When most people hear the words "fuel cell," they think of eco-friendly, hydrogen-powered cars that emit nothing more than water. And that, says Professor Eric Wachsman, director of the University of Maryland Energy Research Center (UMERC), is one of the reasons we're all not driving one.
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Seagrass populations thrive in the shallow coastal regions and offer an ideal habitat for many fish, crustacean and microbes. The worldwide decline of seagrass populations in recent years is therefore of major concern to science and to nature conservation. Researchers believe that climate change plays an important role as the increase in extreme events such as heat waves is a major challenge for the seagrass.
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Most of today's power plants--from some of the largest solar arrays to nuclear energy facilities--rely on the boiling and condensing of water to produce energy. The process of turning heated water into energy was essentially understood by James Watt all the way back in 1765. Heat from the sun or from a controlled nuclear reaction boils water, which then expands, moves a turbine and generates power.
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They shrink when you heat 'em. Most materials expand when heated, but a few contract. Now engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have figured out how one of these curious materials, scandium trifluoride (ScF3), does the trick—a finding, they say, that will lead to a deeper understanding of all kinds of materials.
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Professor Adrian Bejan, an Editorial Board member of Frontiers in Heat and Mass Transfer, has been awarded the title of Honorary Member by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The award was presented during the 2011 ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress in Denver, Colorado on November 14, 2011.
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By sifting through oil and natural gas drilling data, a Google-funded study found that geothermal power in the U.S. could produce ten times the capacity of coal plants today.
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Solar radiation management is a class of theoretical concepts for manipulating the climate in order to reduce the risks of global warming caused by greenhouse gasses. But its potential effectiveness and risks are uncertain, and it is unclear whether tests could help narrow these uncertainties. A team composed of Caltech's Doug MacMynowski, Carnegie's Ken Caldeira and Ho-Jeong Shin, and Harvard's David Keith used modeling to determine the type of testing that might be effective in the future.
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The human eye is as comfortable with white light generated by diode lasers as with that produced by increasingly popular light-emitting diodes (LEDs), according to tests conceived at Sandia National Laboratories.
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With the world’s energy needs growing rapidly, can zero-carbon energy options be scaled up enough to make a significant difference? How much of a dent can these alternatives make in the world’s total energy usage over the next half-century? As the MIT Energy Initiative approaches its fifth anniversary next month, this five-part series takes a broad view of the likely scalable energy candidates.
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Scientists believe that magnetic reconnection is behind the extraordinary bursts of radiation that have emerged from the center of the Crab nebula, the remains of an exploded star. Astrophysicists from Princeton and other institutions are paying close attention to the efforts of the MRX research team, hoping to better understand some of the mysteries surrounding the phenomenon.
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