Materials & Innovations

Glass optics enhance concentrating solar performance

By / November 29, 2010

An all-glass optical lens may be the key component to achieving higher efficiency and higher energy production concentrating solar power systems. Silicon Valley-based Solergy, who recently announced plans  to install…

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Video of the week: Tiger Stone continuous brick road paving machine

By / November 22, 2010

Vanku’s Tiger Stone machine Via, Gizmag and Gizmodo, I found this video of this Dutch-made brick paving machine. I wouldn’t go so far as Gizmodo does in describing this as…

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Wood pulp-derived nanocrystals help cast tunable chiral silica films, with possible sensor and window uses

By / November 18, 2010

Tuning the pores of a new type of glass film causes different colors, but adding a drop of waterturns them transparent. (Credit: Nature/Kevin Shopsowit.) A team at the University of British…

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MS&T’10 plenary presentations: ‘Energy, Infrastructure, Policy and Security’

By / November 16, 2010

Audio versions (MP3) of the three plenary speakers at last month’s MS&T’10 conference are now available. We’ve broken them up into the individual presentations by Terry Michalske, Robert T. McGrath…

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“Chalk piles” to cut CO2

By / November 12, 2010

A recent piece in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discusses geoengineering as a way to manipulate Earth’s climate in order to counteract global warming from greenhouse gas…

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Saint-Gobain invests $80M in Sage Electrochromics

By / November 10, 2010

SAGE Electrochromics, Inc. headquarters in Faribault, Minn. This is a pretty strong endorsement: Saint-Gobain Glass has acquired 50 percent of the equity of Sage Electrochromics for the large-scale manufacture of electrochromic…

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Video of the Week: Graphene’s debut on Periodic Table of Videos

By / November 10, 2010

Chemist Martyn Poliakoff of University of Nottingham has featured a graphene edition of the Periodic Table of Videos. The video offers a short introduction of graphene, a reenactment of the…

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OSU group studies aging of Li-ion batteries

By / November 4, 2010

Ohio State University’s Center for Automotive Research is studying why batteries lose their ability to hold a charge as they age. In collaboration with ORNL and NIST, the group is…

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Materials stories that may also be of interest

By / November 2, 2010

At the end of each week, I end up with a list of a bunch of stories I started to write about, or started to investigate or didn’t even get…

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Lux: Existing nanotech could slash energy use by 12% in U.S., Germany and Japan

By / November 2, 2010

R50 vacuum insulation panel, 30x48x1 inch. Credit: ThermalVisions. Nano R&D is opening up new energy-conservation vistas, but a new report from Lux Research claims that the adoption of existing nano-enabled…

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