Tag: Recently Read

Posted on

Ex-CEO of red-light camera company indicted on corruption charges

Filed under: ,

A former chief executive officer of one of the world’s largest makers of red-light traffic cameras was indicted on federal corruption charges Wednesday, along with two city officials in Chicago.

A federal grand jury returned a 23-count indictment against the three, alleging that ex-Redflex CEO Karen Finley provided approximately $570,000 in cash and other improper benefits to an assistant transportation commissioner in exchange for inside information that helped the Phoenix-based company win contracts in Chicago worth as much as $124 million.

For a decade, Finley schemed with city official John Bills to help secure the rights to city contracts by providing him cash, meals, hotel stays, rental cars and golf outings, according to the charges. Redflex funneled more money to Bills through a friend, Martin O’Malley, who was hired as an independent contractor by the company and passed some of his $2 million in compensation back to Bills, the indictment alleges.

"When public officials peddle influence for profit, the consequences are severe," said Zachary T. Fardon, US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. "When corporate executives enable that corruption, the same rule applies. We will attack alleged public corruption from every angle.

Continue reading Ex-CEO of red-light camera company indicted on corruption charges

Ex-CEO of red-light camera company indicted on corruption charges originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 14 Aug 2014 08:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

from Autoblog http://ift.tt/1owVS98
via IFTTT

Posted on

Scientists Turn Cigarette Butts Into Electrical Storage

Carp with a cigarette butt
Wouter Hagens, via Wikimedia Commons

The electrical power of the future just might be waiting in ashtrays across the world. Researchers in South Korea discovered that, with a one-step conversion process, cigarette filters turn into great supercapacitors. This is great news for anyone who wants new electronics that smell like Bourbon Street at 3 A.M.

Supercapacitors are an electrical storage alternative to batteries. In batteries, energy is stored in chemical reactants, while in supercapacitors, it’s stored as an electrical field between materials. Batteries are slow to charge and heavy, but they’re also compact and store great amounts of energy, which means they’ve long held an advantage in consumer products. But supercapacitors work where space constraints matter less: Braking in a car generates a lot of electricity, and in some cars supercapacitors capture that energy and then release it to get the car going again. Unlike batteries, supercapacitors can release bursts of power more quickly, making them useful in electronics like defibrillators. Think of it like static electricity from wearing wool socks on carpet – the charge builds up quickly and is then released all at once in a spark.

Well it turns out that the collections of fibers in cigarette filters have a lot to offer a supercapacitor. Here’s how the scientists described the process:

Used cigarette filters are composed largely of cellulose acetate. They are disposable, non-biodegradable, toxic and are a threat to the environment after usage. However, it has been reported that cellulose acetate can be directly utilized in the production of carbon materials containing a meso-/micropore structure by only a carbonization process [14]. That is, used cigarette filters could be used as a proper carbon source for supercapacitors. Importantly, carbonizing used cigarette filters in a nitrogen-containing atmosphere could provide the nitrogen doping on the carbon structure with the formation of such unique pore structures in a one-step process.

In essence, the scientists burned the filters in a nitrogen-rich environment, and this made the filter fibers grow pores, further increasing their surface area. According to their results, published in the journal Nanotechnology, these burnt-in-nitrogen fibers stored more energy than materials previously used in supercapacitors. With further research, this could be great news for both electrical storage and ashtrays everywhere.




from Popular Science http://ift.tt/1sGlj7y
via IFTTT