Study Says Compressed Air Cars are a Pipe Dream
-- Focus on EVs

Compressed air cars are the ultimate romantic vision of our transportation future. A car powered by air? What could be better than that? A lot of things, it turns out. According to "Economic and Environmental Evaluation of Compressed Air Cars," a paper published in Environmental Research Letters (ERL), compressed air cars scored worse than electric vehicles on energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and life-cycle costs. The cars are, in other words, just plain inefficient.

All is not lost for air car devotees, however. While the ERL paper shows that compressed air hold less than 1% of the energy of gasoline, and that cars powered by the stuff could only travel 29 miles before a recharge, hybrid compressed air cars are viable -- and could even compete with hybrid electric vehicles.

That's good news for researchers banking on hybrid technology, but disappointing for the slew of companies (Tata, MDI, K'Airmobiles) hoping to make big bucks on compressed air cars. Of course, these companies probably already know that the technology is bunk, or at least nowhere near ready for production. Tata postponed its compressed air car indefinitely, and the other companies haven't said a word on when (or whether) their air cars will be ready. But we'll be still watching the New York-based startup Zero Pollutions Motors closely--the company claims it will have an efficient air car ready in the U.S. as early as 2012.

[Via Wheels]

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Ad With Dying, Computer-Animated Polar Bears
Stirs Controversy

What does shock marketing do for a problem as big as global warming?

How far is too far, in the effort to teach the public about global warming?

A U.K. group called Plane Stupid is drawing fire for a new ad they're airing, which depictes polar bears chucked from planes and falling to their death. It's meant to illustrate the point that every plane flight emits about 880 pounds of carbon-dioxide--about the weight of a polar bear. 

As Ed Gillespie, the co-director of sustainable marketing firm Futerra writes in The Guardian:

He goes on to make a very interesting point: Shock ads tend to work in cases like safe-sex, when it's a matter of making smarter personal decisions. You see a memorable ad, and you think twice before unprotected sex.

But global warming is a different problem--one of collective action, in addition to personal choice. And that's why Gillespie advocates ads that emphasize positive choices--such as the Airplot campaign by Greenpeace and these Trains vs Planes viral ads.

Shock ads like this one, meanwhile, pose a danger in themselves: If the theme of combating climate change begins verging on propaganda, then you risk having the public see it as one of political disposition, rather than something overwhelmingly supported by science. But then again, how else do you reach a public increasingly inured to advertising and largely ignorant of science?

[The Guardian via Treehugger]

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Market losses limited with late day buying

Markets bounced back late in the day. With monthly options expiring, it's always difficult to find meaning in this trading. Dow had been down 60 at its low but finished with a loss of 14, decliners led advancers 3-2 & NAZ lost 11 (again, hurt by earnings news from tech heavyweight Dell). Banks lost ground, the Financial Index has been weak for the last couple of weeks.

S&P 500 FINANCIALS INDEX


Value
196.20Change
-1.13 % Change
-0.6%


The Alerian MLP Index & Dow Jones REIT Index were each off almost 1 point. Both have seen selling in the last week. Junk bond funds were mixed to higher & continuing near their yearly high levels. The charts show, MLPs have done well in the last 2 months while REITs have had choppy trading & junk bonds have been fairly flat. The yield on the 10-year Treasury bond rose 1 basis point to 3.36%.


Alerian MLP Index --- 2 months




Dow Jones REIT Index --- 2 months




Barclays Cap Hi Yld Bond - 2 months





Commodities firmed in the PM. Gold is heading back for its 1150 record reached this week.

CLZ09.NYM..Crude Oil Dec 09..76.90 .. 0.56
......(0.7%)


GCX09.CMX..Gold Nov 09..1,146.40 .. 5.00
......(0.4%)


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DR Horton (DHI), 2nd largest home builder, suffered its biggest stock price decline in the last year after reporting a Q4 loss that exceeded estimates & saying the housing outlook remains difficult. Sales sank to only $1B (down 44%), the number of completed sales dropped 31%. Orders rose 26%, the first gain in more than 3 years, but DHI didn?t project a recovery to profit for 2010. "The thing that drives our business the most is job creation," said CEO Donald Tomnitz. "If we look at the macro economic environment, it?s not good for us." The stock is up sharply form the lows one year ago but today the stock fell off a cliff, plunging 1.83 (15%). The chart shows that speculation about a recovery in housing early on has disappeared.

DR Horton Plunges as Fourth-Quarter Loss Exceeds Estimates

DR Horoton --- 1 year





Without a lot of news driving late day buying, it has to be attributed to those options guys evening out positions. But the news from Horton is a reminder that this recession, especially in the important housing industry, is not ending soon!

Dow Jones Industrials --- 2 months

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Can Chegg Beat the Kindle at the Textbook Game

The Kindle may be the king of e-readers, but it has a long way to go before being accepted as an acceptable replacement for textbooks. When Amazon's device was introduced at Princeton for classroom assignments recently, it received mostly negative reviews. Now the Kindle's budding classroom legacy is being challenged by Chegg, an online textbook rental service that just raised a whopping $112 million in a round led by Insight Venture Partners.

Chegg deals in good old-fashioned print books, but saves paper by letting students rent textbooks in a Netflix-like model. The company, founded in 2007, already serves hundreds of thousands of students at 6,400 colleges, and the new cash infusion will allow it to grow even more. Unsurprisingly, it will probably be able to keep the Kindle at bay.

While school administrators have argued that the Kindle can cut textbook costs in half, Chegg's service takes 60% to 75% off a book's retail price. Not to mention that there's no upfront hardware cost. And while the Kindle may work just fine for novel or newspaper-reading, you'd think that it would be far from ideal for students who want to highlight or underline passages in a book. In fact, probably the main complaint about using the Kindle as a textbook is that it isn't interactive enough. Any student worth his or her salt likes to scribble notes in their reading assignments, or at least on post-its.

Yet Sarah Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., predicts in five years textbooks will be the biggest market for e-book devices. "The technical barriers willdisappear and five years is enough for the content to catch upwith demand. The potential is there," she told Bloomberg today. Granted the devices will improve, possibly even enough to win over detractors.

Until then, Chegg adds another sweetener for sustainability-minded students trying to decide between electronic or paper textbooks: For every textbook rented, the company plants a tree. So far, Chegg has planted 1.5 million trees--a testament to the enduring allure of print books.

[Via PaidContent]

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A Kindle Under Every Tree

The Kindle has been a hit thus far and has the potential to dominate the digital book market the way the iPod has for digital music. We all know how that has worked out for Apple (AAPL) in the last decade. Not to mention, Amazon's ecommerce site has[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://blog.ockhamresearch.com/index.php/2009/11/a-kindle-under-every-tree/

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Infographic of the Day: The Brains vs. Beauty
Quandry

Everyone understands the various categories displayed in this Venn diagram.

In hunting for a partner or a fling, we all known the trade-offs between beauty and brains. But we've never before seen a chart that so accurately describes the trials and tribulations of meeting someone worth dating.

Not a whole lot to say about this one--just check it out. (We recognize that even creating a chart to map these sorts of things--and listing attractiveness on an axis--presupposes a very male way of looking at things.)

But there are some interesting scientific data points in the brains vs. beauty quandary. Men really do prefer women with curves. In turn, curvy women are both more fertile, and tend to be smarter (and produce smarter kids). So among women, sexual selection does seem to be giving men what they want.

Women, meanwhile, tend to be attracted to more masculine men when fertile, and more feminine men when not. More masculine looking men tend to get that way because of higher testosterone levels--which in turn makes their sperm more viable. More feminine looking men are, at the very least, perceived to be more caring. So women, in turn, appear to have varying preferences, suited to finding both the best genes--and the man who'll take the best care of their kids.

[Via the very appropriately titled Chart Porn]

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Startup Weekend Starts Tonight!

We still have spots available.  The event starts tonight at 6PM (you can’t be late).  Register here: Dallas Startup Weekend.We are hosting Startup Weekend Dallas the weekend of November 20th - 22nd at our offices in the INFOMART.  Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TexasStartupBlog/~3/Gzut3TT-sf0/

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Can Protein Sciences Produce a Swine Flu Vaccine
in Time Update: Likely No

UPDATE: A FDA advisory panel has ruled that Protein Sciences' insect cell-based flu vaccine requires more safety tests before being made commercially available in the U.S. The panel said the vaccine appeared to be as safe and effective as more traditional egg-based flu vaccines, but there were concerns over a few patients who had adverse responses, according to Bloomberg. The FDA isn't required to take the panel's advice, but, considering how concerned the public is over vaccine safety already, it seems unlikely that the agency would go against the ruling. As detailed in the earlier post below, Protein Sciences received $35 million from the U.S. to develop a H1N1 vaccine last June, but the company spent the better part of last summer fighting involuntary bankruptcy.

As the start of a new school year begins, concerns over H1N1--aka swine flu--are growing. Everyone's waiting to hear when a vaccine will be available, and earlier this summer, the CDC predicted that 120 million doses of a H1N1 vaccine would be ready by mid-October. But that estimate was revised down to 45 million doses last week. One reason for the delay, according to an article in U.S. News & World Report, is that most manufacturers have been producing H1N1 vaccines using the traditional method, in chicken eggs, which is time consuming and can produce inconsistent yields.

One company that may have a faster solution is Protein Sciences, a small Connecticut-based vaccine manufacturer that has made a name for itself by specializing in an alternative approach using insect cells. Protein Science's process involves growing a fragment of the virusin insect cells, which is faster and produces a higher yield than thetraditional egg method, says Ted Ross, a vaccine researcher at theUniversity of Pittsburgh familiar with the company's work. Other groupshave used insect cell lines to develop vaccines, but the technology isstill relatively new, especially when it comes to large-scaleproduction. "The advantage of using an insect cell line is that itproduces a very high yield of flu protein," says Ross. On the downside,though, he notes, it's unclear whether vaccines produced in insect cells will work aswell in humans as those from eggs or mammalian cells.

Protein Sciences received $35 million from the U.S. government to develop a H1N1 vaccine using their insect method back in June. And last week, the company told the Hartford Courant they had beengranted FDA approval to start testing their vaccine in clinical trialsin the U.S. (trials are already underway in Australia, according to thecompany). Unfortunately, Protein Sciences--unlike the five othercompanies testing vaccines in the U.S., which include giants like Novartis andSanofi-Aventis--has also spent the past fewmonths fighting off involuntary bankruptcy.

And even if the company does remain solvent, the vaccine probably won't be available to the public until next spring, well after the larger companies release theirs. But the insect cell method of producing vaccines is likely to grow--let's hope it does so faster than the superbugs these vaccines are fighting.

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SocialCycling Turns Unrecyclable Products Into
Usable Items

We write a lot about upcycling, or the practice of reusing products for new purposes to prevent waste. Now DMD Green, an environmental management consulting company, wants to make the process even easier with its new SocialCycling program, which takes items that are nearly impossible (or impossible) to recycle and finds new uses for them.

The program, announced earlier this month, gathers reclaimed materials and post-consumer products from DMD Green clients at a central SocialCycling site. Once at the site, products are separated and delivered to artisans, manufacturers, and anyone else who might have use for them. PVC scrap, for example, is being given to workrooms in Africa to be turned into lining for backpacks. So SocialCycling simultaneously solves a disposal problem for a company and provides a service to African consumers.

In order to make sure its products don't end up in a landfill in China, SocialCycling monitors upcycled materials and products every step of the way. The program keeps a close eye on the chain of custody for its materials and offers a certification to organizations that meet its criteria of accuracy and transparency. In a way, SocialCycling isn't all that different from Terracycle. But instead of marketing its own upcycling products, SocialCycling acts as a central hub for givers and receivers of scrap material--kind of like a Craigslist for unrecyclable stuff.

[DMD Green]

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SocialCycling Turns Unrecyclable Products into
Usable Items

We write a lot about upcycling ,or the practice of reusing products for new purposes to prevent waste. Now DMD Green, an environmental management consulting company, wants to make the process even easier with its new SocialCycling program, which takes items that are nearly impossible (or impossible) to recycle and finds new uses for them.

The program, announced earlier this month, gathers reclaimed materials and post-consumer products from DMD Green clients at a central SocialCycling site. Once at the site, products are separated and delivered to artisans, manufacturers, and anyone else who might have use for them. PVC scrap, for example, is being given to workrooms in Africa to be turned into lining for backpacks. So SocialCycling simultaneously solves a disposal problem for a company and provides a service to African consumers.

In order to make sure its products don't end up in a landfill in China, SocialCycling monitors upcycled materials and products every step of the way. The program keeps a close eye on the chain of custody for its materials and offers a certification to organizations that meet its criteria of accuracy and transparency. In a way, SocialCycling isn't all that different from Terracycle. But instead of marketing its own upcycling products, SocialCycling acts as a central hub for givers and receivers of scrap material--kind of like a Craigslist for unrecyclable stuff.

[DMD Green]

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