BMBF Project Puts Automated Electric Vehicle on the Road

The German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) funded project UNICARagil aims to rethink vehicles and their development processes. The goal is a disruptive, modular and agile vehicle architecture and the prototypical implementation of four different application cases from automated family taxis to mobile package delivery stations.

As early as 2013 TUM’s Visio.M drove its rounds remotely operated.

Autonomous electric vehicles will be an essential component of future mobility: they will form the basis for sustainable and intelligent road transport, novel mobility and transportation concepts, improvements in traffic safety and a boost in the quality of life in urban environments.

However, requisite vehicle concepts require a significantly more centralized and efficient data processing and transmission in motor vehicles and, consequently, a departure from established architectures and processes.

Read the Science and Technology Research News story - “BMBF Project Puts Automated Electric Vehicle on the Road.”

Piloting aviation industry through a changing climate

There’s something rather unsettling about eerie pictures of flooded airport runways, and it’s not just the submerged jet bridges. Such photos capture the type of disruptive scenes that could become more common in the future, as the effects of climate change continue to ramp up.

Flying into a changing climate.

New attention to the issue shows that airports and airlines around the world will be affected by climate change in various ways. Consider this past summer’s spate of heat-related groundings in Phoenix, when 120 degree-air temperatures spurred a single carrier to cancel more than 40 flights out of the city. A recent study by scientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, at Columbia University, anticipates more troubles along those lines in coming years).

“There are a number of potential climate change impacts on aviation operations,” said Perry Flint, a spokesperson for the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Impacts range from “reducing the take-off performance of aircraft, to increased storminess – meaning flights have to route around weather more frequently,” he said.

Read the Yale Climate Connections story by Daisy Simmons - “Piloting aviation industry through a changing climate.”

Pointing to the past is a fallacious and weak argument

Those who deny climate change point, without fail, to the past to substantiate their arguments.

Doing that, they argue, as they point to the past: “This is not new, it’s happened before”.

Yes, it is unquestionably easy to do that and find the equivalent of what is happening now, but that overlooks two important and critical matters.

Years, often decades stood between events of the past and today those same, or similar disruptive happenings are an annual occurrence.

And worsening that, those places disrupted by those climatic events are more closely settled and so have populations vastly exceeding those of the past.

A modern and current example of that is unfolding at San Paulo in Brazil.

The country’s largest city is nearly out of water and, of course, those who deny climate change, can quickly point to history and say “Oh that happened 80 years ago, so that is nothing new.”

Those justifications overlook the simple and critical fact that eight decades ago, San Paulo was home to just 200 000 people, while today some 20 million people live in the city.

A story on Real Clear Science, headed: “Brazil's Largest City Almost Out of Water”, explains what is unfolding in the country’s capital city.

Be persuasive. Be brave. Be arrested (if necessary)

Be persuasive. Be brave. Be arrested (if necessary) is what financier Jeremy Grantham argues in a story published in the latest International journal of science, “Nature”.

Jeremy Grantham.

In the November 14 story, Grantham declares he is yet to meet a climate scientist who doesn’t believe that global warming is a worse problem than they thought a few years ago.

“I am a specialist in investment bubbles, not climate science. But the effects of climate change can only exacerbate the ecological trouble I see reflected in the financial markets — soaring commodity prices and impending shortages,” Grantham said.

Considering Grantham’s views, along with the overwhelming evidence of climate change and its potential civilization-ending implications, the responsibility to become more obvious to others and active falls with us.

Beneath the Wisteria organizer, Robert McLean said: “I’m not naturally inclined to be confrontational or disruptive, but the stakes in this conversation have become so large that I’m being forced to reconsider my position.”

“Each of us needs to think about the realities of climate change, how they will impact on family and friends and how we could best invigorate the thinking of our communities enabling them to understand and address the unfolding difficulties associated with our changing climate,” Robert said.

“Let’s”, he said, “talk about the next time we gather Beneath the Wisteria on November 24 at 11:30am.

Read the full Nature story here – “Be persuasive. Be brave. Be arrested (if necessary)”.