My two passions both tend to involve guilt. As much as I love tech and travel, both tend to involve environmental mayhem and emit more carbon than my mums baking. Neither of which is a good thing from an environmental perspective.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology must also love long haul travel, because they've been working on a propulsion technology that has the potential to completely revolutionise air travel.
Going from A to B at the moment requires that a significant amount of aviation fuel is burnt by jet engines. This has the unfortunate effect of introducing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, along with a multitude of other environmental nasties that'd get the pulse of many a dedicated environmentalist and airline PR person going into overdrive. Equally worrying, fuel costs are often cited by airlines as being one of the major contributors to the high costs of air travel.
In the near future however, if the team at MIT have their way, electrically powered ionic wind thrusters will replace jet engines to provide energy-efficient and clean propulsion.
Warning Science Ahead
Ionic thrust is created when an electrical current is passed between two electrodes. The physics gives me a migraine, but cutting a long story short, it appears that if one electrode is thinner than the other, air flow happens in the space between the electrodes - Apply enough juice to the right electrode design and voila! You've got thrust and there's no need for fossil fuel.
