Car powered by aluminum

Aleix Llovet and Xavier Salueña

Inspired by the fusion-powered DeLorean from "Back to The Future", Aleix Llovet and Xavier Salueña from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya built a remote control car, called the dAlh2Orean, that captures hydrogen created by the interaction of sodium hydroxide and aluminium. The hydrogen is then used to power an on-board fuel cell, leaving no polluting waste material. Additionally, the remaining fuel material can be reprocessed. See more info in the press conference.

See a demonstration in the video below.

dAlH2Orean H2 R/C Car powered by Aluminium from Aleix Llovet on Vimeo.

Found here: Aleix Llovet - Xavier Salueña - dAlh2Orean | Geekosystem

Radiation Dose Chart

Randall Munroe (from xkcd) created this interesting chart about radiation dosage.

How Much Radiation a Person Can Absorb | Geekosystem

Pixar Up Balloon House In Real Life

The team of the new National Geographic show How Hard Can It Be? created a real-life version of the flying house from the Pixar movie "UP". They managed to take a 16×16x18′ house aloft using 300 8′ helium balloons. The house reached an altitude of over 10,000 feet and flew for about an hour. See video below:

Up Balloon House In Real Life | Geekosystem

500th exoplanet identified!

Did you know that astronomers already discovered 500 planets outside of our solar system (exoplanets)?


In the past 15 years, the count of those extrasolar worlds has climbed through single digits into the dozens and then into the hundreds. The pace of discovery is now so rapid that the catalogue of identified planets leaped from 400 to 500 entries in just over a year.


Scientific American interviewed Jean Schneider, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory, who is the record keeper of exoplanets in the The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia.


According to the Encyclopaedia, the closest exoplanet is eps Eridani b, which is only 3.2 parsecs away (=10.43 light years). A spaceship travelling at light speed would need ten years to get there. Unfortunately, technology is currently not available to build spaceships that get even near that speed. Maybe a matter/antimatter-engine will be available one day, if CERN can produce some more antimatter (see blog entry on antimatter here).

How One Astronomer Became the Unofficial Exoplanet Record Keeper