philemmons
01-25-07, 04:07 PM
1. Home Hydrogen Fueling Station
What could be greener than a hydrogen car in your driveway? Try a solar-powered hydrogen fueling station in your garage. Australian scientists have developed a prototype of such a device. It's about the size of a filing cabinet and runs on electricity generated by rooftop solar panels. The first version is expected to produce enough hydrogen to give your runabout a range of some 100 miles without emitting a molecule of planet-warming greenhouse gas. Road trips are out of the question, but it's enough juice for running errands or powering fleets of delivery trucks. Tests of the home fueling system began early this year with commercial trials two years off.
2. Environmental Sensor Networks
Call it the networked environment. Picture tiny - we're talking small as a dime - wireless sensors lining lake beds and ocean floors, buried in the ground, and floating in the sky. All the time they are sniffing the air, water, and soil for pollutants and detecting changes in temperature and pressure. The payoff: real-time data on a variety of phenomena that affect the economy and society - climate change, hurricanes, air and water pollution. Cooler yet are solar-powered sensors that hover in the air. Virginia tech company Ensco is developing a beach-ball-size gadget that gets its juice from thin-film solar panels and would measure weather patterns.
3. Toxin-Eating Trees
Plant a forest, clean up a Superfund site. That's the idea behind phytoremediation, a technology that uses vegetation to absorb hazardous waste. The technique is old, but now there's a new twist that promises to make toxic dumping grounds green in more ways than one. British researchers have identified bacteria living in the roots of poplar trees that produce an enzyme that zaps residue from RDX, a chemical compound used by the military and industry. The scientists hope to genetically engineer the enzyme to boost the tree's ability to suck up toxic waste. So don't be surprised if you start seeing forests sprouting up on old military bases.
4. Nuclear Waste Neutralizer
Forget Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Homer Simpson. Nuclear energy is now being touted as a greenhouse-gas free solution to global warming. But one big problem remains: What to do with untold tons of radioactive waste that will be red-hot for hundreds of thousands of years? The answer: Recycle it. But not with current technology, which leaves behind an unfortunate by-product - weapons-grade plutonium. Instead, U.S. government scientists are devising a chemical technology called Urex that allows four times as much waste to be packed into nuclear burial grounds. The technology encases the plutonium in other elements, rendering it all but useless to terrorists, North Korean dictators, and other evildoers.
5. Autonomous Ocean Robots
The world's seas are in an ocean of trouble: climate change, vanishing fish, coral bleaching. Just keeping tabs on an airless environment that covers three-quarters of the earth's surface is a bit like exploring a distant planet. Which means it's best to send in the robots. Unfortunately, today most oceangoing bots are big, dumb, and expensive. But not the Starbug. Under development in Australia, the 4-foot-long robot operates autonomously and is highly maneuverable, thanks to its innovative thruster technology and robotic vision. Starbug will monitor water quality, map fish habitats, and survey threatened coral reefs. Initially costing about $24,000, Starbug should start rolling off the assembly line late this year.
6. Sonic Water Purifier
Here's a sci-fi solution for an age-old problem that leaves 1.1 billion people without access to clean water: Beam ultrasound waves into polluted water, blowing up the cellular walls and carbon bonds of contaminants. What's left is a cool drink of fresh H2O. Ultrasound waves have already been used to break up sewage in sanitation systems. Now that the probes that produce the sound waves are getting more powerful, however, scientists are retooling the devices to decontaminate large tanks of water, a process called sonolysis. Portable sonolysis machines could be deployed to isolated villages in developing countries. In urban areas, sonolysis could treat water tainted with industrial pollution.
7. Endangered-Species Tracker
Old: Save the whales! New: Web 2.0 those whales, and then clone 'em! There are more than 16,000 known threatened animal and plant species. Conservationists are looking to tag endangered animals with radio frequency ID tags and GPS sensors, and then use Web 2.0 mashup techniques to overlay their locations and map details of their habitats and habits with other landscape features to design better wildlife preserves. In 2003, scientists cloned an endangered banteng cow, and Colorado company XY Inc. has developed sperm-sorting technology that could one day be used for sex selection in endangered species to boost captive breeding programs.
8. The Interactive, Renewable Smart Power Grid
California utility Pacific Gas & Electric is developing the electricity grid of the future, one that will look more like the Internet - distributed, interactive, open-source - than the dumb, one-way network of today that pushes dinosaur molecules from a carbon-spewing power plant to your home. Here's some of the technologies and energy sources that utilities will tap: solar power stations; solar buildings with solar cells integrated into rooftops, walls and wind@ws; wind power; wave power; cow power (methane gas extracted from cow manure powers electricity-generating turbines); car power (plug-in hybrid cars that not only have rechargeable batteries but also feed power back to the grid); clean-coal plants; and smart grids that communicate with household appliances.
source (http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/biz2/0701/gallery.8greentechs/index.html)
What could be greener than a hydrogen car in your driveway? Try a solar-powered hydrogen fueling station in your garage. Australian scientists have developed a prototype of such a device. It's about the size of a filing cabinet and runs on electricity generated by rooftop solar panels. The first version is expected to produce enough hydrogen to give your runabout a range of some 100 miles without emitting a molecule of planet-warming greenhouse gas. Road trips are out of the question, but it's enough juice for running errands or powering fleets of delivery trucks. Tests of the home fueling system began early this year with commercial trials two years off.
2. Environmental Sensor Networks
Call it the networked environment. Picture tiny - we're talking small as a dime - wireless sensors lining lake beds and ocean floors, buried in the ground, and floating in the sky. All the time they are sniffing the air, water, and soil for pollutants and detecting changes in temperature and pressure. The payoff: real-time data on a variety of phenomena that affect the economy and society - climate change, hurricanes, air and water pollution. Cooler yet are solar-powered sensors that hover in the air. Virginia tech company Ensco is developing a beach-ball-size gadget that gets its juice from thin-film solar panels and would measure weather patterns.
3. Toxin-Eating Trees
Plant a forest, clean up a Superfund site. That's the idea behind phytoremediation, a technology that uses vegetation to absorb hazardous waste. The technique is old, but now there's a new twist that promises to make toxic dumping grounds green in more ways than one. British researchers have identified bacteria living in the roots of poplar trees that produce an enzyme that zaps residue from RDX, a chemical compound used by the military and industry. The scientists hope to genetically engineer the enzyme to boost the tree's ability to suck up toxic waste. So don't be surprised if you start seeing forests sprouting up on old military bases.
4. Nuclear Waste Neutralizer
Forget Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Homer Simpson. Nuclear energy is now being touted as a greenhouse-gas free solution to global warming. But one big problem remains: What to do with untold tons of radioactive waste that will be red-hot for hundreds of thousands of years? The answer: Recycle it. But not with current technology, which leaves behind an unfortunate by-product - weapons-grade plutonium. Instead, U.S. government scientists are devising a chemical technology called Urex that allows four times as much waste to be packed into nuclear burial grounds. The technology encases the plutonium in other elements, rendering it all but useless to terrorists, North Korean dictators, and other evildoers.
5. Autonomous Ocean Robots
The world's seas are in an ocean of trouble: climate change, vanishing fish, coral bleaching. Just keeping tabs on an airless environment that covers three-quarters of the earth's surface is a bit like exploring a distant planet. Which means it's best to send in the robots. Unfortunately, today most oceangoing bots are big, dumb, and expensive. But not the Starbug. Under development in Australia, the 4-foot-long robot operates autonomously and is highly maneuverable, thanks to its innovative thruster technology and robotic vision. Starbug will monitor water quality, map fish habitats, and survey threatened coral reefs. Initially costing about $24,000, Starbug should start rolling off the assembly line late this year.
6. Sonic Water Purifier
Here's a sci-fi solution for an age-old problem that leaves 1.1 billion people without access to clean water: Beam ultrasound waves into polluted water, blowing up the cellular walls and carbon bonds of contaminants. What's left is a cool drink of fresh H2O. Ultrasound waves have already been used to break up sewage in sanitation systems. Now that the probes that produce the sound waves are getting more powerful, however, scientists are retooling the devices to decontaminate large tanks of water, a process called sonolysis. Portable sonolysis machines could be deployed to isolated villages in developing countries. In urban areas, sonolysis could treat water tainted with industrial pollution.
7. Endangered-Species Tracker
Old: Save the whales! New: Web 2.0 those whales, and then clone 'em! There are more than 16,000 known threatened animal and plant species. Conservationists are looking to tag endangered animals with radio frequency ID tags and GPS sensors, and then use Web 2.0 mashup techniques to overlay their locations and map details of their habitats and habits with other landscape features to design better wildlife preserves. In 2003, scientists cloned an endangered banteng cow, and Colorado company XY Inc. has developed sperm-sorting technology that could one day be used for sex selection in endangered species to boost captive breeding programs.
8. The Interactive, Renewable Smart Power Grid
California utility Pacific Gas & Electric is developing the electricity grid of the future, one that will look more like the Internet - distributed, interactive, open-source - than the dumb, one-way network of today that pushes dinosaur molecules from a carbon-spewing power plant to your home. Here's some of the technologies and energy sources that utilities will tap: solar power stations; solar buildings with solar cells integrated into rooftops, walls and wind@ws; wind power; wave power; cow power (methane gas extracted from cow manure powers electricity-generating turbines); car power (plug-in hybrid cars that not only have rechargeable batteries but also feed power back to the grid); clean-coal plants; and smart grids that communicate with household appliances.
source (http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/biz2/0701/gallery.8greentechs/index.html)