Failed strategy

Hydrogen-Powered Cars

Hydrogen cars got a boost with the $1.2 billion Hydrogen Fuel Initiative in 2003, leading to a flurry of research. The appeal of hydrogen lies in its only emission being water vapor. While hydrogen still relies on natural gas for production, there are possible alternatives, such as coaxing it from bacteria and sunlight. But forget theory for a minute. The Honda FCX Clarity is one of the few real-world hydrogen cars and only 18 states have any hydrogen refueling stations, with California the only state to have in excess of 10. Meanwhile, hybrid cars have been hitting the road for 14 years, with the Toyota Prius pulling ahead with over two million vehicles sold since its introduction in 1997. First-mover advantage isn't the only reason for the hybrid's domination over hydrogen, though. The 2010 Obama administration budget request bet against the technology, favoring and funding hybrids and attempting to cut the amount going to the Department of Energy's hydrogen fuel-cell program. While Congress restored the majority of the funding, the proposed 2012 budget is looking once again to slash financial support for the program.

Microsoft Zune(to compete with ipod)

The Microsoft Zune proved the maxim that looks are everything. Coming across more like an iPod prototype than a sleek, fully realized product, the Zune 30 arrived in 2006 in black, white, and brown. Its Microsoft software was widely praised, but with two notable missteps: it wasn't Mac-compatible and couldn't sync with iTunes (something even Palm managed). Consumers were already five years and several models in to the iPod and their iTunes libraries. A more attractive package could certainly have helped, and Microsoft did gussy up the Zune in its subsequent incarnations but to no avail. The last Zune was produced in April 2010. Microsoft says that it's the final standalone unit, with the technology being merged into Windows Phone 7 devices.


MeeGo

MeeGo's name foretold its own exit. The Nokia and Intel-developed mobile OS was killed by Stephen Elop, the company's president and CEO, just as the first and only phone to use it was announced. Elop dropped MeeGo to make way for Windows Phone 7-based devices. Yet the Nokia N9, the first and now only phone on the platform, garnered rave reviews for features such as NFC, an 8-megapixel camera, and a swipe gesture to replace the home key. But that wasn't enough for a stay of execution. MeeGo's downfall had nothing to do with it but rather it's because it came too late for the company. Nokia is struggling to regain its former prominence, and partnering with Microsoft on a dozen-plus forthcoming phones is the path it has chosen to take. Intel thinks MeeGo is down and not out and plans to try to revive it in the tablet space.

USB 3.0

The latest USB standard—with its SuperSpeed bus that has a fourth transfer mode at 5 Gbps—arrived at the beginning of 2010 with a certified consumer product rollout. However, that rollout has been limited, partly because Intel has been dragging its feet on supporting the standard. The answer why arrived with a thunderclap, or a Thunderbolt, rather. Intel brought its own Thunderbolt technology to market with Apple. Thunderbolt has twice the transfer speed, supports daisy-chaining, and benefits from Intel and Apple's backing. The writing seems to be on the wall with this one.

Bluetooth 4.0

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) said on Wednesday that version 4.0 of the wireless specification may be incorporated into devices by the end of the year. The new spec will bring Bluetooth to a whole new set of gadgets including watches, pedometers, and all other low-power devices that run on coin-cell batteries.
This is a huge step considering that Bluetooth only resided in devices that used triple-A or larger capacity batteries. Michael Foley, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG, said that 4.0 combines both the high-speed data transfer capabilities provided by Bluetooth 3.0 with the new ability to transmit small bursts of data over short ranges.

Missile system which reduce the danger of civilian

A revolutionary missile system which, it is claimed, will significantly reduce the danger of civilian casualties was unveiled on Tuesday at the Paris air show.

Details of the Perseus programme were announced on the day that Nato admitted responsibility for an airstrike which killed nine civilians. The alliance's secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, expressed his "deep regrets" over the deaths which may have been caused by "weapons-system failure".

The manufacturers of the Perseus, MBDA, insists that the system's "smart technology" will safeguard against such mistakes. The guidance system will be programmed for the missile to divert and self-destruct if it "sees" that changes have taken place in the expected landscape. The Perseus, using "stealth" technology to avoid radar detection, will be supersonic with a top speed of 3,200kmph and a range of 300km. Travelling low enough to skim the waves at sea and 20ft above land, it could be used against both naval and land targets.


The production date for the missiles, which are expected to cost around £800,000 each, is yet to be decided. The manufacturer claims that, on completion, the system would be able to penetrate almost all existing defensive shields.

MBDA is involved in a number of Anglo-French projects in the pipeline following the agreement reached between Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron last year.

Electric Networked Vehicle zero-emission hybrid concept

Planet friendly and really green - could an automaker achieve things like these? Oh yes, why not? The vision has been there all along. General Motor's EN-V, short for Electric Networked Vehicle, showed the urge to not interfere with environment in a bad manner. The Porsche 918 Spyder, too showed the way. Then, Swiss car company Mindset came out with its zero-emission hybrid concept.Now, it is 2020 Chevrolet Era project, designed by Yana Briggs of Lithuanian origin, a graduate of Art Center College of Design, much thought has been given to the project before finalizing a design for the eco friendly car.


The Chevrolet Era would have a 2+2 design and would carry its solar panels on the roof. Nicknamed the 'Cleaner' by its designer, the Era works on power gathered at its concave spherical surface. One has to understand that the concave surface has been designed with specific intention to trap maximum power for the vehicle from the sun. Its headlights double up as indicators of the panel charging process. Now, let us move to the Era's interiors.
The internals too, are quite thoughtful. The car is designed to save the one behind the wheel from that polluted air. It uses an O2 filter exhaust. The system renews oxygen for the riders at programmed intervals. The Era has been designed to kill. It boasts of diamond jewellery inspired headlights. These have been detailed very minutely to give the young Yana a chance to compete for the coming World Solar Challenge. That aside, she is presently busy also designing the 2022 Alfa Romeo Mode Concept car.

Light the dark corners of the world

The explorer's symposium at the National Geographic headquarters this summer witnessed an outstanding innovation borrowed from a child's project and the mind of a great explorer- T.H Culhane. When our brilliant explorer viewed a video on youtube, where a child used aluminium cans ( any cold drink holder) and turned it into a battery, he was so inspired that with a global perspective and another well known concept called the 'joule thief', he gave birth to a cheap electricity plan for the backward and rural patches of the world.

Now 'joule thief' is a concept quite judiciously explained by its name, as it uses weak charge to build and convert it into increased energy for all purposes. T.H Culhane used the very same concept to convert a dead AA battery which yields 1.2 volts to power a 3 volt LED light. So now he had in his hands a power saver and almost free of cost 'can' batteries.

Nepal is one of the first planned destinations of this innovation, where Culhane anticipated a huge turnover of waste aluminium cans due to the tourist activity. He plans to set up solar and biogas plants, which will run on this technology. The cans initially will be filled with water (usually operated through wood ash so that it can collect potassium hydroxide) and then used simple electrodes such as a brillo pad or pencil lead to help set up batteries and joule thieves then will light up the remote villages with LED lights. This innovation is a perfect union between fundamentals, new age inventions and global concern which has simmered up high potential solutions to village lighting and electricity problems.

Diet pill-Obesity in Istanbul

A diet pill that can help women drop a dress size in a matter of months could be on sale within two years.

In a large-scale study, overweight men and women who took lorcaserin for a year lost an average of 8 per cent of their body weight.

This equates to a stone for a 12st woman – and at least one dress size.
In one or two extreme cases in the 7,000-strong trial, dieters lost up to 40 per cent of their body weight, with most of the pounds melting away in the first few months.

Appetite was cut, waistlines shrunk and cholesterol and blood pressure were lowered, the European Congress on Obesity in Istanbul heard yesterday. Lorcaserin's Californian manufacturer, Arena, now plans to apply for  permission to sell the twice-a-day drug in Britain early next year.

That means it could be routinely used to help win the battle of the bulge by 2013.


With Britain facing the worst weight problem in Europe and just one obesity drug on the market, some doctors argue there is an urgent need for new clinical solutions.

However, despite lorcaserin's apparent effectiveness, safety concerns prompted by tests on rats have prevented it being sold in the U.S.

The authorities there have insisted that Arena carries out more research before it gains a licence.
The drug, taken before breakfast and dinner, affects the way the brain uses serotonin, a chemical that regulates appetite, making those who take it feel less hungry.

Common side-effects in the trial were headaches, dizziness and nausea, but they tended to be temporary.

Crucially, the drug appeared to be free of the cardiac and psychiatric side-effects that have caused other obesity pills to be removed from the market in recent years.

Some have criticised the development of drugs to treat a problem which, they argue, should be addressed by healthier living.


In response, Arena's vice-president Dr Christen Anderson said: 'Diet and exercise are the cornerstone of any treatment programme but they may not be enough.

'Study after study has shown that motivation can wane and sometimes people need just a little help.

'Right now, patients have very few options. Surgery is a fairly extreme measure, so I think physicians and patients are really eager to have new tools to help battle obesity.'

It is not known how much lorcaserin will cost, but orlistat, the only diet pill currently available on prescription, costs around £1 a day.

Iko Bag

The Iko Bag is a commuter backpack that converts into a messenger. Iko in Japanese means "Go!", and that's exactly the philosophy we want people to experience when wearing this bag. The goal for us was to design a softgood that could create a behavior change to choose transportation such as biking and walking over driving a car. We wanted this bag to be versatile in the way it was used, as the design encourages multifunctionality and organization. As a tool for commuting, we ultimately wanted to create an experience where we carefully considered wearer's safety and presence amongst a road full of cars.

New battery technology / lithium polymer battery pack

The next-generation of lithium-ion batteries aren't just here to power the first wave of electric cars and remake the power grid; they'll be providing better energy storage for our gadgets and computers, too. On Monday, venture capital-backed lithium-ion battery player Leyden Energy (formerly called Mobius Power) is launching a replacement lithium-ion battery for laptops that won't degrade (start losing its full charge) for at least three years, and will come with a three-year warranty.

Most standard laptop batteries start losing their ability to fully charge (providing fewer and fewer hours of battery life) after about a year and a half. Anyone who's a laptop user knows how annoying it is to have a battery that suddenly won't hold a charge for very long, even though it's still early in the life of the laptop itself. Leyden Energy says its battery has one of the highest energy densities and run times for a lithium-ion laptop battery on the market, with 440 watt hours per liter and over 1,000 cycles, and the battery can operate at higher temperatures than traditional batteries.


Leyden Energy's three-year warranty battery will cost a premium over a standard one-year battery, and while Leyden Energy hasn't yet determined the exact price it will sell the battery for, Leyden Energy CEO and President Aakar Patel told me in an interview that a three-year battery will be less than double the cost of a one-year battery. Leyden Energy will also announce a deal Monday to sell its battery through the Canadian battery retailer Dr. Battery, and interested customers will be able to buy the battery online in a couple of weeks through the retailer.

Leyden Energy was founded in 2007 with a patent acquired from chemical giant Dupont, and a $4.5 million investment from investors at Walden International, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. Leyden's secret sauce is an innovation for the electrolyte part of the battery. A battery has a positive and a negative plate and then an electrolyte in between, which is the substance through which electrons transfer back and forth while the battery charges and discharges.

While standard lithium-ion batteries use a salt-based solvent within the electrolyte that starts degrading at a temperature of between 70 to 80 degrees Celsius, Leyden uses a salt-solvent in its electrolyte that doesn't degrade up to temperatures of 300 degrees Celsius. Leyden Energy holds a patent for this innovation. As Patel explained it to me, when a battery charges and discharges, think of the electrons as rods that move across the electrolyte (between the anode and the cathode) and fill holes on the other side. After a certain point in time, standard electrolytes, particularly at high temperatures, let the rods start to break down and the holes start to fill up, but Leyden's battery can maintain the integrity of those rods and holes at higher temperatures for a longer period of time.


In the grand scheme of innovations, and with startups trying to change the game with designs for battery-powered cars with hundreds of miles of range, Leyden's innovation is kind of like baby steps. But if Leyden can manage to get a deal with a major laptop manufacturer to embed the battery directly in a laptop, or market the battery with a popular laptop, then the company could do well. In 2008, Boston Power launched its three-year-lasting lithium-ion battery with laptop maker HP, and is backed by Oak Investment Partners, Venrock, GGV Capital and Gabriel Venture Partners.

Like Boston Power, Leyden Energy has been eying the electric vehicle battery market, too, and is working with Brammo to supply the battery for its electric motorcycle the Empulse, a more powerful version of Brammo's original e-scooter the Enertia (which I test drove here). Leyden and a vehicle maker partner were also awarded a $2.96 million grant from the California Energy Commission to produce ten electric vehicle batteries per month. Leyden seems like it's focusing more on batteries for the laptop and consumer electronics markets, instead of electric vehicles, as it seems like the market for electric vehicles is moving slower than some have expected (see A123 Systems , and Ener1 ).

Liquid-Cooled LED Bulb

For the past couple of years venture firm VantagePoint Capital Partners has quietly discussed what they say is a revolutionary LED bulb startup called SuperBulbs, which has been developing an incandescent bulb-killer. Well, looks like the startup, now renamed as Switch Lighting, is finally showing off its first set of commercial products, which are liquid-cooled LED bulbs that are meant to replace incandescent bulbs, at the lighting convention Lightfair this week.


Switch's bulbs are designed to have small LEDs placed around the edge of the bulb, rather than at a central point, which is common for most LEDs. Switch's bulbs also use liquid within the bulb to cool the LEDs, because liquids are a lot more efficient cooling medium than air (read more about liquid-cooled servers). This combo is the secret-sauce behind why Switch claims its bulb "is the closest alternative to incandescent-quality light," today on the market. Greentech Media has an interesting video and description of the technology.

Switch's first bulbs — it launched a 100-watt incandescent equivalent at Lightfair, and also has developed 40-watt, 65-watt, 75-watt equivalents — are supposed to go on sale later this year. An important thing to note about the Switch bulbs is that they are also supposed to retail for under $20 for the 40-watt, and will likely be far less expensive than the current LED bulbs on the market that can cost as high as $40 to $50 per bulb.
That price point gives the Switch LED bulb a lot quicker pay off in energy savings to the buyer. Switch says its bulbs use 85 less energy than incandescent bulbs and the return on investment is about a year. This could be a game-changer in the industry — if consumers actually respond and start buying these when they come out.

Two layers of liquid metal

A buzzy startup working on a battery that sandwiches molten salt between two layers of liquid metal has gotten seed funding from Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates, reports Cnet . The company is called Liquid Metal Battery, and it's the brainchild of MIT Professor Donald Sadoway (see our 15 Questions for the Don of Liquid Metal Batteries). When I attended the Department of Energy's ARPA-E event earlier this year, Liquid Metal Battery was the company everyone was talking about. (It was one of the earliest grant winners under the ARPA-E program.)

Sadoway and his team have been working on a stable, low-cost, large-scale grid battery, and the group has been building the battery at larger and larger sizes to prove the concept — from "shot glass" scale, to hockey puck, to pizza, and eventually to ping-pong table-sized. Sadoway told us he was planning to spin off the company with some of his co-workers, and this seed round from Gates and others is no doubt to get the company up and running. Cnet says Sadoway is taking a year-long sabbatical from MIT to be the Science Advisor to Liquid Metal Battery.

Sadoway told us what drew him to use liquid metals for a grid battery was a belief that a battery based on liquid metal electrodes would be stable, and scalable at an acceptably low cost for grid storage and renewables storage applications. "That's the number one problem with storage right now. We have batteries that can cycle and do all sorts of things that will meet the technical requirements of the application, but they're far too costly," said Sadoway. Using a large pool of liquid in the battery — as opposed to many individual cells — is why Sadoway thinks the design can deliver a low-cost battery.


The project received an ARPA-E grant of $6.9 million, and Sadoway said the funds helped the team move much more quickly, including expanding company operations to hire more staff, students and post-docs. The project also received $4 million from oil company Total.

Over the past year, Bill Gates has been talking about, and investing in, green technology companies, including nuclear startup TerraPower and being an LP in Khosla Venture's fund. Gates also said at an event last year that he has invested in five battery startups. Liquid Metal Battery must be one of those. Also during that event, Gates said he thinks that battery innovation "may not be solvable in an economic way."

Synthetic plastics / Synthetic car plastics

Synthetic car plastics will eventually be blowing in the wind like those yellow heads of dandelions, the herbaceous perennial foliage that grows in lawns and alongside highways. Does thinking about it make you want to sneeze? Forget the pollen. Ford has been itching for a new kind of rubber for its cars, and dandelions could be the answer.

Ford's engineers are teaming with Ohio State on developing the Russian dandelion (or TKS) as a natural rubber source for cup holders, floor mats and interior trim in its vehicles. So far, everything is coming up (cough) roses in this latest effort by the company to revamp its factory and fleet for a sustainable plug-in future.

By harvesting the weeds in neat rows in a greenhouse, researchers are able to learn how to manage the flowers and the sap that seeps from the roots, a potential source of rubber that could be even stronger than automotive plastics. The Southwestern U.S. shrub Guayule might also be used to replace the toxic alternative.

"What we are trying to do is to create sustainability of vehicles from inside and out by figuring out how we can make materials out of renewable recycled materials rather than depending on petroleum products," says Ellen Lee, a chemical engineer and member of The Ford Research Biomaterials Group in Detroit.  "We are looking at how we can use things we grow to put into our cars."


Things like soy, which Ford has led the way in tapping to produce polyurethane foam seat cushions, backs and headrests. The parts are now on more than 1.5 million Ford, Lincoln and Mercury vehicles on the road, a reduction in petroleum oil usage of some four million pounds each year. Ford also broke ground with the industry's first use of a soy-foam headliner on the 2010 Escape and Mercury Mariner for a 25 percent weight savings versus a traditional glass-mat headliner.

"We are committed to using local resources and raw materials that come from the U.S. and Canada," says Angela Harris, another Ford researcher. "We are in the labs day to day working on products and vising schools, local news stations, public radio stations and start up technology companies to share our mission and the fact the U.S. and Ford are leading the way."

Along the way, their campaign also reaches out to young women who are a minority in the automotive and engineering fields. The team hopes to set an example of what female scientists can do to expedite the development of responsible parts for vehicles.


"Five of us are moms and are working on biotechnology with Ford," says Lee. "We are getting out there to say women should pursue careers in engineering since biotechnology is fast becoming a number-one field. "

In the meantime, they hope to get all of us thinking about how to incorporate available plants as possible materials in our every day lives. It all makes sense when you consider dandelion root is used medicinally to ease everything from a loss of appetite to insufferable intestinal gas, excruciating gallstones, nagging joint pain, muscle aches, eczema and bruises. It helps increase urine production, prompt bowel movements and is a stimulating skin toner, blood and digestive tonic. Some use it to treat infections or to spice up salad greens, soups, wine and teas.Now that's some killer weed.

Lasers and Electro-Optics / laser spark plug

Lasers could soon replace spark plugs in cars to make engines greener, according to researchers.
Experts from from Romania and Japan will reveal their findings - that inexpensive lasers could ignite the fuel-air mixture in combustion engines - at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics in Baltimore next month.
The team, who are believed to be in talks with a spark plug manufacturer, will speak about their studies on May 1 and it could revolutionise the efficiency of vehicle engines.
The revolutionary approach would - in theory - reduce their pollution, by igniting more of the mixture.
Spark plugs are used to ignite the fuel mixture near the spark gap, reducing the combustion efficiency.

One of the biggest drawbacks of the spark plug is that and the metal that they are manufactured with slowly erodes as they age.
Many other people have tried to replace the spark plug - an object which has not really changed since it was invented a century and a half ago - with lasers.
Unfortunately inventors found that the lasers needed to do the job of the spark plug would be cumbersome, inefficient and unstable.

However, the team believe that they have now developed a system that can focus two or even three laser beams into an engine's cylinders at variable depths.
This development increases the completeness of combustion while also avoiding the issue of erosion.
On the minus side it does, however, require lasers of high pulse energies - so, as with spark plugs, a considerable amount of energy is needed in order to ignite fuel.

Takunori Taira of the National Institutes of Natural Sciences in Okazaki, Japan, told the BBC: 'In the past, lasers that could meet those requirements were limited to basic research because they were big, inefficient, and unstable.
'Nor could they be located away from the engine, because their powerful beams would destroy any optical fibres that delivered light to the cylinders.'
In addition the team has been trying to make the lasers out of ceramic powders that are pressed into cylinders which are a similar size to spark plugs.
The ceramic devices are lasers in their own right and gather energy from compact, lower-power lasers.

The scientists have found that unlike the delicate crystals which are usually used in high-power lasers, the ceramics are stronger and can withstand the heat better within combustion engines.
They are currently in talks about commercialising the technology with Denso, a leading automobile component manufacturer.

nano-hummingbird

The skies could soon be filled with the buzzing of thousands of tiny spy drones trained to snoop on British streets, the Home Office has warned.
They are one of a number of futuristic snooping techniques that could become reality including CCTV that recognises faces and cameras in the back of taxis.
The warning comes as the Pentagon revealed it is pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into new drone technology such as the 'nano-hummingbird' - a tiny remote helicopter equipped with video and audio equipment that can record sights and sounds.

Ministers said that advances in technology have meant such hi-tech measures are now possible and could soon be ubiquitous across the country.
The suggestions came in a proposed code of practice drawn up to help regulate the spread of CCTV, that will be overseen by a newly appointed Security Camera Commissioner.

The consultation document, revealed by the Daily Telegraph, stated that traditional CCTV was of 'limited value' to police because images are often too grainy to identify suspects or badly placed.

It said: 'Modern digital technology is on the cusp of revolutionising the use of CCTV.

The consultation said powerful zoom features, 360-degree vision and facial recognition 'are coming closer to being an established part of the CCTV landscape'.
It continued: 'New uses for systems, for example in taxis, are a natural part of industry growth.'
And of the possibility of launching unmanned drones into the sky, it said: 'There is scope for their unchecked proliferation and attendant risks if they are not considered within any overarching strategy.'
Under the proposed code, police and councils will have to explain exactly why they want to place a camera in a certain place.
Information Commissioner Christopher Graham last year blasted Britain for becoming a surveillance state where snooping techniques were advancing so quickly that regulators were unable to keep up.
But the Home Office's most recent paper will only bolster fears that Britain is turning into a Big Brother state, despite the Coalition Government vowing to clamp down on the expansion of snooping techniques and restore civil liberties.
Britain is one of the most watched countries in the world with one CCTV camera for every 14 people.
But despite this, police admit that just one crime is solved for every 1,000 cameras.
Campaign group Big Brother Watch director Daniel Hamilton praised the paper as a 'step in the right direction'.

He told the Daily Telegraph: 'For far too long, the police have been able to operate with impunity, scarcely giving any consideration for personal privacy.

'Today's warning serves as a real shot across the bows. People want to see more officers on the beat, not costly gimmicks like clip-on cameras and spy drones.'

The U.S. government has announced plans to develop tiny drones and large unmanned aerial systems for its armed forces.
Many are inspired by nature and are designed to look like birds, so they blend seamlessly into the sky, such as the nano-hummingbird by California-based technology firm AeroVironment.
But there are larger models too, such as the 'Global Observer', an unmanned aircraft that can fly continuously for up to a week at an altitude of up to 65,000ft and can reach any point on the globe within hours of take-off.

They claim they could be used by the military to spy, but also to find people trapped inside buildings destroyed by a major earthquake, like the one most recently that devastated the New Zealand city of Christchurch.

Sunglasses all in a fraction of a second.

The new high-tech shades have several flexible, embedded LCD screens. When the lights go low, an electric charge passes through one layer, aligning the crystals within and enabling the tint -- all in a fraction of a second.

Sound vaguely familiar? It should. The company behind the technology -- Kent, Ohio's AlphaMicron -- has been honing and perfecting it for almost 13 years, directory of technical sales and marketing Roy Miller told.

The Office of Naval Research, the high-tech research and all-things-awesome arm of the Navy, has begun testing blast-proof ballistic eye wear that instantly alters tints in response to changing light conditions -- going from shaded to clear in barely a quarter of a second.

The super sunglasses -- to which the ONR has assigned the functional yet boring name of Fast-Tint Protective Eyewear -- rely on unique LCD lenses that react to environmental conditions, instantaneously darkening in bright sunlight and going transparent in darker areas.

Navy personnel are testing the amazing tech even now. But the shades aren't just cool, explained ONR Master Chief Charles Ziervogel. Naval warfighters rely on ballistic eyewear for protection in battle. So removing your sunglasses in a firefight simply isn't an option, he said.

"Sometimes when moving from dark to light environments, people that needed this protection were removing their eyewear -- exposing themselves to eye damage," Ziervogel . The current protective eyewear comes with interchangeable lenses -- dark, amber and light -- and it can take up to five minutes to swap them out.


"We wanted to get it to the point where it was military caliber," he said. The tech started out with a very different goal: shielding the eyes of fighter pilots from changing light conditions. AlphaMicron develop a flexible LCD screen that could bend in one direction, like a rolled up tube of paper, and sold it in snow goggles by Uvex, called the Uvex F1 Magic Goggles.

The goggles were hailed as a breakthrough, winning a "Best of What's New" award from Popular Science magazine in 2004. Similar tech is now powering motorcycle visors that change tint automatically -- a product that proved so successful it had consumers asking for more.

"Everyone always said, if you could put this in a pair of glasses, it would be really awesome," Miller told . So the company spent years overcoming physics to build a curved, lens-shaped LCD screen -- and making it thin enough to paste into lenses.

Needless to say, the version going into the Navy's super shades is far more advanced than the motorcycle version, Miller said, but that doesn't mean the company won't sell it as a consumer product in the relatively near future. Once the navy wraps up testing, of course.

"These are still hand built prototypes," explained Stephanie Everett, program manager for ONR's Tech Solutions group. Thirty of the prototypes are undergoing testing right now, she said, and once tests are complete, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is expected to buy 100 of the glasses. But not until they're vetted, of course.
"We want to be able to prove the concept -- and that people like them," she said.

innovation is future life europe

Remi Caron, a computer programmer and entrepreneur in Amsterdam, thought he had the perfect idea. One of his clients, a researcher, had been collecting the blood pressure, temperature and other vital signs of thousands of livestock acrossEurope.

Now he was looking for an easy, cheap way to store all that data.

Caron suggested cloud computing, which allows people and businesses to store their data on servers managed by big tech companies like Google or Microsoft, at much lower cost than building up their own data storage.

But he ran into a problem: Luxembourg law forbids personal data to be stored on shared servers outside the country, and livestock like cows or sheep might be included in that legislation - or so Caron feared.

He headed for Brussels, the headquarters of the European Union, which oversees data protection on the continent, to find answers, but even there no one could help him, he says.

"The EU itself doesn't really know where to find the legislations of various member states," says Caron.

Roadblocks to innovation like the one encountered by Caron have caught the attention of European policymakers as they scramble for ways to get their economies growing after a financial crisis that has pushed several states to the brink of bankruptcy.

Like U.S. President Barack Obama and his call for a "sputnik moment," the EU is touting innovation as the magic bullet for economic recovery. At a summit in Brussels Friday, the EU wants to get leaders to agree on investing more in education, research and technology, even as they slash spending elsewhere.

"Growth and jobs depends upon bringing research results to market. Our competitors have acted on this," Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, commissioner for research, innovation and science, told journalists this week.

The continent has long lagged behind the U.S. and Japan when it comes to turning bright ideas into money. There aren't many rags to riches stories of businesses starting out in a garage, like Apple, or a dorm room, like Facebook, to become the next big thing on Wall Street - no European Facebook, Google, or Nintendo. And now Brazil and China are quickly catching up by putting more money into innovation, having weathered the financial crisis much better than their more developed rivals.

According to EU data published earlier this week, the EU trails the U.S. in all but two of 13 innovation indicators. China has a higher rate of growth than the EU on all but two of the factors contributing to innovation.

But it's not because Europeans lack creativity, innovation experts insist. Europeans invented biodegradable plastic, the hepatitis B vaccine and the streaming webcam in recent years, not to mention past innovations including aspirin, radio and the automobile.

Rather, they say, putting new ideas into action is much more difficult in Europe, where the money needed to fund risky investments is scarce, patents are expensive and the different legal systems in 27 EU countries have left many aspiring businessmen confused.

Caron and his company Sparked eventually decided to stay out of Luxembourg all together - having tried and failed to figure out if their use of cloud computing would break the law.

Diverging laws, often written in a foreign language, create a burden everyone, says Jonathan Zuck, president for the Association of Competitive Technology, whose members include Sparked. "But it's felt in a more exaggerated way by small-business owners."

Small companies, the traditional birthplace for innovation, are often desperately looking for economies of scale, and shutting entire countries out of their business models can break them.

When the EU tries to get rid of some of the legal hurdles, its efforts are often hampered by national governments jealously watching their sovereignty.

One example for that is the European patent, which could save innovators from getting their patent validated in 27 states and - crucially - having to translate it into each country's official language. That laborious process, the EU says, makes getting a patent 10 times more expensive than in the U.S.

The idea of the European patent was to limit translations to English, German and French, the bloc's most widely used languages, and require only one validation.

But Spain and Italy - the next biggest countries - cried foul. Some EU nations have now decided to go ahead with the European patent anyway, leaving Italy and Spain to fend for themselves.

The move came too late for Mike Sax, the founder of the Association of Competitive Technology. Frustrated with the lengthy patenting procedure in Europe, Sax, whose company SaxSoft makes iPhone apps, left Belgium and has now set up shop in Oregon, on the U.S. West Coast.

Another big obstacle to getting new ideas off the ground is a lack of private financing. Venture capital firms - dubbed "angels" in business-speak for a reason - make money by investing in risky businesses, hoping one of them will strike it rich. But there are far fewer of them in Europe than in the U.S.

Without this private money, which banks are unwilling to provide, it is tougher for new companies to establish themselves.

"Europe is weak on this, so that's definitely a problem," says Reinhilde Veugelers, senior fellow at Bruegel, a think tank in Brussels. Veugelers says the lack of venture capital in Europe has been known for a long time, but so far policymakers haven't been able to do anything about it.

Europe's innovation gap might also have cultural roots, experts suggest. Bankruptcy, for instance, is seen as a greater failure in Europe than it is the U.S. Lenders in Europe shy away from serving entrepreneurs who have already filed for bankruptcy, says Roland Straus, managing director of Knowledge4Innovation, another Brussels think tank.

"We obviously do not honor enough risk taking and entrepreneurship," says Straus. "In the U.S. this is completely different because if you fail twice, then you know how it really goes, and the third time you succeed."

One way the EU works to change this perception is through recognition. For the past four years the EU has given out the European Enterprise Awards to companies that foster entrepreneurship. Categories include encouraging entrepreneurial thinking and raising awareness of entrepreneurs in society.

Last year, for instance, one of the prizes went to Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, for a program that trains art students to run their own companies.

What European politicians need to recognize, the EU insists, is that boosting innovation is not a luxury but an economic necessity. "Innovation is as essential to sustainable growth and jobs as water is to life," Geoghegan-Quinn warned in a recent speech. "Economies that do not innovate will wither away."

the Safe Water Drinking Act.

congressional investigators in the US have discovered that oil and gas firms infused diesel fuel into onshore wells in several states over a four year period.

Tens of millions of gallons of diesel which seeped into the soil between 2005 and 2009 allegedly breached the Safe Water Drinking Act.

The Environmental Protection Agency said the diesel fuel was used by drillers as part of a process known as hydraulic fracking in which a water, diesel fuel and sand was injected into rock formations deep underground under high pressure.

According to the EPA the process opened up vast new deposits of natural gas to drilling through the opening of rock fissures to release oil and gas.

It is believed no state or federal regulators had issued permits for diesel fuel use in the hydraulic fracking.

biofuels are on the upswing.

Oil companies are decent barometers of which biofuels are on the upswing. Case in point: As the hype around algae fuel has increased over the past few years, BP, Exxon, and Shell have all made algae biofuel commitments. Now, as the hype is dying down, so is the oil industry's interest. This week, Shell announced that it is exiting its final algae biofuel commitment.
2011 is Shell's "year of choices" -- a time when the company plans to cut down on its biofuel research paths from 10 technologies to five. Last week, Shell exited its investment in Choren, a biomass gasification business. This week, Shell will exit its shareholding in Cellana, a joint algae biofuel venture between Shell and HR Biopetroleum Algae, according to Renewable Energy World.
There are still a number of oil companies working on algae biofuel, including BP, Exxon, Chevron, and Valero. It's not surprising -- Pike Research recently predicted that algae biofuel production could reach 61 million gallons a year and a market value of $1.3 billion over the next decade.
But the biofuel industry has taken hits recently. Last week, the Rand Corporation released a report claiming that biofuels won't be cheap enough or readily available enough in the next decade to be useful to the military. And according to Vinod Khosla, photosynthetic algae biofuels are still too cost-prohibitive to go mass market.
We'll be watching as Shell continues to whittle down its biofuel portfolio. Still in the running: Cosan's sugar-cane ethanol business, Iogen's straw-based ethanol, Codexis' biomass-to-ethanol technology, Virent's plant sugars-to-petrol process, and a number of research agreements.

the solar power market

Cheaper and lighter compared to its more expensive, cumbersome silicon cousin, plastic photovoltaics (PV) could herald a revolution in the solar power market, according to a UK solar panel expert.
"Plastics are much cheaper to process than silicon. In principle the devices we've been making might be very, very cheap and cover large areas," said David Lidzey from the UK's University of Sheffield.
Unlike rigid silicon panels, plastic (or organic) PV is far more flexible making it easier to install, which Lidzey says could hand it a huge advantage.
"If you've got panels that almost roll up like a big sheet of wallpaper then that might be a very good way of powering developing countries," he said
Polymer solar panels differ from most commercial plastics like polythene which are essentially insulators.
Turning them from a material that prevents conductivity into ones that promote it requires chemists to "tweak their molecular structure," says Lidzey.
But he says some everyday plastic products aren't a million miles away from the plastic PV he's researching.
"If you look at a (chip) packet, what you've got is a plastic film, a few layers of inks and a printed metal layer to keep the materials fresh. Rearrange the order of those layers and you get to a structure that's very similar to the PV devices we're looking at," Lidzey said.
On of the leading lights in developing plastic PV is U.S.-based tech company, Konarka who are already applying their "Power Plastic" technology to a wide range of products including luggage and parasols.
Larger arrays are also being fitted to street furniture, as can be seen with San Francisco's bus shelters.
Researchers are also hopeful that buildings could also get the plastic treatment in the future.
In 2009, Konarka installed a "curtain wall" to an outside section of its Florida offices as part of a pilot project.
Plastic PV, say the company, can absorb sunlight from "all sorts of ranges" allowing it to be installed onto vertical walls.
Founded in 2001, Konarka are one of many companies trying to perfect the technology. And the news is increasingly promising. But there are some issues to be resolved before plastic can truly find its place in the sun.
Whereas silicon has an efficiency of around 15-18%, plastic devices can only achieve 7-8% at best, currently.
Problems also remain with operational lifetime. Silicon devices will generally last around 20 years and are very stable, Lidzey says.
Organic-based (plastic) systems are less so, degrading much more quickly. But things are improving.
"There is a lot of activity to find out what the mechanisms are by which these materials degrade so we can produce better packaging materials to prevent this," Lidzey said.
He concedes there is some way to go before plastic PV catches up with silicon's superior efficiency and durability, but even that might not be an issue, he says.
"The idea is that you might not need to catch up provided you can make them cheap enough," he said.

"My guess is that it will be between five and ten years, and then we will see a significant volume of devices being made from plastic."

PepsiCo has a laboratory devoted to greater nutrition

A small group of scientists in white lab coats  some bearing the Pepsi logo — wander through their laboratory, describing the state-of-the-art equipment.

There's the spectrometer, which uses light to determine the nutrients in a food sample. There's also the RT-PCR machine (or, reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction), as seen on "C.S.I." It can identify a sample of food by reading its DNA.

It's all part of the research laboratory that PepsiCo opened in New Haven's Science Park building earlier this year. The eight full-time scientists who work there focus on finding ways to make snack foods more healthful.

Mention that PepsiCo has a laboratory devoted to greater nutrition and most people wait for the punchline. This is, after all, the company that feeds the world with Cheetos, Fritos and, of course, Pepsi.But PepsiCo officials say the lab is part of a pattern toward offering more healthful fare. In expanding its product line, Pepsi has bought part of Sabra, a company that makes hummus; its Frito-Lay division now offers sunflower seeds and several types of nuts. And the company recently bought Wimm-Bill-Dann, a Russian dairy company.

Placing a greater emphasis on science, Pepsi hired Mehmood Khan in 2007 as its chief scientific officer. Khan, who had worked as an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic, has set such goals as reducing sodium and added sugar by 25 percent in key products and reducing saturated fat by 15 percent.

Before the new lab opened, Khan says, Pepsi scientists had found a way to reduce salt on chips by reducing the size of salt crystals. They dissolve on the tongue faster, so more salt is tasted even though there is less of it. The New Haven lab doesn't have specific breakthroughs to boast of yet, or at least not any they can talk about publicly.

"There's stuff in the pipeline that should be coming out soon, maybe next year," says Mark Pirner, head of the lab and director of the company's clinical and scientific development strategy.

At this point, the researchers say, they're focused on gathering information on nutrition in general. So there are no specific goals yet, such as developing a crunchier, leaner chip.

"The discovery is what's going to lead to innovation," Pirner says. "I think some of the best science has been accidental discovery. I'm hoping it allows us to learn things beyond what we can predict all by ourselves."

Fellowship Money

The lab has no formal affiliation with Yale, but it operates near the campus and the researchers say they hope to benefit from their proximity to the university's resources. Also linking the lab and Yale was Pepsi's joint announcement about the lab's opening and its awarding of a $250,000 five-year fellowship for the Yale Medical School's M.D.-Ph.D. program. The fellowship is for students researching nutrition and obesity-related diseases.

The med school's aceptance of the money irked many on campus, as well as health-food advocates. Michele Simon, who graduated from Yale in 1990 and is the author of "Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How To Fight Back," says there's no way to trust any kind of nutritional research that's been funded by Pepsi.

"To me, the bottom line is we don't need Pepsi-funded research in any way," she says. "We don't need any kind of science to tell us to stop eating Cheetos or drinking Mountain Dew."

Robert J. Alpern, dean of the medical school, said such concerns are unfounded.

"The fellowship is an unrestricted gift to the university to support M.D.-Ph.D. students," he says. "It doesn't provide PepsiCo any control."

As for the lab, Alpern says, he's always glad when Yale attracts more science to the area. There are no plans for Yale researchers to collaborate with PepsiCo, he says, but it could happen if there's a mutual interest.

Focus On Nutrition

Standing near a microcope, Jeff Zachwieja, who directs the exercise biology program at the lab, points to a slide of muscle cells grown in the lab.

"We can screen for the potential effects of a lot of nutrients," says Zachwieja, who is also senior research fellow at the Gatorade Sports Science Institute in Illinois. (Gatorade is another Pepsi product.) Applying electrical shocks causes the muscle cells to contract. By adding certain nutrients, he says, "we can screen for things we believe will help the muscle better adapt to the stimulus."

Eric Milgram, senior fellow at the lab, used to work in the pharmaceutical industry.

"I always thought pharmaceutical research was the most challenging research that you could do, because it's very difficult to find a new drug, but in some ways, it's easier than what we do here," he says. The focus at the Pepsi lab is nutrition, which Milgram says has always been a fuzzy concept. Even a simple nutrition guideline — like three to five servings of vegetables a day — presents questions.

"Well, what is a serving? We haven't defined that very well," Milgram says. "Nutrition research is a very complex area, and they haven't applied the same molecular tools that the pharmaceutical industry has."

As a result, questions about food abound. Milgram points to the many claims made about "superfoods" like the acai berry, which has been touted as fighting cancer cells and alleviating diabetes.

"You can think of us as a sort of the 'Myth Busters.' " he says. "We can now profile that fruit and let you know what's in there. We can take someone, have them ingest that, and see what's going on biochemically."

hydrogen technologyalternative energy sources. the Baltic Sea

A small Danish island Lolland Called, located in the Baltic Sea, is, in fact, a leader in terms of alternative energy sources. They currently Produce 50 percent more wind energy cans Than They consume, and now They are turning to hydrogen. 

Hydrogen fuel is Used as a store for energy That has already been created. The fuel, Pls burned, then delivers the energy as heat. The flame of hydrogen not only creates heat, but Also Pls water it reacts with the oxygen in the water.
While hydrogen is generally not found as a single molecule in nature, it cans be created via steam reforming, typically from methane. Storage for hydrogen requires more space Than four times the normal fuel, though it produces no pollutants Practically except small traces of nitrogen oxide.

This makes hydrogen fuel is ideal for Storing energy created by the sun, wind and other means for later use. In fact, liquid hydrogen has been Used since the 1970s by NASA to propel space shuttles into orbit. Now, the city of Lolland is using hydrogen to store excess wind energy in Their order is changed from the first hydrogen-powered city.

The Hydrogen Community Lolland , as the project is being Called, Hopes to establish Lolland as a European leader for hydrogen technology. This micro combined heat and power production (μCHP) will from be based on wind energy, electrolysers for hydrogen production and utilization in PEM fuel cells.

Lolland Hopes to Convert the entire island over to hydrogen via a three stage process, two of the which have already Begun. The first phase was completed in 2006 after the creation of residential Fuel Cell μCHP in Nakskvov. Excess wind energy powers the electrolyser That separates the hydrogen and oxygen molecules. Both the hydrogen and oxygen are stored in low pressure storage units in order to control: 

1. hydrogen supply to fuel cells
2. oxygen supply to waste water cleaning plants.

Most of the energy provided by these energy cells are Used mainly for the operation of the waster water plant, though Some Also was alloted to make electricity and heat Used to heat buildings in the area, similar to a conventional large-scale infrastructre. Other steps of this phase included the de-mystifying hydrogen power to consumers and creating new Synergies and symbioses with existing energy and environmental facilities. 

Phase 2 of the plan was completed in 2008 in the city of Vestenskov, the which not only connected to the hydrogen buildngs current plant, but Also involved decentralized placement of fuel cells in five homes.
EACH unit contained a 2-kilowatt fuel cell stack and an AC converter Would the which replace the existing boilers. These cells ended up being more efficient and have higher energy security Than conventional boilers. This phase allowed for authorities to test the safety and operational stability of these units.

The final phase of the program will from run from 2010-2012 and Involve the installation of these cells in 35-40 more households, the which will from Provide both heat and electricity. The conversion of turning hydrogen into energy is made via an electrochemical procedure That has a 50 percent electricity production and efficiency of simultaneous combined use of 90 percent.
Currently, the homes in Vestenskov are powered by oil and natural gas. Since the hydrogen is created via the excess wind, the power is 100 percent carbon neutral.

While hydrogen technology is certainly nothing new, Lolland's approach to giving power to the end-users, as well as usage of excess energy, it has earned multiple awards. It was chosen as one of the three best climate projects in Denmark and the city of Vestenskov smart m2 was awarded the award of the year from Realkredit Danmark - a prominent building society.

Might be the fourth Lolland Largest island in Denmark, but its population is still only around 66.000 people. Even if this project May find success on the island, it does not show large-scale feasibility for larger cities and countries. Fuel cells themselves are currently not cost-effective and do not exist full on a commercial market.Still, this small island is making strides showing the rest of the world That it is possible to live without using so many fossil fuels.

Silicone rubber Now a new material made of carbon nanotubes

Scientists at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tsukuba, Japan created the nanotube material using chemical vapor deposition. The material has elastic properties of recoverable stretchiness, and viscoelastic properties that give it a thick-honey-like consistency, and allows it to stretch slowly and then spring back to its original shape. It retains these properties over the range of -196°C to 1000°C.

The research team, led by Dr. Ming Xu, has previously worked on carbon nanotube "forests," and development of the new material was the accidental product of an extension of this work. In the "forest" the long nanotubes grow upwards, but when the team modified the catalysts used in the process they found they could make the alignment of the nanotubes much less regular, and were able to create a random network of interconnected nanotubes, which Xu likened to a tangle of jungle vines.

They then investigated the properties of the new material and discovered it has similar viscoelastic properties to silicone rubber at room temperature, but unlike silicone rubber, which becomes brittle when cold and breaks down at high temperatures, the new rubber material remained flexible over a much larger temperature range and has excellent fatigue resistance properties. The researchers speculated the thermal stability could arise from energy dissipating as the carbon nanotubes zip and unzip at points of contact.

Until now, very little research has been done on the viscoelastic properties of carbon nanotubes, probably because they are difficult to make and because they oxidize readily at high temperatures. Xu said the research team is now looking for industrial applications for the new material, so they can further refine its properties to suit those applications. She also said she believed the temperature range could be extended much further, and the material could probably be made more elastic, stronger or softer, as required.

The material may find uses in space applications or rubbers for use in extremely hot environments, but the research is still at an early stage. The findings on the new material are published in Science.
Silicone rubber is used in many applications in which a material is required to remain rubbery over a wide temperature range, since it retains its properties over the approximate range of -55°C to 300°C. Now a new material made of carbon nanotubes has been developed that retains its viscoelastic properties over a temperature range almost four times larger.