NASA Announces Green Airplane Contest Winner-- Source: LATimes

For quite some time now the issue of cleaner aircraft has been a big deal to environmentalists. Currently aircraft including airliners and general aviation planes pollute a substantial amount and despite the money involved there was no real push for any alternative fuels. Fortunately greener technologies were being developed by various people and NASA helped push that drive by creating the first green aviation competition. This week NASA officially crowned the winners of the contest.

According to NASA the requirements for the contest were based entirely on fuel consumption and flight distance. Each aircraft was required to travel 200 miles while only burning a single gallon of fuel per occupant; all of this must be completed within 2 hours as well so the aircraft were required to be somewhat practical. The winning team was the first to successfully build and test a design meeting these requirements and the winning team was a private research team from Pennsylvania.

Thanks to the efficiency and speed of the aircraft the winning team managed to earn the $1.3 million dollar prize from NASA. Obviously there was a substantial amount of money spent to develop the technology but the company behind the design is hopeful that someday they will in fact be able to transfer everything they have learned in this project over to full size aircraft and airliners so that emissions will be reduced and the environmental impact of aircraft will be substantially reduced. All in all this is great news environmentally and technologically.

LG and GM Partner to Create Efficient Electric Cars-- Source:Wall Street Journal

General Motors and LG are both very well respected companies in their own right but today the two announced that they will be working together on an upcoming project. The project is, of course, a vehicle that will be designed by GM but LG will have significant input in terms of power and battery technology. Thanks to new technology from LG, GM is hoping to create some highly efficient cars.

At this time the project is still in early development but LG and GM say that this ongoing partnership could help bring incredibly efficient electric vehicles. Of course LG is not new to the automotive game as they already supply GM with power plants for numerous electric or hybrid vehicles that are currently available.

The fact that two major companies like this are finally willing to work together on a major efficiency project such as this is very good news according to environmental analysts. Without help from major corporations it would be nearly impossible to ever have truly efficient vehicles; the hope is that GM and LG together will be the match made in heaven needed to create the newest wave of efficient cars. At this time GM and LG have not announced a possible reveal date for upcoming cars but given the rate at which the electric car market is expanding it seems likely that GM and LG will both be working quickly to get something ready for the market as soon as they can.