New Battery Tech from MIT Promises to Revolutionize Electric Devices Inclusing Vehicles

Forbes has this interesting piece about a new battery material that could help recharge conventional rechargeable batteries 100 times as fast. This would mean reducing charging times significantly for any product that needs recharging - or, much faster times to recharge your electric car or motorcycle and bring the times closer to filling a tank up. The developers feel that this technology could be available as early as 2011.

I say Bring it On! Let's show fossil fuels the fist asap! And, most importantly, congratulations!

Why India Cannot Really Move Forward on Anything

While this is not directly related to an environmental issue, it has everything to do with why India cannot seem to progress on any front - the environment included. Many years ago when I was a boy, the ambition of anyone who was a few years older than I was was to get a "government job." The average Indian could not think any further than becoming a bureaucrat. Those were the years when Indira Gandhi ruled, followed, as I gew older, by her equally thuggish son Rajiv. The Indian state could do little more than carry out the Gandhis' diktats and continuously hammer the average Indian in every way possible. Corruption was one of the most prominent ways among these - you still cannot get ANYTHING done with an Indian government office without paying a bribe. But this is, again, off topic in the light of today's post.

Considering the number of new environment friendly power generation and green building technologies that are available today, has anyone paused to wonder why no one - yes, not a single Indian business - has even bothered to do something to bring some of these technologies to a country that always gloats when it is referred to as a "technology powerhouse?" The answer may be in Sramana Mitra's piece in Forbes at this link: http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/26/india-angel-investors-technology-enterprise-tech_india.html?partner=technology_newsletter

Indians seem to make good servants but lousy entrepreneurs. Let's face the facts here - when students from the Indian Institutes of Technology, considered India's answer to MIT etc, do not want to do anything more than get a job, there can be little hope that anything would go ahead to lead the country into a pioneering direction. If this sounds harsh, it is not what I am saying myself. There is, sadly, a lot of evidence that this is absolutely true. The occasional small piece of good news that comes out is nothing much. What is glaring is the amount of wasted potential in a country that produces more engineers in every single year than the USA, the world's most technologically advanced nation, produces graduates.

A Cheaper Vehicle Innovation Than What You Usually See Here - Will an Indian Bicycle Manufacturer Pick it Up?

Green Daily has this very interesting green bicycle innovation which uses Li-ion batteries to make cycling easier: http://www.greendaily.com/2009/02/27/mit-develops-the-ultimate-lazy-biker-innovation-greenwheel/ Designed at MIT, the USA's premier engineering college, the device does seem to make a lot of sense for countries like India and China which pollute in a huge way and which also have many more bucycle users than most other countries do. India also has the world's largest bicycle manufacturer, Hero Cycles. I do think that if this were incorporated into the design of bicycles sold in these two countries in a big way and if they were offered to the public, not only would they help reduce pollution and help poor people cycle more easily, they would also help bring costs down on economies of scale.

Let's see where this leads, though. Like most other innovations, my suspicion is that the Chinese might pick it up and produce a cheapened version, but that in India it will go nowhere.

MIT Scientists Mimic Photosynthesis in the Lab With Positive Implications for Solar Power

Yet another breakthrough has been made and it promises to make Solar Power even more efficient and cheap in the future. The engineers at MIT have managed to use solar power to initiate the splitting of oxygen and hydrogen in a solar cell, something that this website explains: http://www.physorg.com/news136738014.html The inventors of this process are confident that it could be perfected in about 10 years' time. Hopefully, if alternative methods are used in increasing degrees during this period, fossil fuel could be shown the fist for once and for all by the time this technology is perfected.

What fantastic news to end the weekend with! May the brilliant folk at MIT come up with more inventions that would accelerate this process forward! Thanks, ladies and gentlemen!