Back in April, Ceramic Tech Weekly reported that the Obama administration had plans to invest a little under $4 billion for Smart Grid projects, but was still trying to work out the details. Now, it appears the DOE is one step closer to getting the funding moving. The big news is that DOE Secretary Steven…
Read MoreThis was the lead lecture at the PACRIM8 conference in Vancouver in June 2009. How often does a major company publicly explain and acknowledge its past mistakes, and reveal – in depth – how it is turning itself around? In this excellent video, Miller describes how Corning fought its way back from a “near-death experience”…
Read MoreNew developments give hope for producing capacitors with the same energy density performance as lithium-ion batteries. Researchers at Eamex Corp. of Osaka, Japan, announced that they have produced a solid polymer capacitor with a greater electrode surface area in order to achieve a performance of up to 600 watt hours per liter. Eamex says it…
Read MoreA transparent laptop screen? A window as a video display? It’s long been a dream and occasionally an expensive prototype, but Fraunhofer researchers say their light-permeable conductive coatings could soon make transparent displays commonplace and relatively inexpensive. While some of these display already exist (usually made by a lithographic method) the costs are enormous, but…
Read More(Abbreviations fixed – h/t to reader Bob Gottschall) The use of graphene as a full-function transistor is a step closer. A team at the Berkeley National Lab led by Feng Wang has figured out a way to create a bandgap in bilayer graphene that can be precisely controlled from 0 to 250 milli-electron volts at…
Read MoreBack in April, the Argonne National Laboratory and Hanyang University in South Korea announced that their teamwork has resulted in a new cathode material that can provide high-energy and extend the life of lithium batteries. They said then that the new material as potentially playing an important role in future plug-in hybrid vehicles. Now BASF…
Read MoreAfter nearly a year of behind-the-scenes planning, the American Ceramic Society just announced that it is launching a new journal on advanced glass research. This new peer-reviewed quarterly will be called the International Journal of Applied Glass Science. The journal’s debut is timely as new generations of glass and glass-related materials are increasingly being called…
Read MoreTwo Northwestern University researchers believe they have developed a new dual-use tool and methods for delivering drugs and other nanoscale therapeutic materials to cells using coated nanodiamonds. The researchers, Horacio Espinosa, professor of mechanical engineering, and Dean Ho, assistant professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering, at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, call…
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