lifeboat.com: By Michael Anissimov.

1. Aerogel holds 15 entries in the Guinness Book of Records, more than any other material. Sometimes called “frozen smoke”, aerogel is made by the supercritical drying of liquid gels of alumina, chromia, tin oxide, or carbon. It’s 99.8% empty space, which makes it look semi-transparent. Aerogel is a fantastic insulator — if you had a shield of aerogel, you could easily defend yourself from a flamethrower. It stops cold, it stops heat. You could build a warm dome on the Moon. Aerogels have unbelievable surface area in their internal fractal structures — cubes of aerogel just an inch on a side may have an internal surface area equivalent to a football field. Despite its low density, aerogel has been looked into as a component of military armor because of its insulating properties. [ read more ]

news.com: by Michael Kanellos

MENLO PARK, Calif.–Back and forth, back and forth. That’s the idea behind WaveRoller. The company, based in Espoo, Finland, says it has devised a way to generate electricity from waves without buoys or other floating devices, the mainstay of other wave power companies.

Instead, the company wants to plant oscillating fiberglass/steel plates on the sea bed. Waves rolling in push over the plates, which rebound after the wave passes to only be knocked down by another wave. The back-and-forth motion of the plates drives a piston and creates hydraulic pressure. The pressure ultimately gets fed to a turbine to generate electricity. [ read more ]

physorg.com: For a project that could be on the very cutting edge of renewable energy, this one is actually decidedly low tech–and that’s the point.

A team of students, led by mechanical engineering graduate student Spencer Ahrens, has spent the last few months assembling a prototype for a concentrating solar power system they think could revolutionize the field. It’s a 12-foot-square mirrored dish capable of concentrating sunlight by a factor of 1,000, built from simple, inexpensive industrial materials selected for price, durability and ease of assembly rather than for optimum performance.
[ read more ]

fastcompany.com: By Elizabeth Svoboda

The oil well of tomorrow may be in a California lab full of genetically modified, diesel-spewing bacteria.

LS9’s world headquarters looks like a dorm room on move-out day. The reception area at the biotech company’s San Carlos, California, digs is stark white, unashamedly bare. No one has bothered to spring for prints or posters for the walls, not even from Ikea. Haphazard stacks of boxes line every corridor. It’s no surprise LS9 doesn’t put much of a premium on appearances–after all, its most important employees are patented microbes too small to be seen. “This is where we grow the bacteria,” says Steve del Cardayré, the company’s vice president for research and development, leading me to a lab space no bigger than your typical college double. He points to a vat containing an oatmeal-like slurry–carbohydrates derived from plant matter that feed the microbes. “After they’re finished growing, all we have to do is take the mixture out and spin it, and density makes it separate into its components.” [ read more ]

orionmagazine.org: by Kyle Edwards

I grew up on a farm in Iron Station, North Carolina, and as a teenager I split a lot of wood to feed the stove that kept our house warm. As a result, I quickly gained an appreciation for deadfall trees. Many times I went with my father to visit a sawmill down the road. Watching the old circle sawmill, I often thought of what it would be like to saw wood for a living. Later in life, when I began to notice the number of trees that were thrown into landfills, I decided to start a business sawing lumber from “waste” trees.

The goal of “treecyling” is twofold: to reduce waste in the landfill and to create higher end-value from what was once considered good only for firewood or mulch. [ read more ]

discovery.com: Proposals to mask global warming by mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions have hit a little snag: Far more dust could be needed than expected.

New modeling of the effects of sunlight-reflecting sulfate particles of different sizes injected into the stratosphere to reduce the sunlight reaching Earth’s surface suggest that at least 50 percent more faux volcanic dust would be required. That makes the task a tad more taunting.

What’s more, the authors of the new study caution that the side effects of such a massive ‘geoengineering’ project are still unknown. [ read more ]

wired.com: A biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn’t interfere with food supplies, company officials said.

Coskata, which is backed by General Motors and other investors, uses bacteria to convert almost any organic material, from corn husks (but not the corn itself) to municipal trash, into ethanol.

“It’s not five years away, it’s not 10 years away. It’s affordable, and it’s now,” said Wes Bolsen, the company’s vice president of business development. [ read more ]

fastcompany.com: Illiteracy, paralysis, blindness, cancer, lack of drinking water – the list of afflictions and troubles that ail the world seems never ending. But there are nascent ideas, which when cultivated and allowed to flourish, can make a difference. Saatchi & Saatchi’s World Changing Ideas Awards pays homage to brilliant thinking across the globe, identifying ten innovative ideas that have the potential to change — and save — millions of lives.

This year’s winner, LifeStraw walked away with $100,000 – and with good reason. The straw-like device is a highly portable, personal water-purification tool that turns even the dirtiest water into safe drinking water. It contains a halogen-based resin that filters out almost 100% of bacteria and 99% of viruses that cause deadly diseases. For the more than one billion people who lack access to safe drinking water, LifeStraw is an innovation that could mean the difference between life and death. [ read more ]

edge.org: To mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.

To understand them, consider our concern with world population. Today, there are more than 6.5 billion people, and that number may grow to around 9 billion within this half-century. Several decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the main challenge facing humanity. Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce. [ read more ]

technologyreview.com: A biotech startup wants to coax fuels from engineered microbes.

The biofuel of the future could well be gasoline. That’s the hope of one biotech startup that on Monday described for the first time how it is coaxing bacteria into producing hydrocarbons that could be processed into fuels like those made from petroleum.

LS9, a company based in San Carlos, CA, and founded by geneticist George Church, of Harvard Medical School, and plant biologist Chris Somerville, of Stanford University, had previously said that it was working on what it calls “renewable petroleum.” But at a Society for Industrial Microbiology conference on Monday, the company began speaking more openly about what it has accomplished: it has genetically engineered various bacteria, including E. coli, to custom-produce hydrocarbon chains. [ read more ]