Electric cars, electric bikes, electric trains, and even electric trucks. Everyone seems to be jumping on the (electric) bandwagon. Cummins Inc., a leader amongst commercial diesel engine manufacturers, has just unveiled their fully electric truck! The truck, which they are calling Aeos, is an 18,000-pound truck that runs on a fully electric engine. It’s capable of hauling a twenty-two ton trailer and its battery can fully charge in around an hour. The truck can only go about one hundred miles on a single charge, making it a great local delivery vehicle. Cummins Inc. also has plans to build a hybrid truck that, while still reducing emissions, will increase the mileage range of the single battery charge.
Last week people were treated to a solar magic show in the form of an eclipse. An awe-inspiring event when the moon crossed in front of the sun. People flocked from all over to witness it. Regardless of how beautiful the sun is, people should not be looking at it without proper eye protection. And when we say eye protection, we’re talking about eclipse glasses or indirect viewers made from cereal boxes, not sunscreen on your eyes. Hospitals reported people complaining of eye pain after applying sunblock to their eyes for viewing the eclipse. Not only does this not prevent the type of eye damage caused from staring at the sun, but it no doubt is going to cause a host of other issues. So please, when North America is ready to view the 2024 eclipse, if you don’t have glasses, get crafty with a cereal box. Don’t put sunblock on your eyes.
Whether you take a bus, carpool, bike or walk, you have to be safe when you’re commuting. A bed and breakfast in Scotland takes this thought seriously. So seriously they have supplied their chickens with safety vests so they can be more easily seen when crossing the road. We may now finally have the answer to the age old “why did the chicken cross the road” question. Because it could, and it did so safely.
Traffic is frustrating. We can all agree on that. But to what lengths would you go to avoid your stop-and-go commute? For one man in Munich, Germany, he became so frustrated with his traffic-riddled commute that he decided he’d swim to work instead. He would sit in traffic on a road that ran along a river until one day he decided he’d start swimming to work. With the help of a special floating waterproof container that holds his clothes and laptop he swims and floats on past the traffic he once contributed to. The commute is a little over a mile and with the current, takes him around twenty minutes to get to work. In the colder months, he trades his swimsuit in for a wetsuit, but he no longer has to trade his sanity to get to work on time.
Whether it’s your dream or not, for a lot of people they dream of one day owning a high-end supercar like a Ferrari. One English man made his dream a reality by purchasing a Ferrari 430 Scuderia, a car that costs just under $300,000. Not more than an hour after he bought the vehicle, he crashed it on the highway. The Ferrari was found off the road, on fire, and reduced to not much more than a scrap of metal. Miraculously, the owner walked away from the crash virtually unharmed. The saying goes, “With great power comes great responsibility.” In this case, the power was horsepower, and there seems to have been a need for more responsibility.
