• Dueling legislation over cybersecurity regulations

     

    Attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure may bring about a Katrina-like situation: no electricity, no fresh water, limited traffic control, severely curtailed emergency response, and more; about 85 percent of U.S. critical infrastructure is privately owned; two different cybersecurity bills in Congress envision different solutions to U.S. infrastructure’s cyber vulnerability

  • Companies team up to develop carbon capturing

     

    Three companies have teamed up to build a low-carbon, coal-based power plant in Scotland; the plant will include a carbon-capture and storage; with more than 90 percent carbon capture, the coal feedstock plant will generate extremely low-carbon electric power and also produce hydrogen gas for commercial use

  • The Transboundary Agreement is not just about the cost of gas and the environment

    The Transboundary Agreement, which the United States and Mexico reached on 20 February, regulates oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico; before the agreement is ratified, there is a need to address serious security issues related to building more oil rigs in the Gulf – for example, the fact that the Mexican government cannot control its powerful criminal organizations, and that it will be easy for terrorists in a small boat to overrun one of these deepwater rigs

  • Electricity from trees

    Plants have long been known as the lungs of the earth, but a new finding has found they may also play a role in electrifying the atmosphere; scientists found the positive and negative ion concentrations in the air were twice as high in heavily wooded areas than in open grassy areas, such as parks

  • Confirmed: oil from Deepwater Horizon disaster entered food chain

    For months, crude oil gushed into the water at a rate of approximately 53,000 barrels per day; new study confirms that not only did oil affect the ecosystem in the Gulf during the blowout, but it was still entering the food web after the well was capped

  • New method for cleaning up nuclear waste

    There are more than 436 nuclear power plants operating in thirty countries, and they create a lot of nuclear waste; one of the more toxic elements in that waste is radionuclide technetium (99Tc); approximately 305 metric tons of 99Tc were generated from nuclear reactors and weapons testing from 1943 through 2010

  • Simulation of nuclear fusion shows high-gain energy output

    High-gain nuclear fusion could be achieved in a preheated cylindrical container immersed in strong magnetic fields, according to a series of computer simulations performed at Sandia National Laboratories; the method appears to be fifty times more efficient than using X-rays — a previous favorite at Sandia — to drive implosions of targeted materials to create fusion conditions

  • Asteroid to miss Earth next year, but not by much

    When it whizzes past Earth in 2013, a newly discovered asteroid is going to miss our planet — but not by much; the 50-meter space rock is expected to come closer than many satellites, highlighting the growing need to keep watch on hazards from above

  • Good news: metal-reducing bacteria interacts with plutonium oxide

    Studies show that under oxygen-free conditions, plutonium(IV) hydrous oxide, the most common subsurface form of plutonium, does not become very soluble; this information will help in developing effective approaches for isolating and removing the contaminants before they can impact humans and the environment

  • Radiation-laced Japanese seafood detected in South Korea

    The effects of the Japanese nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daichii atomic energy plant are continuing to ripple across the world

  • Smart grid: from deployment to applications

    Some 200 million smart meters have been deployed worldwide, forty million of them in North America; a new white paper from Pike Research says that the year 2012 represents a turning point for the sector

  • NICB warns of growing copper thefts

    A recently released report by the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) concludes that copper and other metal thefts are on the rise once again in the United States

  • Reducing fatalities in traffic’s “twilight zone”

    There are more than 30,000 traffic fatalities each year in the United States, and about 2,000 of them occur in stoplight intersections; engineers call them “dilemma zone” — that area before a stoplight intersection where the traffic light turns yellow and the driver is not sure whether to stop or go ahead

  • A long-term low carbon energy strategy is essential for a prosperous U.K.

    An urgent remodeling of the U.K. energy infrastructure is vital if the country wants to decarbonize without “the lights going out” and not be reliant on imported energy supplies, says a new report

  • Harvesting energy, water from human waste

    Researchers begin developing prototype device for harvesting energy and clean drinking water from human waste; the device proposal beat more than 2,000 other proposals to receive funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation