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The main reasons: (1) awareness, people know that a variety of consumer cars exist (2) negative incentives that push people away from gasoline powered cars, eg fuel taxes (3) positive incentives, exemption from road tax, purchase tax and free parking (all temporary) and (4) extensive recharging infrastructure. Other countries have some/all of these elements, but Norway has pushes mostly and the result is that the nissan leaf was the best sold car in September and October, beating all other cars.

If there's anyone who could afford such things, it is Norway... According to http://xkcd.com/980/, Oljefondet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway) is currently worth nearly as much as US has spent on wars. I mean, all of them together... One of the biggest problems in Norway is what to do with this money without damaging the economy in the long run :-)

Driverless cars will soon be a reality on the roads of Nevada after the state approved America's first self-driven vehicle licence. The first to hit the highway will be a Toyota Prius modified by search firm Google, which is leading the way in driverless car technology.

makes me think of the trend years ago to promote car-pooling and avoid 1 driver per car. The trend continues!

TU/e is participating in the new Cruiser class of the World Solar Challenge. This competition entails building an eco friendly family car (instead of a racer) to prove that solar powered transportation is possible. Actually this car produces more solar power than it needs and has a range of 300+ km.

A 7x7x3m large unfolding structure from the car trunk. "Before the design is ready to roll, the team still needs to tune up the solar components, a challenge made more difficult by the pavilion's inherent mobility, making it impossible to gauge how sunlight will fall on it."

around 56 espressos per mile..

how many of the ACT members actually have a car? maybe we are trendsetters :-)

"chances are that if 700 passengers are flown annually, up to 10 of them might not survive the flight in the first years of the operations." most remarkable also the question who is to blame if a dead and burned space tourist corps comes crashing down from the sky into your car.

This calls for some we serious simulations by the Petkow code it seems to me ...

I still would need some serious input data...

Spooky cars on the road

yes but they do not drink & drive

A "four-wheel drive car" less than one billionth the length of an average SUV has been built and operated by researchers in the Netherlands and Switzerland.

"Molecular machines are common in nature. Motor proteins, for example, can move along a surface to transport molecular-sized cargo and are often used to build structures within living cells. " reminds me of the fantastic movie on what happens inside a cell ...

ooops ....

Where is the sticker saying "if found, please post this item unstamped to the following address"?

Yup, it's ours... Still, better take it out of the river than in the face. Such a big one especially.

Quoting Elon Musk, "it does seem kinda wrong"...

Is it just me but isn't this just needlessly complicated? I mean, you can design the plug on the car, its horizontal and symmetric. Why not just translational motors. Probably because its boring and one wants to make a metal Dr. Octavius tentacle of course

Precisely!

looks nice at least .... 

Be careful, the article is written by the company who did the migration to Ubuntu. Here is a comment by a police guy from IT (in french...). In brief he says that tyhe migration was not a problem for most of the people; exepc for some probleme with access. But it did cost money ! and the saving was not the main argument. "Personnellement concerné par la news qui n'en est pas une, je peux vous assurer que le message de Canonical est surtout commercial... Le choix d'Ubuntu est dû à son hégémonie et le fait que ce soit basé sur du Debian qui est considéré comme très stable. La distrib est d'une maintenance plus aisée que la plupart de celles qui ont été testées. "4500 postes" veut dire "4500 unités de gendarmerie" donc dans les brigades que vous connaissez... Pour ce qui est d'OpenOffice, le passage s'est fait assez tranquillement sauf pour les applis Access qui ont eu un peu de mal à passer sur le module Base...La plupart ont été reprise au sein d'applis php/mysql ou d'applis centralisées... Aujourd'hui, les gendarmes qui je le rappelle ne sont pas informaticiens mais vivent pour vous (au sens le plus strict je vous l'assure) utilisent donc firefox/thunderbird et oppenoffice en clients lourds, le reste étant des applis sur l'intranet ou "invisibles" pour l'utilisateur. Le passage à Ubuntu ne gène en rien dans l'utilisation car le trio précédemment cité est déjà connu et maîtrisé par nombre de mes collègues. Je ne suis pas censé m'exprimer en lieu et place de mes supérieurs mais à titre personnel, le choix d'Ubuntu est un choix intelligent car c'est une distribution avec une prise en main très accessible et avec une maintenance vraiment aisée pour les spécialistes informatiques dont je fais partie...Il ne faut pas oublier qu'une distribution plus élitiste aurait été maîtrisée par moins de monde et donc la maintenance aurait été plus coûteuse... Donc aujourd'hui nous "maîtrisons" cette part de notre infrastructure et la trans

Lotus Notes doesn't run on Linux anyway...

James bond compatible (without the music after the middle)

nice development! - not sure if it survives a crash test in this form at 70 or 110 km/h

interesting wrt our space4energy grid study ....

Just got this very shocking link that I want so share. This is how designers see biomimetics...

Collaborative desing of a car - Could the technical approach be useful for spacecraft design?

An short article about something called biomimetics. To all I understand, it is not.

500000 lego bricks, a tank of compressed air, some mechanical engineering and a lot of time later...