Wednesday, 8 February, 2012

Adding nanotubes makes a stronger plastic, but adding several nano-structures greatly increases the benefit, according to a new study from India. Read about the frontier of material science.

By tweaking the conventional recipe, researchers have sped up electricity movement in a lithium battery by 100X. Want to charge your electric car in minutes or your phone in seconds?

Oils in spent coffee grounds are easily converted into biodiesel — a renewable source of transportation energy. Bottoms up for CofFuel?

Obama decides that current and new grant applications at the National Institutes of Health are an effective economic stimulus. People get jobs. Inventions get invented. What’s not to like?

Each hour, the ocean dissolves 1 million tons of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel. As the water grows more acidic, sound travels further. What will happen to marine mammals, which rely on an exquisite sense of hearing?

We need elements. Without phosphorus fertilizer, millions would starve. A shortage of copper means a shortage of electricity. And we’re importing more than 95% of the “rare-earth” elements needed for LCDs, cell phones and green energy. Is this smart?

The candidates are skirting issues related to environment, energy and science policy. Heard promising plans for greener energy, solid science advice, or coping with the decline of oil? We neither…

Lenses cannot project a perfect image on the flat back of a camera, so images are distorted at the edges. A revolutionary camera solves this problem by curving the light detector.

Lasers read and write CDs and DVDs, form the heart of fiber-optics, and are being used in climate prediction, chemical identification, high-tech manufacturing, even the battle against influenza.

When too much fertilizer reaches the Gulf of Mexico through the Mississippi River, a vast area gets robbed of oxygen. What can be done to reduce the dead zone that appears each summer?