Viewing posts tagged: "Academic"

5

Bacteria That Eat Plastic to Make Plastic Goes Commercial

Michael Kanellos: April 7, 2009, 2:58 PM
Thanks to Todd Kimmel of Mayfield Fund and overall green chemistry fan for updating us on this one. Last year, we wrote about how Kevin O'Connor at University of College Dublin had come up with a way to recycle old plastic bottles and containers with microorganisms. The bugs eat a cooked down version of a plastic bottle and metabolize it into new, saleable molecules. If I could do that, I'd never leave home. The plastic that comes out of the digestive process is also biodegradable. It can go safely into a landfill and will disappear over time. O'Connor has since formed a company, called Bioplastech, to commercialize it. CrapPlastic is funner, but might spook investors. If...
11

Calera Gives Info on Green Cement Process, Mystery Lingers

Michael Kanellos: April 3, 2009, 10:23 AM
Brent Constantz, CEO of green cement company Calera, forwarded us a document from one of his scientific advisers today that partly explains what they are doing and to further respond to criticism from Ken Caldeira. It's still vague, it's one they showed to BusinessWeek where the story broke, but good to have on the record. The document was prepared by J.R. O'Neil, Professor Emeritus, Department of Geological Science at the University of Michigan. There is clearly no love lost here. "In essence, Caldeira goofed up big time and should have known better," O'Neil wrote. The story has no legs." Caldeira, however, is not some random Internet crank. He's a climate scientist at the...
1

San Francisco Files Wave Power Application

Michael Kanellos: February 27, 2009, 9:33 AM
The City of San Francisco has filed an application for a wave power farm that could produce up to 30 megawatts of power. Details, however, are vague to nonexistent. What sort of wave machines would be built? Who would own and maintain them, etc. All that is TBA. Nonetheless it's a start. Wave and tidal power are in the embryonic stages but proponents say the business could take off in the 2010s. Pelamis Wave Power launched the first commercial wave power device off the coast of Portugal last Fall and a couple of companies, such as Ireland's Open Hydro (tidal power), have launched large-scale prototypes. The big challenges? Building something that can survive Neptune's fury....
2

Drill, Baby, Drill

Eric Wesoff: February 19, 2009, 12:19 PM
Midday events at Stanford University attract a crowd of students, professors, George Schultz in a red jacket and a bunch of retirees.  I mean, who else can attend a speech by the CEO of ExxonMobil in the middle of the day? Rex Tillerson, chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil recited a speech on Tuesday afternoon in an event sponsored by the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP). GCEP's purpose is to conduct pre-commercial research that will lead to technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  ExxonMobil is GCEP's largest sponsor and plans to invest up to $100 million in the program over 10 years. In 1968, there would be have been howls of protest in the face of an oil...
0

Morons on the High Seas: Ex-Googler Plans Cities on Oceans

Michael Kanellos: February 2, 2009, 8:43 AM
One of the greatest things about the high-tech revolution is how its unleashed the inner bonehead in people. Today's case in point: Patri Friedman of the Seasteading Institute. The ex-Googler wants to build cities on the high seas to escape the pernicious influence of government. It's a Libertarian experiment. "We don't have a frontier anymore. The reason our political system doesn't innovate anymore is that there's no place to try out new things. We want to provide that place," he told News.com. Brave talk like this is always great, particularly when it comes from a guy whose whole career is bound up in a technological achievement (the Internet) funded by an ossified...
2

Berkeley: Radical Hotbed of Energy Efficiency

Michael Kanellos: December 10, 2008, 7:16 PM
With the appointment of Steve Chu as the Secretary of Energy, it becomes official: Berkeley is the world capital of efficiency. Chu, the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, has been one of the leading advocates of trying to curb fuel consumption through things like designing buildings better for their environment. Chu follows in the footsteps of Art Rosenfeld, who taught at the University of California and worked at the lab for decades. A physicist (Enrico Fermi's last grad student), Rosenfeld convinced the state of California to past stringent energy efficiency laws and appliance standards in the 1970s. Since then, electricity consumption in California has stayed...
2

A Molecular Screening Process for Improving Solar Cells

Michael Kanellos: December 8, 2008, 6:55 AM
Developing new solar technologies isn't that different from finding new drugs, say IBM and Harvard. The two are forming a new World Community Grid project to find new molecules for harvesting power from the sun. Under the project, IBM will offer up computing cycles on its cloud computer to researchers to test out the efficacy of various molecules. This, in a nutshell, is how drugs are developed. Researchers examine billions of different combinations of proteins to see how they interact. Running the mind-boggling number of combinations takes repetitive, brute-force computing power. The same is true when it comes to materials for organic solar. A lot of elements and materials can...

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