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University of Minnesota researchers are a key step closer to making renewable petroleum fuels using bacteria, sunlight and dioxide, a goal funded by a $2.2 million United States Department of Energy grant.

In an event flanked with all the electric cars that have recently come to market, and a handful of those that are poised for sale later this year, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa flipped the switch May 13 on the 500th electric-vehicle charging station installed by Coulomb Technologies as part of its ChargePoint America network.

A radically new approach to the design of batteries, developed by researchers at MIT, could provide a lightweight and inexpensive alternative to existing batteries for electric vehicles and the power grid. The technology could even make "refueling" such batteries as quick and easy as pumping gas into a conventional car.

Any architect recognizes the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), lead by star architect Rem Koolhaas, as one of the most important and thought-provoking architectural firms in the world. The counterpart to OMA's architectural practice is AMO, a design and research studio that specifically focuses on areas beyond the traditional boundaries of architecture, such as media, politics, sociology, technology, fashion or graphic design. Remarkably, it seems AMO is getting more and more active in developing complex-scale, mass-medium data graphics. In February of this year, they presented the "Energy Report" for the WWF, a comprehensive study claiming that the world can be 100 percent reliant on renewable energy by 2050.

On the heels of another halting round of talks on climate change, UN scientists this week will review quick-fix options for beating back the threat of global warming that rely on technology rather than political wrangling.

It has all the appearances of a breakthrough in battery technology, except that it's not a battery. Researchers at Nanotek Instruments, Inc., and its subsidiary Angstron Materials, Inc., in Dayton, Ohio, have developed a new paradigm for designing energy storage devices that is based on rapidly shuttling large numbers of lithium ions between electrodes with massive graphene surfaces. The energy storage device could prove extremely useful for electric vehicles, where it could reduce the recharge time from hours to less than a minute. Other applications could include renewable energy storage (for example, storing solar and wind energy) and smart grids.

In an attempt to mimic the photosynthetic systems found in plants and some bacteria, scientists have taken a step toward developing an artificial light-harvesting system (LHS) that meets one of the crucial requirements for such systems: an approximately 100% energy transfer efficiency. Although high energy transfer efficiency is just one component of the development of a useful artificial LHS, the achievement could lead to clean solar-fuel technology that turns sunlight into chemical fuel.

Much of what we write about here at GeekMom is high tech gadgetry, so when I say 'solar' you might think of any number of modern solar powered electrical systems. What you probably didn't think about is the super low tech but incredibly brilliant solar bottle bulb developed by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Scientists at the NRL Materials Science and Technology Division are providing solid evidence that there is a new route towards developing novel, lightweight energy storage devices. By moving away from centuries of caustic, hazardous aqueous-based battery cells and instead using non-volatile, thermally-stable ionic liquids, scientists predict multiple new types of batteries. Rather than depend on highly acidic electrolytes, ionic liquids are used to create a solid polymer electrolyte composed of an ionic liquid and polyvinyl alcohol, developing novel types of solid state batteries with discharge voltages ranging up to 1.8 volts.

A high-tech entrepreneur has unveiled plans to launch the world's most powerful rocket since man went to the moon.

We tend to think of our cell phones as our own person technological domains. They are the places where we can store our digital life and keep an eye on the things that we need to, while we are on the go. But, what if your data is not you own, what if it is used against you in a court of law?

One of the most important decisions facing designers of plug-in electric or hybrid vehicles is related to battery choice. Now, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have used a life cycle analysis to examine three vehicle battery types to determine which does the best job of powering the vehicle while causing the least amount of environmental impact during its production.

As manufacturers and other businesses step up efforts to cut waste, reduce energy use and improve the overall sustainability of their products and processes, the number of planet-friendly standards and regulations also is increasing at a rapid clip, creating a sometimes-confusing array of options for "going green." National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers have prototyped a framework to help organizations of all types sort through the welter of choices and evaluate and implement sustainability standards most appropriate for their operations and interests.

Approximately 75 percent of electricity used in the United States is produced by coal-burning power plants that spew carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. To reduce this effect, many researchers are searching for porous materials to filter out the CO2 generated by these plants before it reaches the atmosphere, a process commonly known as carbon capture. But identifying these materials is easier said than done

A Binghamton University computer scientist with an interest in "green" software development has received the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award for young researchers.

If you thought 2010 was disruptive, wait until 2011. This year we saw major game-changers emerge -- the iPad, a flurry of mobile apps, the rise of social commerce, C-Suite fixation on enterprise social-media -- and more. This coming year we'll see even more dramatic change. Keep your eyes on the following

The living room is the epicenter of family, the hub of the household. Perhaps more so than the dining table, the living room hosts hours upon hours of family attention and interaction every week. Whether we were gripped by the music and voices emitting from radios or entranced by the moving images illuminating our televisions, we celebrated everything from togetherness to relaxation around a common centerpiece. This once mighty magnet of attention, through its iterative forms, is learning to share its powers of attraction forever changing the idea of the family cornerstone. Now attention is a battlefield and the laws of attraction are distributed.

As I read both Carr and Shirky over the past couple weeks-who both seek parallels between the rise of the internet and digital social media and the invention of the printing press in the 16th century-I couldn't help thinking about medieval manuscripts. Since the early 1990s, both medievalists and electronic media theorists have pointed to the hypertexted quality of medieval illuminated manuscripts in making complementary claims: medievalists to continuing cultural relevancy and electronic media theorists in continuity to literary tradition. The medieval books we admire so much today are distinguished by the remarkable visual images, in the body of a text and in the margins, that scholars have frequently compared to hypertexted images on internet "pages."