Environmental SCENE is a news channel of Chemical & Engineering News, featuring up-to-the-minute news about environmental research, business, and policy, including coverage of climate change, pollution, toxic substances, and sustainability.

New semiconductor-based devices for managing power on the grid could make the “smart grid” even smarter.  They would allow electric vehicles to be charged fast and let utilities incorporate large amounts of solar and wind power without blackouts or power surges.  These devices are being developed by a number of groups, including those that recently [...]

Electron spins are strong candidates with which to implement spintronics because they are both mobile and able to be manipulated.  The relatively short lifetimes of electron spins, however, present a problem for the long-term storage of spin information.  We demonstrated an ensemble nuclear spin memory in phosphorous-doped silicon, which can be read out electrically and [...]

Computers these days have serious human envy.  When you call your bank, the robot on the other end doesn’t want you to communicate using your touch-tone keypad anymore.  No, it insists that you just speak to it.  Your car is trying to take over the parallel parking duties.  And computers have long since drained all [...]

Solar cells that work at night.  It sounds like an oxymoron, but a new breed of nanoscale light-sensitive antennas could soon make this possible, heralding a novel form of renewable energy that avoids many of the problems that beset solar cells.  The key to these new devices is their ability to harvest infrared (IR) radiation, [...]

The decades-long growth in computer performance will come to a screeching halt without huge changes in software and revolutionary new microchips.  That’s the stark warning in a new report from the U.S. National Research Council titled “The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?”  It’s bad news on many levels for a trillion-dollar [...]

Before you leave for work in the morning, your smart phone downloads the latest episode of a television series.  Your drive to work is easy in spite of fog, thanks to in-car radar and the intelligent transport software that automatically guides you around traffic jams, allowing you to arrive in time for a presentation in [...]

Diffusionless phase transitions are at the core of the multifunctionality of (magnetic) shape memory alloys, ferroelectrics and multiferroics.  Giant strain effects under external fields are obtained in low symmetric modulated martensitic phases.  We outline the origin of modulated phases, their connection with tetragonal martensite and consequences for their functional properties by analysing the martensitic microstructure [...]

Usually, investigators in materials science have asked: “What properties does a certain new material or structure have?”  Now, the inverse problem arises: “I want to achieve certain — possibly unheard-of — material properties.  How should the corresponding micro- or nanostructure look?”  Examples could be: efficiently blocking acoustic noise due to a highway from a nearby [...]

It may not prove as handy as the Model T, but, conceptually, a tiny machine unveiled this year blows the doors off Henry Ford’s famous car or any other previous machine.  Until now, all machines have moved according to the not-surprising laws of classical mechanics, which govern the motion of everyday objects.  In contrast, the [...]