They use biodiesel (which is, functionally, not dissimilar to regular diesel).

It's not a case of being correct or incorrect mathematically, in the same way that neither "library" nor "bibliotheque" is the correct way to refer to a building full of books you can borrow. They're different combinations of letters, but they represent the same thing.

If you make judicious use of brackets, order of operations becomes irrelevant. PEMDAS is just an agreement for how to interpret equations that don't make judicious use of brackets, and so it affects how we write them down, but not the fundamentals of maths itself - and water boils at the same temperature, whether you refer to it in Fahrenheit or Celsius or Kelvin.

>So the only way to make something "run for a long time" as a power source is to really really slowy take energy away from it. Why would we bother to do that?

I agree with everything you're saying, but there are some fairly obvious answers to this question, because there are plenty of things that require very little power but that are difficult or impossible to service and thus you want to last a very long time - pacemakers, for example, or certain robots designed for space that use very low power, very long lasting nuclear power sources.

Haha! Woops - nitrogen oxide!

The age is irrelevant - the ULEZ is charged based on the declared Nitrous Oxide emissions from the car. However it's been illegal to sell new cars in the UK that don't comply since about 2005, which is why you often hear the age of the car being brought up - but the age itself isn't actually relevant.

Human ingenuity may be just as natural, but it's benefits are still notably different to adaptations gained via genetic success stories. In evolutionary adaptations, the changes themselves and the benefit gained are inherently linked - a creature develops wings which allow it to fly, an octopus develops the ability to blend it to its surroundings itself which allows it to hide, a giraffe's has a long neck which enables it to reach tall leaves etc. There may be situations where reaching tall leaves isn't actually beneficial (eg in a field with no trees), but the benefit of being able to do so will always exist with a giraffe with a long neck.

​

This isn't really the same with human intelligence and ingenuity, which has a much more diffuse relationship between the driver and the outcomes much of the time (and certainly in most of the cases in which people specifically survive when they wouldn't normally, rather than simply elongating or improving their existence). For instance, human ingenuity means we're able to synthesise insulin for the benefit of diabetics, but my possession of human intelligence doesn't allow me to spontaneously create insulin in the middle of a field. I can't cross a furious river simply because humans are capable of building bridges, or survive a fall because we can build parachutes.

​

Case in point, we know that people 10,000 years ago were no less intelligent or ingenious, yet lived lives far more ravaged by 'natural selection' than we do today. We benefit from a huge accumulation of knowledge, skills, relationships, transportation, standing-on-shoulder-of-giants research, supply chains etc any parts of which could be potentially be taken away. So the fruits of our ingenuity are huge - leading the OP to ask his question - but if all the libraries and servers were burnt down tomorrow we'd potentially see ourselves back to the living standards of 10,000 years ago, eschewing these huge benefits in a way the giraffe and his long neck don't really have to worry about.

It definitely hasn't always been everywhere. My grandfather - British - served during the 2nd World War in a Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers workshop in India, fixing broken down vehicles for the war effort. The way my dad describes it, he had a very good war because he seemingly spent the whole time dicking around with tools and stealing bananas from the back of lorries on a motor bike.

​

He knew what bananas were but, in the UK at least, they were rare items that perhaps you'd get as a treat at Christmas, in much the same way if you were lucky you might get a satsuma or clementine around Christmas. But there, in India, where bananas were grown locally and incredibly plentiful, they'd transport them around in the back on these slow, ponderous, open topped lorries. He would have to take various vehicles out for drives to test them after fixing them up, so whenever he had something fast he took it upon himself to grab a stick, go for a ride and try and hook a bunch of bananas like he's trying to win a stuffed toy at a fairground.

​

I imagine the locals thought he was a bit nuts, risking life and limb for these boring fruit that were ten a penny but for him they were these absurdly exotic treats and here he was, able to hook more in one grab than he'd ever seen in one place in his whole life. And that was only 75 years ago!

I don't suppose many cars could drive at their full BHP until their tank was empty, though, so it's sort of comparing apples to oranges.