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Awesome chart shows you how far you can drive on empty

Every car is different.

Photo from Pixabay.

Running on empty.

There are two types of people in this world—those who panic and fill up their cars with gas when the needle hits 25% or so, and people like me who wait until the gas light comes on, then check the odometer so you can drive the entire 30 miles to absolute empty before coasting into a gas station on fumes.

I mean…it's not empty until it's empty, right?

But just how far can you drive your car once that gas light comes on? Should you trust your manual?

Now, thanks to a post from industry leader in automobile repair Your Mechanic, you can know exactly how far you can go on empty. Of course, as people who care a lot about the health of your car, we've gotta note that Your Mechanic does warn that driving on a low fuel level or running out of gas can really damage your car.

Proceed at your own risk.

fuel efficiency graph

How far you can go on empty.

Graph from Your Mechanic.

Here's a link to a larger version of the chart.

These are, of course, approximations that depend on several factors, including how you drive, your car's condition, etc. So don't automatically blame Your Mechanic if you find yourself stranded on the side of the road.


This article originally appeared four years ago.

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An oil pipeline leak in Alabama is about to affect the entire East Coast.

If you drive a car, you may want to fill up your tank sooner rather than later.

A major pipeline that serves 13 states on the East Coast has been closed after a massive spill was discovered on Sept. 9, 2016.

Repair efforts were delayed by bad weather, and experts are now saying that the pipeline has been closed long enough that it will start punching consumers right in the wallet.

Photo by Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Images.

“We’re starting to see the dominoes fall where this will become an issue that will affect motorists’ wallets for sure,” said Patrick DeHaan a petroleum analyst at GasBuddy. “It could become not only a wallet issue but a fuel availability issue.”

The Colonial Pipeline delivers about 40% of the gas used on the East Coast of the United States.

Many states have already taken steps to prevent a chaotic gas shortage freakout.

Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama have waived rules that limit how many hours truck drivers can travel so they can speed up fuel deliveries.

On Sept. 14, hoping not to disrupt fuel transport, the EPA ended a Clean Air Act summer requirement for cleaner gas two days early for 13 counties in Georgia and five counties in Tennessee.

Photo by Phillippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images.

And Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley declared a state of emergency in Shelby County after the gas spill.

So yeah. Things aren't looking great. But don't get too worried.

For the most part, gas consumers on the East Coast will see a price spike and not much else. Repair efforts are underway at the pipeline and (hopefully) everything will be back up and running normally before long.

The truly fascinating thing about this story is that it highlights just how powerful fossil fuels are in our economy.

Even if you set aside their harmful environmental effects (which you shouldn't), watching our economy bend and shape itself with every change in gas availability is alarming.

This outage has already driven gas futures up 5%, which is only the third time this summer that they've gone up that much.

And honestly, I have no idea what gas futures are, but the effect of gasoline on the economy is pretty stunning.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

As the prices rise and fall, there's a huge impact on the wallets of everyday people — and when that price can be affected so greatly by something like an accidental spill, it puts our economy and livelihoods in a weirdly fragile place. It gets weirder when you remember that the majority of the gas we use comes from overseas.

Loosening our dependence on fossil fuels could help ease crises like this in the future. Imagine if more drivers on the East Coast had electric cars. *Thinking face emoji*

For now, East Coasters will just have to wait it out.

The pipe will be fixed, the spill will get cleaned up, and eventually everything will return to normal.

The real question is: How much longer will we let fossil fuels push us around?

Heroes

The haunting reason these sculptures were designed to sink slowly into the mud.

This ghostly statue marks the site of a often overlooked, but devastating natural disaster — one that is sadly still ongoing.

Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images.

In 2006, steaming hot mud erupted, without warning, from a rice paddy in eastern Java, Indonesia, sweeping through a dozen nearby villages.

Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images.

20 people were killed, and thousands more were forced to flee their homes permanently.

Footprints in a house overwhelmed by the mud flow. Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images.

The statues were erected by sculptor Dadang Christanto in 2014 to commemorate the eighth anniversary of the tragedy.

Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images.

Since they were installed, the sculptures have have been sinking slowly — by design.

"They were not in mud when they started," Christanto told Australia's Saturday Paper in 2015. "And in one year they are nearly submerged. They will disappear. It is not just the environmental disaster but the social disaster."

May 30, 2016, marked the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the deadly mud flow.

Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images.

While there have been no more fatalities, mud continues to pour out of the volcano to this day.

There's also strong evidence that the disaster was manmade.

Activists stage a protest on the fifth anniversary of the disaster. Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images.

A 2015 report published in Nature argues that the gas needed to trigger the eruption could only have been unearthed by a nearby oil and gas drilling operation.

"We're now 99 percent confident that the drilling hypothesis is valid," Mark Tingay, the paper's lead author, told The New York Times.

(Other experts continue to disagree, arguing that the mud flow could have been caused by an earthquake.)

Like the Deepwater Horizon spill, this eruption demonstrates how lack of attention to the potential side effects of drilling can have disastrous consequences.

The nearly 40,000 Java residents who were forced to flee their homes have endured an often painful resettlement process. Many initially took shelter wherever they could find it — often in local markets.

"We couldn't shower, we couldn't wash our clothes," Sadli, a factory worker who was displaced by the mud flow, told the Chicago Tribune. "For every toilet, there were dozens of people constantly in line."

Some victims were eventually compensated. Others are still waiting.

When Lapindo, the company in charge of the drill operation allegedly responsible for the eruption, proposed installing two new wells near the site of the disaster, protests erupted and shut down the project.

Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images.

That isn't to say we should stop drilling for oil and gas altogether.

Icky as oil can be, we need it for the time being, and natural gas can be an alternative to far dirtier sources of power.

But the statues serve as a kind of warning: When we mess with nature without taking the proper precautions, we don't just put our environment at risk.

An artist paints at the site of the sinking statues. Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images.

We put ourselves at risk too.

Heroes

A scientist figured out how to get data from farts, and it could save lives.

Darn tootin'!

"What did you EAT?!"

Photo via iStock.

It's probably the most common question that follows an untimely (or, timely, depending on who you're with) bout of flatulence.

I'm talking about farting, people. Letting one rip. Making a stink. Going "Insane in the Methane."

GIF from "The Simpsons."

Though we've given a nickname to each and every one of their many variations — the "squeaker," the "SBD," the "Dutch oven" — and used them as the punchline to many a juvenile joke, the only thing more discomforting than a fart itself is how little we actually know about them.

Some experts will tell you that the old one cheek sneak is a sign of healthy gut microbes. Others will say that it could be an early indicator of a much more serious stomach problem, like inflammatory bowel disease or even colon cancer. I'm pretty sure that not letting them go causes spontaneous combustion, but what are we supposed to think?! If only there were someone who could settle this debate once and for all!

Thankfully, there is one man who thinks he has found a cure for our wind-breaking woes.

His name is Peter Gibson, and he's the professor and director of fartology — which I've learned is technically called "gastroenterology" —at the Alfred Centre and Monash University in Australia.

Over the past few years, Professor Gibson has been working tirelessly to create a device capable of measuring our gas at each stage of digestion.

“What comes out of the backside only tells us about the last 20cm of the gut,” Gibson said to BBC. “We know bits and pieces about it, but it’s been very difficult to get to the crux of what is happening."

Recently, Gibson's team had a breakthrough in the form of a tiny, swallowable, high-tech capsule that tracks your gas as it passes through your system.

Think of it as a "fart monitor," if you will.

Me right now. GIF from "30 Rock."

Wired to provide real-time measurements of our bowels, Gibson's capsule takes samples of gas at regular intervals in the digestive system.

The capsule then relays its readings to a tablet computer. It's also affixed with a sensor to evaluate other key factors about the gut, like ambient temperature and acidity (which especially comes in handy when the capsule is nearing the end of its Magic School Bus-esque journey).

“You want to know if it’s passed out of the backside, but you wouldn’t know because it’s just part of the stool,” Gibson explained. “When the temperature falls, that’s when it’s gone outside.”

Gibson has already begun testing his pill device on pigs and is hoping to begin human trials in the next few months.

If all goes according to plan, Gibson and his team will be able to use the information taken from these trials to create (I'm not joking here) a "fart library" of data that could determine the makeup of gases related to different lifestyles and diseases down the line, more accurately measuring the effects of different treatments for these diseases.

The gases we produce can tell us a lot about the state of our stomachs.

Photo via iStock.

How we digest food is not only a matter of our differing diets and metabolisms, but also a matter of gene development as well. When the microbes in our intestines become irritated or otherwise harmed, they can release excess gases that not only cause discomfort, but also serve as precursors to other health problems.

For example, too much hydrogen and methane in your farts could mean you have problems with digesting carbs. Too much methane could be the cause of your constipation. Excess hydrogen sulphide (aka the stink in our stink bombs) could signal that the lining of your gut has become damaged.

Basically, our farts are like snowflakes — unique and individual to us all. And a change in their odor could be a cause for concern.

So I say bravo to Gibson and his team for rolling their sleeves up and doing the dirty work required to ensure our future well-being. May his findings truly cause a stink in the gastrointestinal scientific community.

Now if only there was a similar capsule that could actually convince the people around us that it really was the dog's fault...

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