All Articles
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February 13, 2013
The nuclear reactor in your basement
How would you like to replace your water heater with a nuclear reactor? That’s what Joseph Zawodny, a senior scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, hopes to help bring about.
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January 17, 2013
NASA partners with community to demonstrate hydrogen bus
What swallows Lake Erie water, motors quietly through the streets of Cleveland, and expels water good enough to drink from its tailpipe? It's a brand new Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (RTA) bus, part of a demonstration of clean, alternative transportation.
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December 11, 2012
Reactor makes space trash a power source
NASA researchers focusing on the difficulties of traveling into deep space have identified an unusual source for fuel that astronauts will be carrying with them anyway: trash.
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November 14, 2012
DOE mines college students for energy
Between the lofty towers of basic research and the promised land of successful commercialization stretches a woeful chasm known in the tech biz as the Valley of Death. The DOE aims to bridge that chasm with a national competition.
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October 2, 2012
NASA exploring space applications of hydrogen and fuel cells
For decades, NASA has relied upon hydrogen gas as rocket fuel to deliver crew and cargo to space.
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July 16, 2012
Caltech professor sees green energy in termite guts
The "crazy zoo" of microbes teeming inside the termite gut makes a Caltech scientist who studies them feel like Alice in Wonderland. But that's where he expects to find part of the solution to our energy problems.
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May 3, 2012
Electricity in the air
Engineers at NASA's Langley Research Center are helping to develop a novel approach to generating energy with wind turbines—get rid of 400 tons of tower and concrete, and just fly the blade tips. (Artist's concept)
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April 4, 2012
Astrobiology research sparks 'GreenTech' revolution
NASA’s astrobiologists study microbial life to understand how it transformed a rocky Earth into the life-sustaining planet we inhabit today. These studies of photosynthetic ‘green’ algae are creating sparks for new ‘green technologies’ on Earth and future human space exploration missions.
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February 9, 2012
Getting a charge out of wasted automobile heat
Only about 25 percent of the energy in every gallon of gasoline you buy actually helps your vehicle to run. The rest is converted to heat, which is radiated uselessly off of your engine or blown out of your exhaust pipe. What if you could recover some of that wasted energy? JPL and automakers are developing technology to do just that.
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January 12, 2012
Researcher tries directed evolution to craft better biofuels
Frances Arnold helped invent directed evolution, a technique in which you start with randomly mutated proteins, pick out those that possess a desired trait, and then breed those mutants over several generations. She's using this technique to develop better biofuels.
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November 29, 2011
NASA envisions clean energy from algae
NASA scientists have proposed an ingenious and remarkably resourceful process to produce "clean energy" biofuels, that cleans waste water, removes carbon dioxide from the air, retains important nutrients, and does not compete with agriculture for land or freshwater.
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November 7, 2011
Alternative energy crops in space
What if space held the key to producing alternative energy crops on Earth? That's what researchers are hoping to find in a new experiment on the International Space Station.
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October 17, 2011
Fishing for wind: Nature inspires more efficient wind turbines
John Dabiri made wind turbines that work more efficiently. He uses the lesser-known vertical-axis turbine. These can be bunched together until they’re almost touching, harnessing the energy of almost all the air that blows by. The key is that every turbine rotates in the opposite direction from its nearest neighbors.
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July 20, 2011
Solar sculptures: Converting sunlight into energy
Harry Atwater recently converted a previously unheard of 27.6 percent of the light aimed at a cell into electricity. These solar cells trap the light and keep it contained. They are very thin making them very inexpensive to produce.
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March 5, 2009
Turning the tide to energy
NASA researchers who developed a new way to power robotic underwater vehicles believe a spin-off technology could help convert ocean energy into electrical energy on a much larger scale.
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December 17, 2008
Fuel cells on the fast track
A Caltech team is hot on the trail of an energy technology for the future—fuel cells that can run on more traditional fuels, like ethanol or biomass, while also solving many of the problems of conventional hydrogen fuel cells.
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