News: Energy
DOE is offering $52.5 million for research, development, and demonstration of concentrating solar power (CSP) systems that provide low-cost electrical power both day and night. CSP technologies...
Blog
Walter Cronkite, arguably the best-known and respected television news anchor of the past half century, died last Friday at 92. Cronkite left an indelible mark on the face on television news journalism, covering many of the main events and interviewing many of the world’s key leaders shaping the 20th...
News: Energy
Wood science researchers at Oregon State University have made some surprising findings about the potential of microcrystalline cellulose – a product that can be made easily from almost any type of plant fiber – to...
News: Energy
The U.S. Department of Energy announced the availability of up to $85 million toward the development of algae-based biofuels and advanced, infrastructure-compatible biofuels. DOE seeks to bring together...
News: Green Design & Manufacturing
There's a new way to fabricate efficient solar cells from low-cost and flexible materials. The new design grows optically active semiconductors in arrays of nanoscale pillars - each...
News: Green Design & Manufacturing
Smog is made up of an array of air pollutants, including mercury. One Ryerson University researcher has found that summer is the peak season for this atmospheric toxin, and that higher levels of mercury species...
News: Energy
Scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have come up with an innovative approach that can safely and economically extract and convert heat...
News: Green Design & Manufacturing
The accidental discovery of a bowl-shaped molecule that pulls carbon dioxide out of the air could offer new possibilities for dealing with global warming, including genetically engineering microbes to...
Articles: Government
U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced up to $32 million in Recovery Act funding, which is designed to support the deployment of hydropower turbines and control technologies to...
Blog
July 20 marks the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, the first space mission to land on the Moon. Astronaut Neil Armstrong’s words - “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” – arguably depict one of the finest moments in U.S. history. The landing was the culmination of a massive collective effort by the U.S....
News: Green Design & Manufacturing
Photovoltaic and wind energy plants, hydroelectric power stations, and biogas plants can be complex to design and maintain. In designing a hydroelectric power station, an engineer needs to know...
News: Green Design & Manufacturing
Arctic sea ice thinned dramatically between the winters of 2004 and 2008, with thin seasonal ice replacing thick older ice as the dominant type for the first time on record. The new...
News: Energy
Though the solar industry today predominately produces solar panels made from crystalline silicon, they remain relatively expensive to make. New players in the solar industry have...
Articles: Energy
Light emitting diodes (LEDs) and solid state lighting (SSL) products that incorporate LEDs pose many measurement challenges compared with other lighting elements, such as traditional tungsten...
Videos: Green Design & Manufacturing
To better understand the impact of the emission of greenhouse gases on the environment, researchers conducted a study in the Costa Rican rainforest to measure the exchange of CO2 (also known as...
Videos: Green Design & Manufacturing
A goal of scientists has been to develop an artificial version of photosynthesis that can be used to produce liquid fuels from carbon dioxide and water. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s...
Blog
I spent part of the recent Fourth of July weekend in central Pennsylvania, with one of the stops being Lancaster, home of one of the largest concentrations of Amish people in the U.S. The Amish are well known for eschewing modern technology as they shun the use of electricity, private automobiles, and many of the...
News: Energy
Two things are needed to produce fuel from sunlight: an antenna that harvests light, and a light-driven catalyst. The most efficient antennae contain bacteria. An international...
Blog
One of the world’s leading manufacturers of cars and light trucks, Toyota, is making inroads into the area of brain machine interface (BMI) technology. Toyota has developed a brain wave control that analyzes the brain waves of a wheelchair driver in as little as 125 milliseconds, as opposed to several seconds with...
News: Green Design & Manufacturing
Five years from now, scientists will be able to better determine how, when, and why plutonium moves in soil and groundwater. The way to predict how plutonium is transported in groundwater away from a site...
News: Green Design & Manufacturing
Ecological and economic factors are prompting telecommunications companies to deploy energy-saving systems. Scientists at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Communication Systems ESK provide a solution that...
News: Energy
Scientists have developed a new hydrogen storage method - carbonized chicken feather fibers - that can hold vast amounts of hydrogen, and do it at a far lower cost than other hydrogen storage...
Products: Electronics & Computers
Fujipoly (Carteret, NJ) has announced the availability of a specially formulated thermal interface gap pad that simplifies board-level maintenance by dramatically reducing material tearing during disassembly...
Products: Electronics & Computers
The ETX® 620 computer-on-module (COM) from ADLINK Technology (San Jose, CA) is suitable for mission-critical military, avionics, medical, and industrial applications. ETX 620 features the low-power AMD Geode LX 800...
Products: Electronics & Computers
The MDU PC Panel Mount Computer Series from Comark Corporation (Medfield, MA) combines the functionality of a computer, display, and optional touchscreen into a modular assembly. The MDUPC-15, MDUPC-19, and MDUPC-20...
Products: Electronics & Computers
Austin Semiconductor, Inc. (Austin, TX) now offers a 512Mb, 54-Pin TSOPII SDRAM with a copper lead frame. The TSOPII features a Lead on Chip (LOC) design, which allows the size of the package to be approximately the chip size....
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Figure 1 shows damage to the space shuttle’s external tank (ET) that was likely caused by a pea-sized hailstone. Because of the potential damage to the ET while exposed to the weather, it is important to remotely monitor...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
A dual cryogenic capacitive density sensor has been developed. The device contains capacitive sensors that monitor two-phase cryogenic flow density to within ±1% accuracy, which, if temperature were known, could be used to determine the ratio of liquid to gas in the line. Two of these density sensors,...
Briefs: Manufacturing & Prototyping
Some improvements have been made in the design and fabrication of blackbody sensors (BBSs) used to measure the temperature of a heater core in a vacuum furnace. Each BBS consists of a ring of thermally conductive, high-melting-temperature material with two tantalum-sheathed thermocouples...