• Purdue researchers turn cell phones into radiation detectors

    Boilermaker scientists equip cell phones with radiation sensors able to detect even light residues of radioactive material; many cell phones already contain global positioning locators, so the detector-equipped network of phones would serve as a national radiation tracking system

  • Harvesting rain-drop energy

    The search for clean and renewable energy led French researchers to experiment with harvesting the energy of falling rain drops; they show it is possible to convert the energy into electricity that can be used to power sensors and other devices

  • Westinghouse wins $200 million Watts Bar contract

    The rising price of oil and anxiety about global warming make nuclear power generation more attractive; companies servicing the nuclear power industry benefit

  • FERC approves eight critical infrastructure protection standards

    SCADA systems’ vulnerability offers business opportunities: The CIA revealed last week — well, “hinted” or “allowed” would be more accurate — that criminal gangs now extort cities by threatening to cut off these cities’ power; what gangs can do, hostile governments and terrorist organizations can do, too (and they will not demand money, either); there is a commercial opportunity here for IT suppliers

  • Acergy to develop Victoria Field

    As the price of oil rises, the exploitation of difficult-to-reach oil and gas fields becomes more attractive; contract signed to develop Victoria Field in the southern North Sea

  • Renault/Nissan to turn Israel into electric car haven

    Car makers, with the help of $1 billion investment from Project Better Place, will wire Israel with 500,000 charging points and 150 battery-swap stations where motorists can exchange their depleted batteries for recharged ones within about five minutes

  • What are the security risks of virtualization?

    Server virtualization can aid security, but virtualized environments bring their own headaches as security threats can originate externally and internally in a virtualized environment

  • OMB wants privacy review details in FISMA reports

    U.S. government agencies will have to provide more details about the privacy reviews they conduct as part of annual reporting in compliance with FISMA

  • U.S. wind power generation expands 45% in 2007

    Rapid increase in U.S. wind power generation capacity sees 45 percent growth in 2007, injecting $9 billion into U.S. economy; growth of wind power accounts for 30 percent of the entire new power-producing capacity added nationally in 2007

  • SPARQL is a new, format-independent query technology

    Many successful query languages exist, including standards such as SQL and XQuery, but they were primarily designed for queries limited to a single product, format, type of information, or local data store; SPARQL is the key standard for opening up data on the Semantic Web, and the goal of the Semantic Web is to enable people to share, merge, and reuse data globally

  • Animation shows how cities will cope with devastating earthquakes

    How do we know what damage will be sustained by a city located in an earthquake-prone region? Purdue University researchers have an ambitious idea: Create a mini satellite city to cope with the aftermath of such a catastrophe; Boilermakers have created a 3D fly-through animation showing what the city would look like

  • CIA: Utilities threatened by cyber attacks

    CIA says U.S. utilities are at risk for cyber attack; security experts said the CIA’s acknowledgment of the problem indicates how seriously they are taking it, as CIA policy had been not to disclose such things

  • Idaho geothermal power plant goes online

    U.S. Geothermal launches first geothermal power plant in Idaho; plant uses innovative binary cycle technology in which the geothermal fluid is pumped through a heat exchanger to vaporize isopentane, an organic compound that vaporizes at lower temperatures than water

  • New consortium to develop tiny sensors to boost energy production

    The University of Texas at Austin announces the Advanced Energy Consortium (AEC), a multimillion-dollar research consortium dedicated to the development of micro and nanotechnology applications to increase oil and gas production

  • Swiss move on quantum cryptography

    Ensuring effective data security is the next challenge for global data networks; quantum cryptography offers such effective security; the Swiss national election in October 2007 provided first real-life test of the technology, and Swiss now move to implement it in security-sensitive sectors of the economy