Hybrid Electrifies Racing Circuit

The Ginetta-Zytek hybrid racer from Corsa Motorsports combines two things we love best: high technology and auto racing. The gas-electric car ran again last weekend at Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, and we corralled driver Johnny Mowlem to ask the biggest question we’ve had since the car made its American Le Mans Series debut earlier this season:
What’s it like to drive?
“Cool!” Mowlem told us by phone after Friday’s practice session in the car, called the 09HS. You could almost see him smiling as he said it with his British accent. His enthusiasm for the car was infectious, and it’s easy to see he’s a big believer in the technology.
Le Mans–style racing has become the place where enviro-friendly ideas like biofuels and hybrid drivetrains are put to the test. The successes of the Audi and Peugeot diesels at Le Mans are well known, and here in the states the American Le Mans Series has ushered in a series of initiatives to make racing greener and the technology more relevant to cars the rest of us drive.

The cars of 2015

In automotive skunk works around the globe, designers and engineers are already plotting the car that you'll drive in 2015.
The big question is, will it look any different to the one you're driving now? The experts are divided but if the past six years are any guide, stand by for some dramatic changes.
In 2003, one in three Australian car buyers chose a large car. Since then, large car sales have halved and one of them, the Mitsubishi 380, has disappeared altogether. Smaller cars - ranging in engine size from 1.0-litre to 2.0-litres - outnumber large cars by almost three-to-one and now take up more than a third of the market.
Driven by the financial crisis and dwindling oil reserves, the industry is in the middle of a revolution as profound as the switch from horse and cart to internal combustion engine. The next decade could see more change in the cars we drive than the last century.
The lofty twin goals of zero emissions and zero fatalities will be the guiding pillars of vehicle development in the next six years, and beyond - driven partly by government mandate and partly by economic necessity.
In Europe, car makers will have to comply with tough laws that require their average CO2 emissions per car to be less than 120 grams per kilometre.
To give you an idea of just how high the bar is being set, less than a dozen models on the Australian market currently come in under that number.
Our top-selling model, the Holden Commodore, emits more than twice that level (next month a new engine will reduce emissions by 12 per cent).
The rules will be almost as tough in the US and Asia, which means all imported cars in Australia will, by default, be greener. So what else is likely to change by 2015?
Traffic jams are likely to be quieter and healthier affairs as most manufacturers are moving rapidly towards stop-start technology, which turns off a car's engine when it's stopped

Energy and Transport

Meanwhile, humans were learning to harness other forms of energy. The earliest known use of wind power is the sailboat.[citation needed] The earliest record of a ship under sail is shown on an Egyptian pot dating back to 3200 BC.[citation needed] From prehistoric times, Egyptians probably used "the power of the Nile" annual floods to irrigate their lands, gradually learning to regulate much of it through purposely-built irrigation channels and 'catch' basins. Similarly, the early peoples of Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, learned to use the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for much the same purposes. But more extensive use of wind and water (and even human) power required another invention.

The wheel was invented in circa 4000 BC.
According to archaeologists, the wheel was invented around 4000 B.C. The wheel was probably independently invented in Mesopotamia (in present-day Iraq) as well. Estimates on when this may have occurred range from 5500 to 3000 B.C., with most experts putting it closer to 4000 B.C. The oldest artifacts with drawings that depict wheeled carts date from about 3000 B.C.; however, the wheel may have been in use for millennia before these drawings were made. There is also evidence from the same period of time that wheels were used for the production of pottery. (Note that the original potter's wheel was probably not a wheel, but rather an irregularly shaped slab of flat wood with a small hollowed or pierced area near the center and mounted on a peg driven into the earth. It would have been rotated by repeated tugs by the potter or his assistant.) More recently, the oldest-known wooden wheel in the world was found in the Ljubljana marshes of Slovenia.[35]
The invention of the wheel revolutionized activities as disparate as transportation, war, and the production of pottery (for which it may have been first used). It didn't take long to discover that wheeled wagons could be used to carry heavy loads and fast (rotary) potters' wheels enabled early mass production of pottery. But it was the use of the wheel as a transformer of energy (through water wheels, windmills, and even treadmills) that revolutionized the application of nonhuman power sources.