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Fukushima may still be reeling from last year's nuclear disaster, but a global interest in nuclear power looks to be on the up and up — even here in the U.S. More »
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With photosynthesis, plants are already busy converting sunlight into usable energy. The question then is how to use plants' natural solar-power abilities to generate energy for us. In this video, an MIT researcher explains how to do just that. More »
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Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has promised us a permanent Moon base by 2020. Many people have been calling Newt's vow a publicity stunt, while others have chimed in by attacking the idea of a lunar base in and of itself, with assertions like "real scientists know [a Moon base] is fantasy." More »
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If your car is a diesel, it will run. Liquid hydrogen, the fuel that powered the space shuttle's main engines, could work, says Manuel Martinez-Sanchez, an aeronautics and astronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But keeping hydrogen liquid requires maintaining it at a temperature below about –432°F. Storing it in a garage would be tricky, as would keeping it from freezing the engine. More »
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For years, the energy industry has been looking to seaweed to become the next big source of biofuel. But the algae plant has its drawbacks. Much of its energy is stored in a form of sugar that is difficult to tap into; this snag drives the cost of biofuel produced from seaweed up, and its viability as an alternative to petroleum-based fuels down. More »
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In the last several hundred years, human activity has shifted large quantities of the world's carbon from long-term storage (i.e. carbon bound up in rocks, fossil fuels, and forests) into forms of short-term storage such as croplands and pastures, which tend to store less carbon for shorter periods of time. More »
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Earlier this month, we told you about a mysterious, potentially biological white web that was found growing on nuclear waste at the Savannah River Site. More »
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Researchers from Kyoto University have discovered a new technique that could dramatically improve the efficiency of some semiconductors. They took gallium arsenide, and blasted it with a terahertz range electric field pulse for just a picosecond, which lead to a 1,000-fold increase in exciton density. An exciton is a pair of an electron and a positively charged area it came from, which are attracted to each other and recombine to luminesce. They're how we get light out of LEDs and other applications, and this new technique could make them dramatically more efficient. More »
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This is as fascinating as it is unsettling. Scientists at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site — a nuclear reservation in South Carolina — have identified a strange, cob-web like "growth" (their word, not ours) on the racks of the facility's spent nuclear fuel assemblies. More »
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The artificial leaf is poised to be one of the next big breakthroughs in energy. If we can learn to mimic the biological mechanism by which plants convert solar energy into hydrogen, the sky is the limit. Millions of years of evolution have already proved the worth of photosynthesis, even if it's not all that efficient in its natural state. More »
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If my parents had shown me this video when I was five, I would have broken my habit of leaving the lights on whenever I left a room much sooner. More »
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The winter wind in Scotland was angry yesterday, and at the top of its shit list were turbines and trampolines. More »
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Over the course of the last century, the exponential expansion of industry has seen the production of materials like steel, aluminum, cement and plastics skyrocket. It is estimated that the amount of these so-called energy-intensive materials produced every single year comes to 10 times the total weight of every living person on Earth, and accounts for a fifth of the world's carbon emissions. More »
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The congressional supercommittee responsible for trimming 1.5 trillion dollars from the US federal budget has failed to deliver, triggering a decade-long, 1.2-trillion-dollar budget-slash set to begin in 2013. More »
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We tend to hear a lot about the importance of pushing to seek out sources of renewable energy, but how many people know what the biggest sources of this energy actually are — let alone what regions of the globe are working to incorporate them? For example, where do you think North America stands, relative to Europe and Asia, when it comes to generating electricity via renewable energy sources? More »
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The world stands on the brink of annihilation. Powerful nations threaten each other by building ever more destructive weapons that could reduce farmlands to charred rubble. Sounds like the quaint old Cold War of the twentieth century, right? Wrong. It's the future scenario that many environment groups predict for the next century. More »
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Last month I was lucky enough to visit one of the biggest genomics labs in the world. At the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) in Walnut Creek, CA, huge rooms full of genome sequencing machines work 24/7 to crunch the codes that create life. And the research here, funded by the US Department of Energy, has a purpose. The biologists and geneticists at JGI, several of whom helped sequence the first human genome in the 1990s, are trying to unlock the secret of sustainable biofuels that enhance the environment. More »
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How do you draw attention to the Earth's dwindling supply of Arctic Sea ice? Simple: slap a gigantic naked man on it. More »
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The world's coldest, tallest, and most forbidding mountains might soon be the new frontier of solar power. These tall, snow-capped peaks could retain way more sunlight than elsewhere, and the intense cold would actually make panels work more efficiently. More »
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Scientists examining Hubble Telescope images of the Moon recently noticed what looked like titanium deposits all around the 1972 Apollo 17 landing site. When they inspected samples of moon rock from the site that were brought back to Earth by the Apollo team, scientists discovered that they were, in fact, chock full of titanium — titanium that could be a vital resource for future human inhabitants of the Moon. More »
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Take a look at this video. See the little bubbles racing to the water's surface? What you're looking at is an "artificial leaf," unveiled yesterday by a team of researchers at MIT. On either side of this leaf are specially-designed catalysts that, with the help of a little sunlight, allow it to convert the water that its submerged in into hydrogen and oxygen. More »
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Since June of last year, Granville, Pennsylvania's Sherry Vargson has had to cook using water, not from her tap, but from a five gallon jug. More »
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Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen is generally considered a fantastic way to get a renewable power source. The problem is how exactly you go about splitting the water. Current methods require some power input in order to kickstart the reaction, reducing its effectiveness as a sustainable power source, since power needs to flow continually in to the system. But a new technique could meld together a number of other methods and produce constant, carbon-neutral hydrogen from two things we have in abundance: fouled water and seawater. More »
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The last decade was the hottest on record, and yet it wasn't until 2010 that an individual year was hotter than the record-breaking 1998 heatwave. Somehow, global temperatures mysteriously flattened out. The explanation may lie thousands of feet underwater. More »
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Ten years ago today, Chicago developer J. Paul Beitler — who once aspired to build the world's tallest building — told The Chicago Tribune that governments would cease to approve plans for skyscrapers, for fear that they would become "magnets for future terrorism." More »
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A new town is being built in New Mexico. It will have no people, no government, and no workers. Supposedly it's there to test out environmental technologies, but truly, it is there to provide a rich ground for future conspiracy theories. Welcome to The Center. More »
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Orson Scott Card's homophobic views aren't exactly news — they've been a source of online controversy for years. It's only newsworthy when Card does something especially notable, like rewriting one of the world's greatest ghost stories into an anti-gay screed. More »
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It just so happens that hovering in mid-air is a pretty energy-intensive process. It's this fact that helps explain why helicopters — notorious for being energy-hogging little buggers — have yet to make an appearance in the recent wave of electric vehicles. More »
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Pandas have all kinds of talents, like looking adorable, dozing off for no reason, and looking tiny next to Shaq. More »
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Lots of people around the country are outfitting their houses with energy-harvesting solar panels, and not just for the environment, but for government kickbacks, as well. Some companies will even foot the bill and install your panels for free, provided they can collect on the federal subsidies. More »
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We're still trying to figure out how to properly harness the power of hydrogen as a clean energy source — and now we might be able to pick up some unexpected pointers from some bizarre symbiotic bacteria found at the ocean depths. More »
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As if the Exige 270E Tri-fuel sports car wasn't expensive enough, the engineers over at Lotus have gone ahead and made it run on three of the most expensive vices on the planet. That's right: you can fuel this car with chocolate, cheese, and wine. More »
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Bats are the only mammals that can technically fly, but a lot of other creatures do a pretty good impression of flight by gliding down from the tops of tall trees. But there's a problem: this behavior makes no sense. More »
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Earth runs on massive amounts of heat, enough to melt iron in the core and create our magnetic field, enough to power the constant movement of plate tectonics. Where all this heat comes from is a mystery...but we're getting closer. More »
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Athletes have used steroids, amphetamines, hormones, and who knows what else in search of an unnatural advantage, and no sport is more notorious for doping than professional cycling. The newest potential performance-enhancer is safe, legal...and yeah, maybe a little ridiculous. More »
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It might not be immediately obvious just how birds could evolve something as complex as the wings needed for flight. But that's just it: flight was basically incidental to the real adaptation. The secret is a little something called flap-running. More »
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This gorgeous, mysterious video is a glimpse of one possible Earth future. Imagine that we abandon fossil fuels for solar, but not before our once-green world grows sprawling new deserts. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5816031&view=rss&microfeed=true Scientific American has a great article about how low rainfall means that Europe will be facing food shortages this summer. What's particularly interesting is that the water shortages will also affect energy production too, especially in France: More »
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Why use corn for your biofuel when you could use chicken fat? That's what NASA wanted to know, so they tested out chicken and beef fat-based fuels on a DC-8. Turns out that they actually released far fewer pollutants in exhaust than other fuels. More »
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With water shortages looming in the future, we need new ways to clean water that's been fouled by human waste, agricultural runoff and industry. A new article published in BioScience (free PDF link) shows that we can use naturally-occurring algae as a filter. The plants would not only make the water suitable for re-use, but could also allow us to harvest pollutants for fertilizer and even biofuel. More »
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