Encouraging Sustainable Energy in the Developing World

Societies will always need energy to develop and function; how this energy is generated and delivered will determine whether we can achieve a sustainable future. Today, approximately 40% of the world’s population, mostly in low- and middle-income countries, don’t have access to modern sources of energy, instead relying on old-fashioned biomass burning, such as the use of firewood, charcoal, or animal waste, which leads to … Continue reading Encouraging Sustainable Energy in the Developing World

Counting Spots: How Clean Are The Tar Sands?

— Measuring, or what Richard Feynman called “quantitative observation” in his Lectures on Physics, is one of the defining features of science. Some scientists, most notably Steven Hawking, even believe that science is nothing but measuring – if something can’t be measured it isn’t science. But measuring is also fraught with surprising practical, philosophical, and political implications – and even important social consequences – as demonstrated by a recent study of the Alberta tar sands. Continue reading Counting Spots: How Clean Are The Tar Sands?

The Dawn of Homo Sapiens: Our Family Tree Grows Messier Still

— To unearth the secrets of our human origins, scientists are delving deep into the prehistoric record to find the last common ancestor of great apes and humans, while simultaneously looking in more recent history to define when and where modern humans (modern in terms of anatomy and behavior) first appeared. This endeavor, which has traditionally entailed years of painstaking digging for fossils and archaeological relics in often far-flung places, has lately received a welcome boost from the advent of novel genetic tools that enable the reconstruction of complete human genomes (a genome being the complete set of genetic material contained in an organism). Newly published work in the journals Nature and Science describing novel human fossils and genomes have now added to our small but growing appreciation of the complexity of our common evolutionary ancestries. Continue reading The Dawn of Homo Sapiens: Our Family Tree Grows Messier Still

Spinning electricity out of thin, moving air

The sun’s beaming rays heat the Earth, but not evenly. Many attributes of the Earth – such as its atmosphere, topography, bodies of water, and rotation – contribute to uneven heat distributions, which create air movement, or wind []. Windmills use wind-generated kinetic motion to perform useful work, such as pumping water or grinding grains, whereas wind turbines use it to generate electricity []. Wind … Continue reading Spinning electricity out of thin, moving air

Electric Vehicles and Hybrids: Where are we now?

As President Eisenhower said, our “transportation systems are dynamic elements in the very name we bear—United States.  Without them, we would be a mere alliance of many separate parts.” (Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Feb 22, 1955). The automobile became a household staple and a powerful symbol of our industrialized economy, such that cars are now intimately intertwined with our lives. As we move into the … Continue reading Electric Vehicles and Hybrids: Where are we now?

Why We Need Sustainable Energy

The degree to which we use energy has far-reaching consequences. For example, the simple act of driving to work uses fuel that is ultimately tied to both international conflict and global climate change. The success of modern civilization is fundamentally linked to our ability to harness energy, primarily in the form of fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas. As shown in Figure 1, … Continue reading Why We Need Sustainable Energy

Black Silicon: Working around the current limits of solar cells

For many years, sunlight has been seen as a potential gold mine of useable energy for our global needs.  Having successfully used the sun to grow food to feed the world, people are now trying to harvest the sun’s energy and convert it into electric energy.  The principle way this has been accomplished is through the use of solar cells, also known as solar photovoltaics … Continue reading Black Silicon: Working around the current limits of solar cells

Synthetic Biology for Fuels

Fossil fuels are running out Since the mid nineteenth century, humans have progressively mastered the discovery, extraction, and combustion of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are the remains of organisms, mostly thick growths of plants from more than 500 million years ago, that were buried under heavy layers of sediment and slowly heated and compressed, under conditions without oxygen, into carbon-rich deposits. These are now used … Continue reading Synthetic Biology for Fuels

Green Chemistry: Cutting pollution at its source

The US chemical industry makes a wide variety of consumer products, or at least the chemicals that coat, color, and clean them. This includes things you use every day but never think about, like the coating on paper that makes it smooth, the dye in your clothes that makes them colorful, and the components in your toothpaste that enable it to clean your teeth. But … Continue reading Green Chemistry: Cutting pollution at its source

Beyond the Debate: The role of government in renewable energy finance

Last year, the world invested more money in renewable energy than ever before, at over $257 billion [1]. There is no question that renewable energy projects need finance to develop and commercialize. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), $37 trillion of investment will be needed in the world’s energy supply system over 2012-2035, of which a growing component will be in renewable energy [2]. … Continue reading Beyond the Debate: The role of government in renewable energy finance