Scientific American

Diesel Program Cuts Pollution but Faces Budget Cuts

Wed, 01 May 2013 13:30:00 EST

More than 50,000 high-polluting diesel engines have been cleaned up or removed from U.S. roads in a federal program designed to reduce smog and greenhouse gases, according to a new Environmental Protection Agency report to Congress.

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Consumers Overwhelmingly Want Higher Mileage Cars

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:45:00 EST

Who wouldn’t want a car that gets better gas mileage ? Most Americans--in the past. For years surveys showed that U.S. consumers were more focused on a car’s power, safety, roominess or special features, but the public has made an about-face, according to data released yesterday by the Consumer Federation of America.

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Electric Vehicle Market Looks for a Recharge

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:00:00 EST

U.S. electric car pioneer Fisker Automotive once posted a manifesto on its Web site: “New isn’t easy.” Not for them, it wasn’t. Now their site is defunct and the company is scrambling to find a funder or face bankruptcy.

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9 Materials That Will Change the Future of Manufacturing [Slide Show]

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:00:00 EST

The future of manufacturing depends on a number of technological breakthroughs in robotics, sensors and high-performance computing, to name a few. But nothing will impact how things are made, and what they are capable of, more than the materials manufacturers use to make those things . New materials change both the manufacturing process and the end result. [More]

Getting 3-D Printing and Next-Generation Manufacturing to the Factory Floor [Video]

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 07:00:00 EST

"Additive manufacturing" offers manufacturers a powerful set of tools for making any number of products cost-effectively and with little waste, a groundbreaking development that promises to help revitalize the U.S. manufacturing sector . But what will it take to get the process out of the lab and onto the factory floor? A generous cash infusion, perhaps unsurprisingly, will help--and it is now in the offing. [More]

Keystone XL Oil Pipeline Exacerbates Climate Change

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 06:30:00 EST

The Keystone XL Pipeline would move enough tar sands oil to result in another 181 million metric tons of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere yearly. A new report prepared by environmental group Oil Change International (OCI) analyzes what the climate change impacts of the proposed pipeline might be. [More]

Crash Course: Training the Brain of a Driverless Car

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 07:00:00 EST

Early attempts at driverless cars have had little difficulty gathering the loads of data required to operate autonomously. Automakers and researchers--at Google, most notably-- have logged hundreds of thousands of kilometers driven in vehicles laden with Internet servers, GPS, radar, lasers, cameras and a variety of other onboard sensors. The results are encouraging : Self-driven vehicles have demonstrated the ability to measure and maintain their distance from other automobiles and even obey traffic laws. [More]

Major Fuel and Emissions Savings Unlikely in Automobiles

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 11:30:00 EST

Efforts to drastically slash automobile emissions and fuel use within 40 years don't stand a chance without subsidies, technology improvements and more stringent government standards, according to a report by a panel of experts released Monday.

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Recommended: Red Rover

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 10:00:00 EST

Red Rover: Inside the Story of Robotic Space Exploration, from Genesis to the Curiosity Rover [More]

Will Alternative-Energy Growth Tank During New Fossil-Fuel Glut? [Slide Show]

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:01:00 EST

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.--The artificial leaf promised to revolutionize the world by bringing reliable modern energy to those mired in poverty. But the company founded to commercialize the research--Sun Catalytix--has found that it needs to concentrate its efforts on something likely to make money in the nearer term, namely the kind of flow batteries that might provide large amounts of energy storage on the U.S. electric grid. [More]

Still in Search of the Energy Unknown: A Q&A with ARPA-E Director Cheryl Martin

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 15:01:00 EST

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.--Can a government agency capture the explorer's urge of Christopher Columbus , Neil Armstrong or James Cameron ? That's what the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy hopes to do, in the words of Deputy Director Cheryl Martin, who is currently heading ARPA–E. [More]

Medical Advice before Taking a Spaceflight

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 10:00:00 EST

The following is excerpted from a feature that appeared last December in the medical journal BMJ:

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Buckeye Bullet Electric Vehicle Breaks 300 MPH [Video]

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 10:00:00 EST

Four years ago, an earlier iteration of the Buckeye Bullet became the first electric vehicle to break 300 mph. This fall, its redesigned successor will attempt to be the first to break 400 mph .

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Aviation in 1913: Images from Scientific American 's Archives [Slide Show]

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 08:05:00 EST

The new science and art of flight evolved as inventors created machines to fill specific flying purposes. While the storm clouds of World War I gathered, military aviation became predominant. [More]

The News on Aviation from 1913

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 08:01:00 EST

February 1963

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The Buckeye Bullet Electric Vehicle Will Go 400 MPH (preview)

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 06:08:00 EST

As he was walking to a math class during his freshman year at Ohio State University, R. J. Kromer spotted a poster for a student-run team designing a fuel-cell-powered car. He had never built anything more complex than Lego-based robot kits, but he sent an e-mail to the group asking to join anyway. To his surprise, the team members responded immediately. “I thought there would be all kinds of requirements,” Kromer recalls, “but they said, ‘No, just show up.’”

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Grand Central Terminal: The Centenary. A Look Back in Scientific American 's Archives [Slide Show]

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 16:35:00 EST

While great ocean liners plied the waves, and glorious skyscrapers changed the skyline, the Grand Central Terminal opened in New York City on February 1, 1913. It was so much more than just a large train station: it was designed, promoted and built as the gateway to a new era of prosperity and progress.

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The Future: A History of Prediction from the Archives of Scientific American

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 14:00:00 EST

For a thousand years people consulted the Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece in an attempt to know what the future held [see “Questioning the Delphic Oracle,” by John R. Hale Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, Jeffrey P. Chanton and Henry A. Spiller; Scientific American, August 2003]. The Oracle was a priestess in a cave who became disoriented by volcanic fumes and babbled incoherently. These days we don’t believe any of that nonsense. Instead we can see the future because we consult thinkers and scientists and journalists and, well, all sorts of clever people. On second thoughts, perhaps the Oracle at Delphi was more reliable. Here is a small sampling of articles on prediction, all from the archives of Scientific American.

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Electric Cars Need a New Sound

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 22:45:08 EST

Kids today may be more familiar with the sound of a rushing highway than a rushing river. But imagine that the internal combustion engine could be set aside and we could design the soundscape of our future. What aural environment would you choose for traffic?

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The Sensational--and Fraudulent--Piltdown Man

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 14:00:00 EST

December 1963

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