Megadgets

Professor L.-S. Fan has pioneered a new clean coal technology that could create jobs and help the U.S. achieve energy independence.

A new Kickstarter project called The Power Pot allows you to charge your small electronics while out camping or off the grid. It uses the concept of thermoelectric differences to generate the required electricity for most small electronic devices. Here’s a quick video on the project. Over at Kickstarter you can donate to help get [...]

  Source: Stuart Gary @ ABC Science Researchers at Bio Architecture have genetically engineered microbes to convert a strain of brown seaweed into biofuel. Researchers including Dr. Yasuo Yoshikuni from Seattle’s Bio-Architecture Lab foresee a future when underwater farms provide a source of renewable energy. Scientists are focusing their efforts on brown seaweed because it’s high sugar [...]

Here’s three pieces of hardware I’ve found that can save a ton of water every month. If you like me, having to pay a higher water bill for my indiscretions can really add up. Whether it’s enjoying those long soaking showers or double flushing the commode, having some energy (or water) efficient fixtures can help. [...]

Thorium Reactors may very well be the future of Nuclear Power. Thorium is readily available and can be turned into energy with all the nasty by-products of traditional reactions. This stuff was first discovered in World War II but it was ignored because it was too unstable for use in munitions. I believe Thorium reactors [...]

(PhysOrg.com) — Researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have reported the first solar cell that produces a photocurrent that has an external quantum efficiency greater than 100 percent when photoexcited with photons from the high energy region of the solar spectrum. The external quantum efficiency for photocurrent, usually expressed as a percentage, is the number [...]

    The folks over at MIT have created something special. Sheila Kennedy is my new hero scientist. Her hard work is going to revolutionize the Solar Industry. Here’s the story. Sheila Kennedy, an expert in the integration of solar cell technology in architecture who is now at MIT, creates designs for flexible photovoltaic materials that may [...]

We may no longer need corn to make ethanol. Great news for all you tortilla lovers. Over at physorg,com, there talking about how scientists have been tinkering with “super yeast” that can make ethanol form treated pine trees. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-super-yeast-ethanol.html Researchers at the University of Georgia have developed a “super strain” of yeast that can efficiently [...]

Image via WikipediaLondon and New York, 10 November 2011 – The cost of electricity from onshore wind turbines will drop 12% in the next five years thanks to a mix of lower-cost equipment and gains in output efficiency, according to new research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.  The best wind farms in the world already [...]