Most communities in the US treat their wastewater just enough to legally dump it, but not reuse it. Pasteurisation Technology Group has developed an inexpensive treatment system that yields water clean enough to be returned to aquifers. Instead of using chlorine, the system pasteurises wastewater by heating it to 80ºC. The warmth comes from the waste heat of a nearby electricity generator running on either natural gas or biogas produced by an associated sewage digester. A PTG water plant opening next year in California expects to make a $160,000 annual profit by selling its extra biogas-generated electricity. Even if the turbine is fuelled with natural gas, the pasteurisation is energy-efficient enough to be about half the cost of chlorine treatment.
Tracking down radiation hotspots is tricky and time consuming because it's hard to see where the problem areas are. Radiation doesn't spread itself evenly over an area, and as such it can be hard to find the spots within a contaminated area that require cleanup and differentiate them from the places that do not (typically this is done by walking around waving a handheld meter around, a process that is really, really slow). To simplify the task, Toshiba has developed what it's calling a Portable Gamma Camera that mashes up gamma ray data with image data to create visual radiation heat maps on the fly.
After UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa, produced yet another international commitment to wait a few more years before committing to anything, Canada has gone and done exactly what many feared it would do and pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, making it the first country to formally do so. And today, the finger-pointing begins.
At the University of Stuttgart and the nearby Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, researchers are taking the notion of smaller, more compact engines to a micro-machinery extreme. Their new power generator is a single particle - just 3 mircrometres wide - that functions like a Stirling engine to generate actual work.
There's no official announcement yet but word on the street and around the cafeteria at CERN says that scientists may haveglimpsed the elusive Higgs boson. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have been saying that they are closing on the so-called God Particle for a while now, and while a rock-solid 5-sigma event isn't in the offing we might soon see our first experimental data that points toward a real Higgs sighting.
Bill Gates recently confirmed during a talk at China's Ministry of Science and Technology that a company in which he is a primary investor, Terrapower, will be collaborating with Chinese scientists on a next-generation nuclear reactor. It's still in the early stages, but already there are a lot of impressive superlatives being thrown around.
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