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Freakonomics looks at innovation in NASCAR.

With the exception of a few road course races, most of the NASCAR races are held on ovals. The cars always race counter-clockwise on the ovals, meaning the cars only turn left.

Given all the attention that learning and expertise has been getting, I’m deeply curious as to what would happen if for one race NASCAR went in the opposite direction, so that it was all right turns. I understand that they would probably have to do a lot of work to the cars, because the cars must be optimized for left turns, but put that aside. Would lap times be appreciably worse because the drivers would have trouble cornering? Would there be more crashes? Would the same drivers excel?

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Fast Company looks at the fuel efficiency of America’s trucking industry.

“Trailer aerodynamic improvements are much less developed,” the 2009 DOT study reported.”There is little interaction between tractor and trailer manufacturers, and as a result, there has been no effort to treat tractor-trailer aerodynamics as an integrated whole.”

A rectangular metal box, it turns out, may be the worst possible shape to haul down the highway at high speeds. It’s a fashion show of new forms on the road: trailer skirts, trailer tails, and “SuperSingles” all designed to reduce the wind resistance sucking the efficiency out of America’s freight shipping fleet.

The top three trailer makers, Wabash, Utility, and Great Dane, now provide trailer side skirts–panels along the bottom of the trailer which reduce wind resistance and improve mileage, like those on the Walmart truck pictured here–as factory installed options. ATDyanmics manufactures the TrailerTail, which smoothes out the airflow around the back of the trailers, and they’ve reportedly sold about 5,000 (Ed: This number has been corrected from 100,000) in the last 12 months alone.

“There is no more low hanging fruit left for fuel savings in the tractor or cabin, other than that of driver habits,” wrote Babur Ozden, chief operating officer of ATDynamics which makes trailer aerodynamic devices, by email. “Getting another 1% fuel efficiency from the tractor is same as getting 5% from the trailer.”

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Wired Magazine looks at a new book visualizing the effect of skyscrapers.

Kate Ascher’s 2005 book, The Works: Anatomy of a City, was essentially a wiring diagram of the city of New York—every city, really—intricately detailing the mechanics of urban infrastructure. (You’ll never be more enthralled by a sewage-system infographic.) Now Ascher’s back with another eye-widening piece of illustrated deconstruction, this one on the most enduring symbol of city life—The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper. “I love the complexity of cities and their total dependence on the invisible systems that keep them running. Skyscrapers are cities in the sky,” she says. The Heights features more than 200 pages of explanations, diagrams, and remarkable stories. It wasn’t easy to pick just one, but we aimed high.

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Fast Company looks at the new border crossing in Georgia (think USSR, not the Bulldogs).

Border crossings are supposed to feature somber, vaguely intimidating architecture. Georgia, apparently, didn’t get the memo. The former Soviet republic commissioned German starchitectJürgen Mayer H. to design a security checkpoint between Georgia and its southern neighbor, Turkey, on the Black Sea, and what he gave them was this: a giant concrete squiggle. Yep, a squiggle.

Mayer’s office doesn’t tell us much about the project except that the top squiggle is used as a “viewing platform” and the building is conceived so that it “welcomes visitors to Georgia.”

Does that say “welcoming” to you? We can’t decide. Either it’s the world’s friendliest Panopticon tower or the world’s biggest, most sinister-looking puzzle piece.

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FastCompany.com looks at ideas to reduce carbon emissions.

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT): This is far from a new technology, as the first bus rapid transit was introduced in Curitiba, Brazil in 1974. BRT is generally associated with dedicated lanes, elevated bus stops to expedite exit and entry, and high frequency. When implemented correctly, BRT systems get awfully close to the ride, speed, and comfort of light rail or subway systems at a fraction of the cost. Currently there are approximately 120 BRT systems around the world. BRTs make a lot of sense because they provide the convenience of rail systems at a fraction of the cost and can move a lot of people on a daily basis. The Bogota Transmilenio serves nearly 1.5 million people daily. Obviously, this results in a significant reduction in carbon emissions–and in fact the Bogota system was the first transportation project approved by the UN Clean Development Mechanism as a carbon project. What’s next for BRT? How about electric, smart-grid connected buses? PerhapsProterra will enter this market soon.

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DARPA is awarding one lucky company $500,000 to study the possibility of sending a human to a neighboring star. The New York Times looks at the new ‘star shot’.

The awarding of that grant, on Nov. 11 — 11/11/11 — is planned as the culmination of a yearlong Darpa-NASA effort called the 100-Year Starship Study, which started quietly last winter and will include a three-day public symposium in Orlando, Fla., on Sept. 30 on the whys and wherefores of interstellar travel. The agenda ranges far beyond rocket technology to include such topics as legal, social and economic considerations of interstellar migration, philosophical and religious concerns, where to go and — perhaps most important — how to inspire the public to support this very expensive vision.

Photo Credit: Adrian Mann

Fast Company looks at Saudi Arabia’s bid for tallest building in the world.

Saudi Arabia is set to shatter the record for the tallest building in the world, with a slender, asymmetrical spire that rises at least 3,280 feet in the air — more than twice the size of the Willis Tower, the tallest building in the United States, and 568 feet higher than the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.

The $1.2 billion Kingdom Tower will be built in north Jeddah, the major urban center of western Saudi and an historic gateway to Mecca just off the shores of the Red Sea. The building, by Chicago-based Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (Smith also designed the Burj Khalifa while at SOM), pairs new developments in skyscraper technology with a sleek, “three-petal” form inspired by the folded fronts of young desert plant growth. “The way the fronds sprout upward from the ground as a single form, then start separating from each other at the top, is an analogy of new growth fused with technology,” Gill says.

The tower’s got a slick, aerodynamic shape with tapering wings that’ll help slash structural loading caused by the wind. A high-performance facade is expected to reduce energy consumption, and notches in each of the skyscraper’s three “petals” will create pockets of shade, shielding occupants from the harsh desert sun and providing outdoor terraces with views of Jeddah and the Red Sea.

Photo credit: Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture

The Wall Street Journal discusses the future of air travel as the airlines would have us believe:

A new generation of planes—including jets from Airbus and Bombardier Inc. and led by BoeingCo.’s 787 Dreamliner, which is slated to enter service with Japan’s All Nippon Airways Co. sometime this summer—promises to offer passengers a less taxing environment. “Physically, people will feel better when they leave our 787,” says Kent Craver, regional director for passenger satisfaction and revenue at Boeing.

The plane is built largely with high-tech, carbon-fiber composite material in place of metals. The material allows air pressure to be set at the equivalent of a lower altitude than on current planes and the humidity to be set higher, making passengers more comfortable. Today’s commercial jets typically simulate an altitude of about 8,000 feet in the cabin. The Dreamliner, Boeing says, can bring that down to as low as 2,000 feet.

The Dreamliner’s windows are another feature designed to give passengers a more pleasant ride. The windows will be the largest on any commercial jet, allowing more natural light to enter the cabin. But they also will allow individual passengers greater control over how much outside light enters their area. The traditional pull-down shades have been replaced by a passenger-controlled button at the base of each window that darkens or lightens the window. Flight attendants will be able to take control of all windows in situations where they want everyone to have a clear view, such as landings and emergencies.

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Wired magazine looks at the future of black box technology, specifically black box technology in planes. New units could use ‘the cloud’ to prevent data loss in an accident.

The Iridium network, which covers the entire globe with 66 orbiting satellites, could probably accommodate the bandwidth needed to transmit at least the 88 required parameters from the 8,000 or so commercial flights in operation at any moment. Krishna M. Kavi, a professor of computer science at the University of North Texas, estimates that the worldwide demand would be about 64 megabits per second, only a portion of which would have to be sent by satellite. Using different assumptions, Seymour Levine, an inventor who has devised his own telemetry, estimates the maximum bandwidth requirement at 25 Mbps and the total storage requirement for a day’s worth of data at 100 gigabytes—a quarter the speed of a fast broadband connection and less disk space than an iPod classic.

This data, aggregated terrestrially instead of scattered among thousands of black boxes constantly flying around the world, would inevitably call forth other uses. Airlines could mine it for information about flight operations and use it to schedule maintenance and fine-tune fuel efficiency. Jet engines are already among the most closely monitored machines in the world, but manufacturers can always use more data; FLYHT AeroMechanical Services claims that its system, called AFIRS, detected and transmitted a warning about an out-of-spec turbine vibration in time to prevent a possibly catastrophic in-flight failure aboard one of its customers’ planes. But to really think outside the, um, box, you have to consider the implications of having all this information while the airplanes are still in the air.

Photo credits: Henrik Knudsen, Brown Bird Design