Media Watch

Scott Samuelsen, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center, located at UC Irvine, [writes]: You’d have to be completely uninterested in cars or any other type of transportation to not recognize that automobiles are undergoing a major transition.

On his first visit to Melbourne in 2009, Stanley Grant, a drought expert and professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine, had a question for his taxi driver. “How’s the drought?” he asked. “It’s about 28 percent,” came the reply. Grant was puzzled. But shortly afterward, they drove past an electronic road sign announcing that the city’s reservoirs were indeed at just 28 percent of capacity.

UC Irvine engineering professor James Earthman demonstrated in 2014 how quickly a swing can launch a 3,000-degree spark into the brush. … “It was when companies started making other clubs out of titanium that these fires stated to occur, in particular irons and hybrids made of titanium are particularly hazardous,” he said.

A 2014 UC Irvine study determined that titanium alloy clubs caused sparks that generated a small brush fire at Irvine's Shady Canyon in 2010 and another a few years earlier at Arroyo Trabuco. … Chemical engineering and materials science Professor James Earthman, lead author on the study, said: "When the club strikes a ball, nearby rocks can tear particles of titanium from the sole of the head. Bits of the particle surfaces will react violently with oxygen or nitrogen in the air, and a tremendous amount of heat is produced. The foliage ignites in flames."