The search for victims of a building collapse that killed six people wound down Thursday, and the first civil lawsuit was filed amid mounting questions about whether the demolition company that was tearing down the structure caused the tragedy by cutting corners. The four-story building along Philadelphia’s busy Market Street collapsed Wednesday onto a Salvation […]
Automotive/Transportation
A Fireside Chat: U.S. Gave Up on Manufacturing for Short Term Profits
Miniature fluid handling specialist Bio-Chem Fluidics has announced its new Vice President of Operations, Joe Turiello. In his new position, Turiello will work with the manufacturing assembly, quality assurance, purchasing and customer service groups to support the company’s growth. Turiello has over 30 years of engineering and management experience. He was most recently the manager […]
Board Approves CA High-Speed Rail Construction
The board that oversees California’s High-Speed Rail Authority on Thursday unanimously approved a nearly $1 billion contract to start construction on the first leg of the $68 billion bullet train in the Central Valley, clearing the way for work to start as soon as this summer on what officials have said will be a tight […]
NASA Builds Sophisticated Earth-Observing Microwave Radiometer
A NASA team has delivered a sophisticated microwave radiometer specifically designed to overcome the pitfalls that have plagued similar Earth-observing instruments in the past. View: Photos of the Day: Earth-Observing Microwave Radiometer Literally years in the making, the new radiometer, which is designed to measure the intensity of electromagnetic radiation, specifically microwaves, is equipped with […]
Photos of the Day: Earth-Observing Microwave Radiometer
Building the new radiometer took years to accomplish and involved the development of advanced algorithms and an onboard computing system capable of crunching a deluge of data estimated at 192 million samples per second. Read: NASA Builds Sophisticated Earth-Observing Microwave Radiometer This photograph shows the SMAP propellant tank after installation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory […]
New All-Solid Sulfur-Based Battery Outperforms Lithium-Ion Technology
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have designed and tested an all-solid lithium-sulfur battery with approximately four times the energy density of conventional lithium-ion technologies that power today’s electronics. The ORNL battery design, which uses abundant low-cost elemental sulfur, also addresses flammability concerns experienced by other chemistries. “Our approach is a […]
Japan Nuke Plant Investigates Leak from New Tank
Workers at a tsunami-crippled Japanese nuclear plant are scrambling to find the cause of a highly radioactive water leak from a brand-new storage tank amid concerns that the problem is hampering cleanup efforts. The Fukushima Dai-ichi plant suffered multiple meltdowns after the March 2011 tsunami knocked out power and is still on a fragile makeshift […]
SEMI PV Materials Expert Forum at Intersolar North America
SEMI formally announced the conference program for the SEMI PV Materials Expert Forum to be held at Intersolar North America 2013 in San Francisco, California on July 9, 2013. The Forum focuses on explores how materials impact system performance/cost and how innovation roadmaps, new technologies and advances in efficiency and lifetime will help to mitigate […]
Why Innovation Thrives in Cities
In 2010, in the journal Nature, a pair of physicists at the Santa Fe Institute showed that when the population of a city doubles, economic productivity goes up by an average of 130 percent. Not only does total productivity increase with increased population, but so does per-capita productivity. In the latest issue of Nature Communications, […]
To Improve Today’s Concrete, Do as the Romans Did
In a quest to make concrete more durable and sustainable, an international team of geologists and engineers has found inspiration in the ancient Romans, whose massive concrete structures have withstood the elements for more than 2,000 years. Using the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a research team from the University […]