So, you also create a wormhole between Mercury and Mars... and transport Mercury over to Mars. Since Mercury is basically a big nearly-melted metal ingot it will add some much needed mass, as well as enough metal content to hopefully give Mars a magnetic field that will be useful in deflecting the solar wind. It might take a couple millennia for the surface of the new planet to settle, but the impact energy should keep things warm for a while. Boosting Mercury to Mars' orbit and matching orbital parameters with Mars would be quite a challenge. Don't forget that you need to somehow arrange for the angular momentum of the new planet to be correct so that you keep a reasonable daylength.

Collecting exercise data and keeping it for later analysis or comparison can be a great motivational tool especially when you're in the early stages of an exercise program. On a day to day basis it may not feel like you're getting any more fit or going faster, but you can look at a trend line based on a month's data and clearly see that you're going farther, faster, and at a lower perceived effort level (or with a lower heart rate).

Some fitness metrics are hard to quantify based on a single exercise session, so it's worth it to have data for different days, doing different things.

Disclosure: I design and test fitness monitoring products for one of the companies mentioned by several of the posters. As a group we're some of the fittest nerds around.

You know it's bad when paraphrasing actually corrects the "facts" presented in the tech tabloids. Thanks for pulling up the correct quote (and figuring out the correct interpretation).

They state "long UV wavelengths and short IR wavelengths", both in the linked article and the EE Times parent. I'm sure the researchers have it the right way around... this should be a great enhancement to the overall usefulness of solar cells.

The problem with any internal combustion engine is it's hard to control the combustion process so completely that you don't get any intermediate products out the tailpipe.

The GP said "the combustion products of methanol are relatively harmless" and that's the part I'm taking issue with - I think that because methanol can be cheaply synthesized from a number of different feedstocks, it's a good candidate for a gasoline substitute, and I've actually used M-85 blend in my race car. The higher octane number of methanol allows you to bump the compression ratio way up and gain some efficiency that way.

One of the reasons that methanol and ethanol produce fewer emissions than gasoline is that either of those alcohols is a much simpler molecule (just one or two carbons) while gasoline is actually a blend of 6- to 9-chain carbons, with varying amounts of branching. The reference "octane" molecule that has an octane number of 100 is actually a pentane with three methyl branches. So the number of intermediate products that are possible in gasoline combustion just boggles the mind, where methanol combustion really only has a couple of possibilities. I'm guessing that if methanol becomes a more common fuel in the future we'll see methanol specific catalysts in the exhaust and they will take care of the aldehyde problem... but in the meantime, methanol exhaust is not "relatively harmless".

One of the combustion products of methanol is formaldehyde, and that's not harmless.

Linky to Wikipedia

The car will charge whenever the user plugs it into the wall... because otherwise the battery would be ballast for half the time and that's not how anyone will want to use it. Having the charger regulate itself according to some internal clock would simply be defeated by having the user reset the clock as required to get the car into the charging mode.

The only way that "charging at night" could be enforced is if the car-charging wall outlet was switched by the power utiltity...