There's a long tradition of offering big cash prizes to entice talented and creative individuals to solve problems that have stymied industry and governments for decades. For example, in 1810, French cook Nicolas Appert won a 12,000-franc government prize for a food preservation
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Transportation to some of America's most iconic tourist destinations will be a little more high-tech and eco-friendly come April. Statue Cruises, which provides ferry service to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, has signed an agreement with Derecktor Shipyards in
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How a record-breaking pilot made it through the night in a sun-powered plane
Born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1952, the year the first commercial jet airliner took flight, André Borschberg grew up longing for the skyward frontier and the "freedom of three dimensions."
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A clean-aviation milestone
Zero-emission flight leapt forward in July, when Swiss pilot André Borschberg flew the solar- and battery-powered Solar Impulse HB-SIA for 26 hours, 9 minutes and 10 seconds, reaching a height of 28,500 feet before gliding back down
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Anything is possible with determination and a little help from modern technology. That's the message of Haidar Taleb's inspirational 200-mile journey across
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A gigantic Chinese dairy farm is now the world's largest methane farm, turning a massive source of greenhouse gas emissions into a lucrative renewable energy source.
Huishan Dairy
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Those spiky things around the stadium's top? Those are 20-foot-tall wind turbines. 80 of them
The Philadelphia Eagles announced a partnership with Solar Blue to completely re-green their
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This translucent tree of a building seems like something that might grace the cover of an old Popular
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The next generation of Mars rovers may not rove at all, instead bouncing around the planet while harvesting carbon dioxide for fuel.
A new Mars hopper concept involves a carbon
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America's only nationwide carbon trading market will shut its doors next month, a tacit acknowledegment that Republican gains in Congress spell doom for any sort of federal greenhouse
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As particle physicists gather this week for a conference in Paris, they're reporting progress toward finding the elusive Higgs boson, with two groups suggesting a Higgs discovery may not be far off.
Physicists from Fermilab in Illinois announced they combined the results of two experiments
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Good dog parents might think they're doing their part by using biodegradable baggies to pick up after their pooches. But after Fido's feces go in the trash can and to a landfill, they release methane gas, a significant contributor to the greenhouse effect. A dog
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Human skin is primed for touch - even minuscule pressure from a fly is enough to make you flinch. This ability does not yet extend to artificial limbs, however, and robots are a long way from having sensitive tactile abilities.
Now two California research teams have announced
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There's a long tradition of offering big cash prizes to entice talented and creative individuals to solve problems that have stymied industry and governments for decades. For example, in 1810, French cook Nicolas Appert won a 12,000-franc government prize for a food preservation
Read more...
A new eco-city planned in Portugal takes a cue from biology, using a centralized computer "brain" to control functions like water use, waste processing and energy consumption. It's the biggest attempt at
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Smart house tech is about to go a step beyond your average energy-efficiency monitoring systems. What about a house that prepares a fresh pot of coffee when you wake up, plays your favorite music without being told to, and sets the thermostat to your ideal setting? Now that's
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Plants are extremely efficient converters of light into energy, more or less setting the bar for researchers creating photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight into electricity. As such, researchers are constantly trying to mimic the tricks that millions of years of
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Those spiky things around the stadium's top? Those are 20-foot-tall wind turbines. 80 of them
The Philadelphia Eagles announced a partnership with Solar Blue to completely re-green their
Read more...
A new underwater kite being developed in Sweden could be a low-cost, low-impact method for harnessing ocean energy. Swedish start-up Minesto has obtained US$2.5 million to start testing the kite in Northern Ireland next year.
The kite, called Deep Green, is able to capture tidal energy at
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An ultralight kit plane designed in the 1970s has become the first four-engined electric plane to take to the skies. Weighing in around 175 kilograms -- including the pilot -- the
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As particle physicists gather this week for a conference in Paris, they're reporting progress toward finding the elusive Higgs boson, with two groups suggesting a Higgs discovery may not be far off.
Physicists from Fermilab in Illinois announced they combined the results of two experiments
Read more...
Over five years ago, scientists succeeded in teleporting information. Unfortunately,
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While Toyota and Volkswagen – the world’s two biggest car makers – are locked in a battle for global sales leadership over the next decade, driven by a new generation of hybrid and electric cars, Japanese maker Honda is working on technology that may well leapfrog them both. Most big
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Never mind that twisty compact fluorescent. The new energy-efficient way to light your home is with LEDs. An upcoming crop of bulbs draw 12 watts or less, edging out a typical fluorescent, and they have a more conventional shape, contain no mercury, and last at least
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It?s amazing no one thought of it before: nuclear fusion from a levitating tire-sized magnet
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Looking for new energy solutions, scientists are increasingly embracing the idea of cold fusion, once considered a junk science along the lines of alchemy. "Cold fusion" describes the nuclear fusion of atoms at close to room temperatures, as opposed to the epic temperatures
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The future of community bike systems may not require much pedaling at all; Sanyo has just installed two "Solar Parking Lots" that serve as solar charging stations for 100 Eneloop electric hybrid
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Viruses generally get a bad rap, but they can also be very helpful little machines. For instance, bacteriophages have been engineered to clear up infections that seemed otherwise untreatable, and genetic material from viruses has been used to ease
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General Motors touted the automatic driving mode of its two-wheel electric car when it unveiled the vehicle last month in Shanghai, China. Now there's a video that
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A laser-obsessed entrepreneur whose mosquito-zapping project demoed at the TED 2010 conference has bigger plans for energy beams. Tom Nugent envisions using lasers to deliver energy over long distances -- whether that means juicing up an aerial drone's batteries or beaming solar space power
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