Could Poop Power Our Cars?

Is brown the new green? UCLA researchers are using waste matter (yes, including poop) to make a new generation of advanced biofuels. The U.S. alone annually produces over 1 billion tons of manure from agriculture, which produces nitrous oxide methane emissions, greenhouse gases 325 times more potent than carbon dioxide. But what if all this … Read more

Powering the world from space

The limitations of using solar power on earth can be anything from bad weather to just the fact that it needs to be daytime.  What if power could be collected both day and night, rain or shine? National Lab researchers at Lawrence Livermore are studying this possibility by launching solar satellites into space. These orbiting … Read more

Microscopic Nanolasers

From an electrical engineering researcher at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego: “It resembles a mushroom cloud, but in fact, it’s one of our microscopic nanolasers, imaged under an electron microscope.  These lasers are among the smallest in the world, so small you could fit a billion of them on an iPhone … Read more

Clean burner technology produces whiter chicken meat in food

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists invented “ultraclean low swirl combustion.” Their commercialized burners are cheaper than the traditional kind and they don’t cause pollution. “Companies are able to find a market for this burner in places that does not require low emissions burner because in the absence of pollutants, for example they sell the burner … Read more

How nanotechnology can boost energy efficiency

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed a nanocrystal material that could add a critical energy-saving dimension to “smart window” coatings. “We’re really excited about our technology using a solution-based process because that has the potential to really bring the costs down to the point where it can be deployed broadly in the … Read more