. Some of the choices that Catherine and I made for our kitchen will actually have positive long-term economic payback while some are pretty much a wash. Still others will cost us a bit more no matter what they save but still make sense in terms of the resources they save or the jobs they will help create: factors which don’t easily fit on the manufacturer’s ledger books. In most cases there will be several “correct” answers to choose from, depending on how one weighs the non-traditional but very rea...

It’s conventional to end one year and start the next by celebrating the events of the former and hoping for the best in the latter. I wish I could do that, but a story has been burning in my mind for the last six weeks and it finally has to be told. It may cost me the next time I travel to, or in, the US by air, but life has always been full of risks of one kind or another. So-called full body scanners at airports became a controversy, it seems, only after the US TSA (Transportation Security Administration) decided to implement fairly invasive pat-down techniques to presumably force more passengers to undergo the scanner regimen. The cries of ‘don’t touch my junk’ seemed to be a focus for those who have/had concerns about the scanners themselves, but the noise level has unfortunately dropped off. The TSA labels the body scanners as Advanced Imaging Technology and says that the two types of product that are being used – ‘millimeter wave technology’ and ‘backsca...