In this city (Berkeley, California) where Toyota Priuses clog the roads and battery-powered Tesla Roadsters and Chevrolet Volts can be spotted at the organic farmers market, the engine factory in a gritty industrial neighborhood near San Francisco Bay is a throwback to the automotive past . . . or a harbinger of the future.  In [...]

It could soon be more practical to cool buildings using solar water heaters and waste heat from generators.  That’s because of new porous materials developed by researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  These materials can improve a process called adsorption chilling, which can be used for refrigeration and air conditioning.  In an adsorption chiller, [...]

Brazilian scientists have developed a way of using fibers from bananas, pineapples, and other plants to create plastic that is stronger and lighter than the petroleum-based stuff.  So-called nanocellulose fibers rival Kevlar in strength but are renewable, and the researchers believe they could be widely used within a couple of years.  They are light, but [...]

Scientists claim one of the milestones in the drive for sustainable energy: development of the first practical artificial leaf.  Speaking at the 241st National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, they described an advanced solar cell the size of a poker card that mimics photosynthesis, the process that green plants use to convert sunlight and [...]

New findings in the nervous system of invertebrates have shown how a number of features of central pattern generator (CPG) circuits contribute to the generation of robust flexible rhythms.  In this paper we consider recently revealed strategies that living CPGs follow to design CPG control paradigms for modular robots.  To illustrate them, we divide the [...]

Global warming and emissions of greenhouse gases are the most serious challenges today.  Immense efforts have been focused on reducing the emissions of heat-trapping gases, such as carbon dioxide.  Recently, researchers have demonstrated that using “cool roofs” with light colors and increasing the albedo of urban areas can potentially counteract the heating effect of carbon [...]

Thugs and fires are obvious threats for police and firefighters, but traffic accidents also pose a serious danger for these first responders.  Nearly 13 percent of the firefighters and police officers who die in the line of duty are killed in vehicle-related incidents, and fire trucks are involved in ten times as many collisions as [...]

Air is one of the few things that you really cannot do without . . . at least if you want to continue to live.  As the population of the earth increases, and larger amounts of the globe become industrialized cityscape, the quality of air is a major environmental concern.  Poor air quality can lead [...]

One of the most complex efforts toward a quantum computer has been shown off at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas.  It uses the strange “quantum states” of matter to perform calculations in a way that, if scaled up, could vastly outperform conventional computers.  The 6cm-by-6cm chip holds nine quantum devices, among them four [...]

A dynamic systems model is proposed describing memory resistors which include a filament conductive bridge.  In this model the system state is defined by both a dynamic tunneling barrier and a dynamic Schottky barrier.  A general model is formulated which may be applicable to many different forms of memory resistor materials.  The frequency response of [...]