Archive: 2012

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…

-- 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…

-- 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…

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 [].…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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),…