Speeding Downrange Barry Hathaway

We're not sure how your week was, but for a team of mechanical engineers, speed junkies, and gearheads from Ohio State it was anything but slow. This week the team took the Buckeye Bullet version 2.5, the team's battery powered, all-electric landspeed racer out to the Bonneville Salt Flats to break the electric car land speed world record, and they did exactly that, hitting a peak speed of 320 miles per hour.

The Buckeye Bullet team -- a collaboration between the Ohio State University Center for Auto Research and a handful of sponsors -- has been racing electric cars for well more than a decade, but the VBB2.5, as it's known, is their first landspeed racer that runs purely on battery power. Last year their hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered VBB2 set a world record for fuel cell-propelled land vehicles by running a mile at an average speed of 302.877 miles per hour (the two-way average was a slightly lower 300.992 miles per hour).

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You may not have heard about it during your local traffic report this weekend, but anyone negotiating the Beijing-Tibet expressway in recent days is painfully aware of the problem: a 62-mile jam that slowed traffic to a crawl between the Chinese capital and Jining city. But while such huge traffic jams aren't unheard of, China's traffic woes are unique in their duration - the current traffic snarl (it's still ongoing) has been unfolding since August 14, making for nine days of gridlock. Read more »

Ferrari Simulator This image shows the robotic arm Ferrari simulator without a steering wheel attached. The simulator includes a force-feedback steering wheel and pedals. via Cyberneum

The hot-pink industrial arm whips you around while you sit in the driver's seat

Paolo Robuffo Giordano and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, must really enjoy their jobs. Their CyberMotion Simulator is intended to realistically replicate the experience of driving a Ferrari without actually having to buy one.

Players sit in a cabin on a robot arm about 7 feet off the ground and drive a Ferrari F2007 car around a projected track. Read more »

The Bio-Bug

Think your car runs like crap? A sewage utility in Bristol, UK, has converted a Volkswagen Beetle to run on human waste. The Bio-Bug is the first car in the UK to run on byproducts of sewage processing, and if its trial run is successful Wessex Water, the utility company that made the car, might build a whole fleet of them.

Wessex's Avonmouth sewage treatment plant was already producing methane gas, which it refined from the waste treatment process and used to power the facility. But there was surplus gas available and the company didn't like to see it going to waste. So they decided to build a sustainable car. Read more »

Each 3D Fast Bus can carry over a thousand passengers

Public transit in a metropolitan area is all about balance; if there aren't enough public transit options, too many people choose to drive, clogging roadways and adding to pollution. But trains are expensive (and, if above-ground, contributors to traffic) and adding more buses to the road can magnify traffic woes further. Enter the 3D Fast Bus, a futuristic concept vehicle that carries passengers above street level, straddling the lanes below so traffic can pass freely underneath. Read more »