A Green Approach to Reducing Flood Impacts

Penn State researchers are exploring green stormwater infrastructure to manage severe urban flooding and pollution. They are studying ways to improve the existing green stormwater infrastructure in Lancaster, PA, as a pilot project for other cities as well.

An Underwater Robot for Ocean Cleanup

One of the strategies to combat the mounds of waste found in oceans — especially around coral reefs — is to employ robots to master the cleanup. However, existing underwater robots are mostly bulky with rigid bodies, unable to explore and sample in complex and unstructured environments, and are noisy due to electrical motors or hydraulic pumps.

How Much Do You Know About Green Design and Manufacturing?

Green practices help organizations become more efficient, competitive, and profitable. How much do you know about green design and manufacturing? Find out with this quiz.

How Much Do You Know About Our Renewable Energy Resources?

Limited energy resources, global warming, and air pollution are increasingly being seen as growing crises. How good is your knowledge about our renewable energy resources? Take this quiz to find out.

An Energy-Efficient Method to Monitor Soil Moisture

The University of Maine’s Wireless Sensor Networks laboratory has developed a novel method of using AI and machine learning to make monitoring soil moisture more energy and cost efficient.

Radiative Cooling and Solar Heat from One System

Researchers have been exploring how to turbocharge a passive cooling technique — known as radiative or sky cooling — with sun-blocking nanomaterials that emit heat away from building rooftops.

3D Printing Creates High-Performance Metal Alloy

Scientists used a 3D printer to create a high-performance metal alloy with an unusual composition that makes it stronger and lighter than state-of-the-art materials currently used in gas turbine machinery.

Copper Catalyst Converts Carbon Dioxide into Liquid Fuels

A research team has gained new insight by capturing real-time movies of copper nanoparticles as they convert CO2 and water into renewable fuels and chemicals: ethylene, ethanol, and propanol, among others.

Turning Plastic Waste into a Valuable Soil Additive

Researchers have moved a step closer to finding a use for the hundreds of millions of tons of plastic waste produced every year that often winds up clogging streams and rivers and polluting our oceans.

AV Computers Contribute to Global Carbon Emissions

MIT researchers recently explored the potential energy consumption and related carbon emissions if autonomous vehicles (AV) are widely adopted.

Low-Cost Device Can Measure Air Pollution Anywhere

Air pollution is a major public health problem. Now, an MIT research team is rolling out an open-source version of a low-cost, mobile pollution detector that could enable people to track air quality more widely.

New Sensor May Be Groundbreaking Tool for Soil Health

Bioengineers have developed sensors that monitor multiple soil parameters to provide farmers with accurate, real-time, continuous data to improve soil health and productivity.

Fully Recyclable Printed Electronics Use Water, Avoid Toxic Chemicals

By avoiding hazardous chemicals, the work points down a path industry could follow to reduce its environmental footprint.

3D-Printed AUV Aims to Thwart Climate Change

The Yonder Deep team installed an entire suite of sensors in its AUV, versatile enough to withstand the frigid Arctic waters as well as the coastal waters of Southern California.

Bioelectronic Devices Enable Real-Time Sensing

If a chemical spill in a river goes unnoticed for 20 minutes, it might be too late to remediate. Living bioelectronic sensors developed at Rice University can help.

Lighting the Way to Sustainability with PoE

Commercial buildings are responsible for roughly 18 percent of the total energy consumed in this country.

Scrubbing Carbon Dioxide from Power Plant Smokestacks

Aluminum formate (ALF) has a talent for separating carbon dioxide from the other gases that commonly fly out of the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants.

A Drone to Protect Bats from Wind Turbines

A study has perhaps solved the wind-turbine issue of causing harm to bats.

Top 10 Most-Read Tech Briefs Stories of 2022

See Tech Briefs’ most-read stories of 2022.

Producing Oil from Duckweed

Scientists say that such oil-rich duckweed could easily be harvested to produce biofuels or other bioproducts.

2022 Create the Future Design Contest: Consumer Product Design Category Winner — Green Screen

The core of the Green Screen consists of noise-absorbing mineral wool, which also serves as a vertical surface for evaporating rain coming from the roofs of the adjacent buildings.

2022 Create the Future Design Contest: Electronics/Sensors/IoT Winner - RF Fingerprinting for Industrial IoT Security

Some of the hardest to detect cyber-attacks are wireless, including man-in-the-middle attacks and rogue access points.

2022 Create the Future Design Contest: Sustainable Technologies/Future Energy Category Winner — SUNPave: Tomorrow’s Energy Today

When solar panels are placed horizontally, they harvest 15-20 percent less energy from the sun, and hence consumers end up paying a higher price for the harvested energy.

Designing to Minimize Environmental Impact

According to the NASA Earth Observatory, air temperatures on Earth have been rising since the Industrial Revolution. Here is a suggestion about one way that engineers could help reduce the problems caused by that in their everyday work.

Bringing More Reliable Electricity to Puerto Rican Microgrids

Ben Ollis and a team of engineers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory are creating a novel orchestrator tool to manage a cluster of microgrids so they can directly support and communicate with each other, making them more resilient during long power outages. It is being installed as a demonstration project in the small town of Adjuntas in the Central Mountains of Puerto Rico.

Pulsed 2-Micron Laser Transmitter

The design produces a compact, efficient, long-lifetime laser transmitter as needed for use in space, while also having potential applications as an airborne or ground-based wind measurement tool.

Scientists Stick Hydrogen Where the Sun Doesn’t Shine

One method for keeping removed carbon out of the atmosphere long-term involves injecting CO2 into rock formations deep underground.