Viruses are mostly seen as the bad side of nature, the fallen creation or just that unwanted flu during those sunny days when you were supposed to go play outside. For Angela Belcher viruses are working tools, since she and her MIT colleagues have just found a way to guide some of them so they make solar cells more efficient, by as much as a third.
Inspired by Stenocara gracilipes, a beetle found in the Namib Desert, MIT engineer Shreerang Chhatre developed a simple and efficient device that can harvest fog. Being actually an inexpensive way to provide clean drinking water, this fog harvesting device could be perfect for poorer countries, where water scarcity is still an unsolved problem.
A new report from Pike Research shows that the number of people using electric motorcycles and scooters will grow from 17 million to 138 million by 2017, that over 8 times the current percentage. This kind of vehicles is already popular in China and other regions of Asia Pacific, where the population is more likely to use a two-wheel vehicle.
Greenfire Energy stands to prove us how good projects, as long as they're really good, will stand out and receive funding. This project will get $2 million in funding for replacing water with CO2 in the process of extracting geothermal energy.
The high population of India makes for the pollution to be high as well. So, if there is any place on Earth where electric vehicles are needed, then it's there. Aware of this situation, a handful of engineering students in Palwal City, Haryana state have conceived an oxygen-run motorbike, which they claim is a discovery in the field.
Apparently, necessity teaches us better than any ecological drive, or at least this seems to be the case for the U.S. military. Missions can't do without water, but the amounts they need are very hard to transport. So the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has found a way to ease the pain of carrying large water supplies.
Every project has a good side and a downside. In the case of the first American offshore wind farm, these sides seem equal. The construction of the facility is expected to begin this fall in Nantucket Sound, Massachusetts, upsetting locals and high personalities.
We now get to witness the world's first remote-controlled car running on soda cans, roughly speaking, brought to us by Aleix Lovet and Xavier Saluena from the Catalonia Polytechnic Institute.
Seas and oceans are often seen profitable for their waves' power, but few know that these huge salt water recipients store energy in yet another way: in their salt. The new approach sees the entire oceans and seas as battery electrolytes. Interesting? Read on.
Conventional gasoline engine makers may one day replace spark plugs with lasers, as Japanese researchers have designed and prototyped laser devices that are powerful enough to ignite the fuel and small enough to fit into the engine cylinder head (9 millimeters in diameter and 11 millimeters in length).
