Introducing the Egg-Shaped Electric Two-Wheeler
At the New York Auto Show this week, General Motors Corp. and Segway unveiled a two-wheeled, two-seat concept vehicle that is more like a Segway than it is an electric car.

Built to carry two or more passengers, the prototype vehicle uses a lithium-ion battery and what GM calls "digital smart energy management" to travel at speeds up to 35 miles per hour with a range up to 35 miles between recharges.

The project, dubbed P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility), "represents a unique solution to moving about and interacting in cities, where more than half of the world's people live," Larry Burns, GM's vice president of research and development (R&D) and strategic planning, said in a statement. The project's team hopes the vehicle will also "allow designers to create new fashion trends for cars, and to focus on the passion and emotion that people express through their vehicles while creating solutions that anticipate the future needs of urban customers."

GM's sales of new vehicles tumbled 45 percent in March from a year earlier, and last week its CEO of nine years was ousted. But Burns said the P.U.M.A. prototype cost "only one half of 1 percent of G.M's typical engineering budget" for a year, the New York Times reports.

People Call for Triple Galaxy Photo - and Get it
The Hubble Space Telescope last week took a closer look at a group of galaxies called Arp 274 after 140,000 people around the world voted on six potential targets. The triple galaxy group won the "You Decide" competition with more than 67,000 votes.

"Arp 274, also known as NGC 5679, is a system of three galaxies that appear to be partially overlapping in the image, although they may be at somewhat different distances," according to the Hubble Web site. "The spiral shapes of two of these galaxies appear mostly intact. The third galaxy (to the far left) is more compact, but shows evidence of star formation."

The group is located in the constellation Virgo, 400 million light years away from Earth. The two bright stars at the right of the image are actually located in our own galaxy.

"The areas have previously only been photographed by ground-based telescopes," according to Wired.

Click image for larger view.
Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Livio and the Hubble Heritage team (STScI/AURA)

NASA held the contest as part of the International Year of Astronomy in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the telescope.

Slow Down: Art of Slow-Motion Science

Fist to face, fruits and foods in slow motion:

Ultra slow-motion cameras capturing Schweppervescence at 10,000 frames per second:

Bubbles shot at 250 frames per second:

Sources: Toxel.com (via TechEBlog) and Discovery.com

Unexpected Energy Generators
President Barack Obama's proposed spending bill for the 2010 budget year marks a dramatic shift away from support for fossil fuels to new renewable and "green" energy. Here are some energy projects the administration likely won't think to pursue:

• Underwater vibrations — "A novel method of generating power uses a network of metal rods to tap into the currents that flow along the bottom of the ocean (and along riverbeds as well)," Discover Magazine reports. "Water swirls as it flows past the rods, making them vibrate." A University of Michigan engineer's device can run efficiently on water flows of a few miles per hour.
• Exercise bikes — The so-called human-powered gym is an emerging exercise trend (fad?) that capitalizes on the obsession with green. If you're going to work out anyway, why not use the workout to make electricity? Basically, exercisers' burned-off energy is diverted and converted to power lighting fixtures, while excess energy is stored in a battery.
• Dance — Similar to the human-powered gym, the Sustainable Dance Club is an unlikely project that turns fancy footwork into kilowatts to power the club's basic utilities. Seriously.
• Hamsters — Scientists have managed to harness the energy-producing power of hamsters by strapping tiny detector jackets to the animals as they run on their cage wheels, capturing the biomechanical energy they release as they exercise. It would take 1,000 hamsters to generate enough energy to power a mobile phone.
• Urine — "Scientists have developed a way to turn pee into electricity," LiveScience reported in 2005. "And there's plenty where that came from, they point out." A 2007 Gizmodo post, titled Battery Passes Urine Test, Running 90 Minutes on Pee, stated that "a Pee Battery uses the ions in human urine to keep 1.5 volts streaming for 90 minutes. And its makers say it can be tweaked to last even longer."

Visit IMT on Tuesday for our "Inspired by Nature" issue.

Cheers.