Scientific American - Technology

Auto-dicted: Sans a Major Diversion of U.S. Transportation Dollars to Mass Transit, Urban Traffic Congestion May Not Ease

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:00:00 EST

Dear EarthTalk: Short of massive efforts to build a public transportation infrastructure, which doesn’t appear likely anytime soon, what is being done to address traffic congestion, which is reaching absurd levels almost everywhere? --John Daniels, Baltimore

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Public transport - Transport - United States - Traffic congestion - Transportation

Sunshine is free, so can photovoltaics be cheap?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:35:00 EST

Here's how to make a solar cell from silicon : take one solid block of doped silicon, saw it into thin wafers, layer said semiconductors beneath a panel of transparent glass, connect them to a metal electrode that can channel away the electrons knocked loose by incoming photons and turn it into a photovoltaic device. That process has at least two flaws: such silicon is very expensive, as much as $300,000 for a wafer, and sawing it turns as much as half of that very expensive silicon into wasted grit. [More]

Wafer - Semiconductor - Solar cell - Photovoltaics - Silicon

Invasion of the Drones: Unmanned Aircraft Take Off in Polar Exploration

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST

A multinational, robotic air corps is quietly invading the polar regions of the earth. Some catapult from ships; some launch from running pickup trucks; and some take off the old-fashioned way, from icy airstrips. The aircraft range from remote-controlled propeller planes--of the type found at Toys “R” Us--to sophisticated, high-altitude jets. All are specially outfitted, not with weapons but with scientific instruments.

Unmanned aircraft have made headlines in the mountains of Afghanistan, but the technology has quickly trickled down to scientists seeking a less expensive, safer way to study the earth’s poles. Researchers have begun to put unmanned aerial systems, or UASs, to a variety of tasks, from monitoring the ozone layer to counting seal populations. Thanks to lower costs and improved technologies, “it’s absolutely exploded in the past couple of years,” says Elizabeth Weatherhead, who is an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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Aircraft - Unmanned aerial vehicle - Afghanistan - Technology - Ozone layer

PET project: Using organic catalysts to make more biodegradable plastics

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:30:00 EST

Whereas most discarded plastic water and beverage bottles (those imprinted with a number 1 within a triangular arrow) can be recycled , the resulting second-generation plastic is generally unusable for making new plastic bottles. This is because the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) thermoplastic polymer used to make the original bottles is often made with the help of metal oxide or metal hydroxide catalysts that linger in the recycled material and weaken it over time. [More]

Recycling - Polymer - Plastic - Polyethylene terephthalate - Business

Storing megawatts: Liquid-metal batteries and electricity

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:31:00 EST

Making aluminum requires a lot of electricity. That's because the metal bonds tightly to oxygen and it takes a lot of energy to break that bond. In essence, the process of making aluminum is a giant battery with the silvery metal being reduced to purity at the cathode while oxygen bonds with the carbon anode to make, you guessed it, CO2. It takes roughly 15 kilowatt-hours of electricity to make just one kilogram of aluminum via electrolysis. [More]

Energy - Anode - Aluminium - Cathode - Battery

Smokestash Industry: ARPA-E Seeks Breakthroughs in Carbon Capture Technology

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:01:00 EST

WASHINGTON--Every second, our bodies capture carbon dioxide in our tissues, transport it via the blood, and dump it in the lungs from where it is exhaled. This unconscious process is yet another way humans contribute to the accumulation of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere--albeit in a minuscule volume compared with burning fossil fuels . The key to this metabolic process is an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase and it's efficiency at capturing and releasing CO2 is what human engineers want to mimic at the power plant scale. [More]

Carbon dioxide - Greenhouse gas - Power station - Fossil fuel - Environment

Scooting toward Oblivion

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST

There’s a story about a truck driver who passed the long, lonely hours in his big rig knitting sweaters. His hands thus otherwise occupied, he steered with his knees. A highway patrol officer noted this behavior and set out after the truck driver. As the cop got close, he commanded via his vehicle’s loudspeaker, “Pull over.” To which the trucker shouted back, “No, it’s a cardigan.”

Though not a bona fide law-enforcement officer myself, I sometimes act in loco centurion while on the road. I do this by sharing safety tips with distracted motorists, such as “Slow down!” or “Pick a lane!” or, my go-to line, “Get off the phone!”

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Truck driver - Semi-trailer truck - Business - Trucks - Transportation and Logistics

Seeing the Little Picture: Novel Nanocoating Gives Atomic Force Microscope Users a Better Look at Individual Molecules

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:20:00 EST

Spotting a disease in its earliest stages can help to facilitate its treatment greatly, yet telltale clues are often hidden at a scale too small to study accurately. This hindrance has some researchers looking for ways to use high-powered atomic force microscopes (AFMs) to study individual molecules for disease markers [More]

Atomic force microscope - Molecule - Microscope - Instruments and Supplies - Laboratory Equipment

Magic Fingers: Digging Into Multi-Touch Technology with Both Hands

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:00:00 EST

At Perceptive Pixel 's offices on Manhattan's West Side, Jefferson Han stands in front of a megasize multi-touch screen and runs his fingertips across the display. Each finger leaves a trail of colored pixels in its wake, causing the display to look, briefly, like it has been scratched by a set of digital claws. [More]

Multi-touch - Touchscreen - Jefferson Han - Perceptive Pixel - Pixel

Can solid-oxide fuel cells like the Bloom box remake the energy landscape?

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:34:00 EST

The fuel cell has a long history. Various types of fuel cells have been part of the NASA space program, and the basic science of how fuel cells work--an energy carrier comes in, creates a flow of charge in the anode, which migrates to the cathode creating a current, and separated by some form of electrolyte--has been known for more than a century. Yet, Bloom Energy believes the time is finally right for one of the more promising fuel-cell technologies--solid-oxide fuel cells, so-called because the electrolyte is a solid rather than the more common liquids--to produce electricity on a grander scale. [More]

bloomenergy - Fuel cell - Solid oxide fuel cell - NASA - Electricity

A need for new nukes? "Modular reactors" for energy attract interest

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:31:00 EST

The entire budget of the U.S. Department of Energy branch that covers today's energy mix--from cleaning up energy generation's environmental aftermath to energy efficiency programs and renewable energy development--is $10 billion. That's enough to "either build one supercollider on the basic end or one nuclear power plant on the applied end," said Kristina Johnson, the undersecretary in charge of the branch, at the ARPA-E conference on March 3. In other words, nuclear power ain't cheap. [More]

United States Department of Energy - Energy - Renewable energy - Technology - Nuclear power

Want TV in 3-D? Then You'll Still Have to Wear Silly Glasses--At Least for Another Decade

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:15:00 EST

Hold onto your remote control: 3-D television is on the way . By the end of the year, most of the major TV manufacturers, including LG Electronics, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony, will be selling displays capable of showing 3-D movies and other programming. Unfortunately, none of the models going on sale this year will eliminate the least pleasant aspect of the 3-D viewing experience--those often uncomfortable and frequently silly-looking spectacles. 3-D TV for the naked eye does not exist--at least not yet. [More]

Sony - Television - LG Electronics - Samsung Group - Remote control

Playing the Body Electric

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST

Each new generation of astronomers discovers that the universe is much bigger than their predecessors imagined. The same is also true of brain complexity. Every era’s most advanced technologies, when applied to the study of the brain, keep uncovering more layers of nested complexity, like a set of never ending Russian dolls. We now know that there are up to 1,000 different subtypes of nerve cells and supporting actors--the glia and astrocytes--within the nervous system. Each cell type is defined by its chemical constituents, neuronal morphology, synaptic architecture and input-output processing.

Different cell types are wired up in specific ways. For example, a deep layer 5 pyramidal neuron might snake its gossamer-thin output wire, the axon, to a subcortical target area while also extending a connection to an inhibitory local neuron. Understanding how the brain’s corticothalamic complex creates any one conscious sensation necessitates delineating these underlying circuits for the 100 billion cells in the brain.

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Neuron - Brain - Nervous system - Glial cell - Axon

Sound Idea: Acoustic Technology Lets Small Planes "Listen" for Nearby Aircraft

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST

Dutch and U.S. researchers are testing new acoustics technology that could be mounted on the outside of small aircraft, listening for characteristic sounds that indicate the presence of other fliers. Called an acoustic vector sensor (AVS), the system uses nanoscale materials to alert pilots to other aircraft within about 10 kilometers, a system that may help prevent midair collisions such as the one between a private plane and a sightseeing helicopter over New York City's Hudson River in August 2009, the researchers say. [More]

Hudson River - Aircraft - United States - New York - New York City

Impact Factor: Can a Scientific Retraction Change Public Opinion?

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:45:00 EST

When science revises its stance, the field itself follows established protocol to adapt, but public opinion can be slow to catch up. Rather than wiping the slate clean, last month's retraction of a key paper proposing a link between childhood vaccines and autism seem only to have widened the societal divide on the issue. And the rising rate of retractions--roughly ninefold between 1990 and 2008--suggest that there could be more cases in which public opinion carries on long after science has reversed course. [More]

Autism - Vaccination - Health - Side Effect Debate - Lancet

Shift happens: Will artificial photosynthesis power the world?

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:31:00 EST

One drinking- water bottle could provide enough energy for an entire household in the developing world if Dan Nocera has his way. A chemist from M.I.T. and founder of the company Sun Catalytix, Nocera has developed a cobalt-based catalyst that allows him to store energy the same way plants do: by splitting water. [More]

Drinking water - Sun Catalytix - Developing country - Daniel G. Nocera - Energy

Is ARPA-E Enough to Keep the U.S. on the Cutting-Edge of a Clean Energy Revolution?

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:01:00 EST

WASHINGTON, D.C.--At the inaugural summit of ARPA–E, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy , no less an august personage than Norman Augustine declared that we were possibly witnessing an inflection point--a turn from old thinking to new. As an aerospace business pioneer, Augustine certainly knows when trajectories change and escape velocities are attained. Indeed, a host of speakers regarded ARPA–E's effort as an Apollo project, a Manhattan project, and Mike Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials, even called for ARPA–E to be part of a potential Marshall Plan for energy--a road map to a future of clean power, complete with the Hoover Dam of solar, or the like. [More]

Energy - DARPA - Technology - United States - Marshall Plan

Next-Gen Scientists Honored for Evolving Medicine and Renewables [Slide Show]

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:00:00 EST

The more mysteries that scientists unlock, the more opportunities emerge for the next generation of researchers to transform newfound knowledge into tomorrow's breakthroughs that serve society. The Lemelson–M.I.T. Program recognized several potential breakthroughs Wednesday in awarding four of its $30,000 Lemelson–M.I.T. Student Prizes to those from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (R.P.I.), and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (U.I.U.C.). [More]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology - California Institute of Technology - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign - Education

World's Mightiest Solar Boat Unveiled

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:00:00 EST

Nearly 500 years after Juan Sebastián Elcano completed the first circumnavigation of the globe using nothing but renewable power, Swiss engineer Raphael Domjan and French sailor Gerard D'Abouville are preparing to repeat Elcano's journey in an all-electric boat powered by the energy gathered by 470 square meters of solar panels. [More]

Energy - Renewable - Solar - Business - Circumnavigation

Could Mini Labs and Plant-Based Vaccines Stop the Next Pandemic?

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:00:00 EST

The H1N1 virus's rapid spread worldwide last year exposed the weaknesses in the global system for swiftly developing, manufacturing and distributing vaccines for newly identified strains of influenza. In Texas, researchers are attacking the first two of these problems through Project GreenVax , which will use a plant-based approach to vaccine development and a modular manufacturing environment that can scale quickly as vaccine demand grows. [More]

Influenza - Vaccine - Influenza A virus subtype H1N1 - Health - Vaccination