Michael Giberson That is the goal. Few numbers show up in the Christian Science Monitor article to support that claim, but the people discussed are launching a business with the goal of improving the design further and then go to production. The key innovations appear to be in the cheaper process to produce the appropriately …
Lynne Kiesling There are a couple of very interesting recent solar developments that have substantial economic implications. First, the blue sky stuff: courtesy of Slashdot, a team of researchers in the Netherlands have demonstrated avalanche effects in semiconductors that can be used in solar cells (here’s the original article). Avalanche effects mean that instead of …
Lynne Kiesling Want to buy the freshest in-season local produce? Here’s the tool for you: Epicurious’ seasonal ingredient map. Right now I should be eating lots of asparagus and potatoes …
Michael Giberson David Pogue in the New York Times: I can’t tell you how huge this is going to be. There will be thousands of iPhone programs, covering every possible interest. The iPhone will be valuable for far more than simple communications tasks; it will be the first widespread pocket desktop computer. You’re witnessing the …
Lynne Kiesling This certainly qualifies for a “how cool is that?”: new research on amine sponges to separate and absorb carbon dioxide from flue gas. The idea is that they make a sponge material customized specifically to absorb carbon dioxide by combining amines with different metals to create pores of the right size. The researchers …
Lynne Kiesling Both overall energy use and data center/server farm energy use are pressing energy policy issues, and one of the reasons is the waste heat generated by computer chips. This Boing Boing article describes a new technique for creating cooler computer chips by building in something called a Peltier cooler: North Carolina’s Nextreme has …
Lynne Kiesling From New Zealand, a newly-discovered bacterium that lives at high temperatures and eats methane. Is it possible to add them to landfills without creating invasive species problems? Maybe. Still, quite interesting. Thanks to Slashdot for the link.
Lynne Kiesling Kevin Bullis at Technology Review has a nice post that dispels some misunderstandings about plug-in hybrid vehicles. I encourage you to follow his links and to learn more about plug-in hybrids, how they work, and what benefits they introduce into the entire electricity ecosystem, in particular, their article on “how plug-in hybrids will …
Michael Giberson I just set up a market for predicting the winner of the Women’s World Cup 2007 tournament, which is kicking off in China this weekend and wrapping up on September 30. (Women’s football/soccer.) Took me about 45 or 50 minutes, start to finish. A lot of it was just cut-and-paste team names and …
Lynne Kiesling Here’s some new interdisciplinary research that is using nanotechnology to create energy storage in a paper-like material. Details of the project are outlined in the paper “Flexible Energy Storage Devices Based on Nanocomposite Paper” published Aug. 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The semblance to paper is no accident: …
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