Another week survived means another week’s worth of science news goodies for you lucky, lucky people!

First up : using the body of the car as a capacitor in order to increase the range of hybrid or electric cars.

First, a nit to pick in the article.

The capacitor car parts do not add much energy…

Ellipsis mine. And of course the capacitor car parts don’t add much energy, Popular Science, because a capacitor only stores energy, it doesn’t generate it.

They don’t add energy to the car’s system any more than your kitchen sink adds water to the water system.

(Yes, I know what they meant. I guess I am just feeling persnickety. )

Anyhow, that mental itch scratched, I quite like this idea. Obviously, while it doesn’t specifically mention this in the article, these would be insulated capacitors, so there would be no chance of you getting a serious zap from your car door or hood.

What I like most about the idea, besides the immediate prospect of making electricity using vehicles more efficient by getting around the battery weight-to-power paradox, and hence making them more affordable and practical, is that it shows that people are thinking outside of the internal combustion box and realizing that working with electricity gives you an enormous advantage over working with chemically generated mechanical motion via internal combustion.

There is a whole complicated part of the traditional automobile called the “transmission” because its job is to transmit power from the engine to the wheels. It’s expensive, hard to make, requires a lot of moving parts, and loses massive amounts of energy (and hence efficiency) at every coupling.

In an electric vehicle, power is transmitted by a freaking wire.

Next up, we have Iceland rewriting their constitution with the help of the Internet.

As usual, Popular Science overstates the case by claiming Iceland is “crowdsourcing” their new Constitution and other such malarkey. No country, even one in such incredibly dire straights as Iceland, whose entire economy went south with the economic collapse of 2008, would crowdsource their Constitution.

That would be just asking for a Constitution that was all about boobs and cats.

But what is actually happening is still pretty interesting, because the people who are working on said Constitution are taking an enormous amount of input from the Icelandic people via Twitter, Facebook, and other Internet avenues, and that will make this new Constitution the first one in history with such a wide base of opinion in its foundation.

While I am sure most of what the people contribute will not be terribly useful, what I like most about this approach is that a Constitution is the very sort of thing where you want as many people trying to think of potential pitfalls and omissions as you possibly can. It is, in many ways, the ultimate contract, the contract between a government and its people, and you want to cover as much as you can possibly cover without making the document completely incomprehensible.

So hats off to the men and women at the heart of all this, the ones who have to take all this input, add it to their own best intentions and diligence and intellect, and try to come up with a single, solid document that will stand the test of time.

If all goes well, this new Constitution could be an extremely awesome document, something that expresses the best ideals of our era in language of power and simplicity, just like previous Constitutions did.

Presumably, it will include provisions about keeping government morons from betting the entire treasury on real estate ponzi schemes.

Finally, in their never ending quest to fill the world with awesomeness, Google has recently added millions of miles of oceanographic date to their Google Earth application.

They are calling it Google Ocean, and while it does not cover the entirety of the oceans of the world, it does cover half of what we have mapped, which is an area the size of North America.

So now you can virtually explore thousands of miles of seabed, just like you were Jacques Cousteau, from the comfort of your computer chair.

Who knows, maybe some fresh eyes on a user-friendly form of this data will lead to fresh discoveries!

Well, that’s it for this week’s Roundup. Tune in next week for more science brain candy!

Oh, wait, there’s one last thing, something I haven’t been able to fit anywhere else.

CATS IN TANKS!

Cats in Tanks from Whitehouse Post on Vimeo.