Palo Alto, CA — By integrating satellite mapping, airborne-laser technology, and ground-based plot surveys, scientists from the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, with colleagues from the World Wildlife Fund and in coordinatio…
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Plants are good at doing what scientists and engineers have been struggling to do for decades: converting sunlight into stored energy, and doing so reliably day after day, year after year. Now some MIT scientists have succe…
Speakers made from carbon nanotube sheets that are a fraction of the width of a human hair can both generate sound and cancel out noise — properties ideal for submarine sonar to probe the ocean depths and make subs invisible to enemies. That’s the …
Scientists may have peeled away another layer of mystery about materials floating in deep space. Tiny multilayered balls called “carbon onions,” produced in laboratory studies, appear to have the same light-absorption characteristics as dust particles in the regions between the stars. “It’s the strongest evidence yet that cosmic dust has a multilayered onionlike carbon structure,” said Manish Chhowalla, assistant professor of ceramic and materials engineering at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Chhowalla used transmission electron microscopes to study radiation absorption of the laboratory-produced onions and found characteristics virtually identical to those reported by astrophysicists studying dust in deep space.
Chemists hope a new variant of vancomycin that contains buckyballs — tiny cage-shaped molecules of pure carbon — could become the world’s first targeted antibiotic, creating a new line of defense against bioweapons like anthrax. Vancomycin, which entered clinical service 40 years ago, is the antibiotic of last resort, given only when all others fail. Unfortunately, vancomycin-resistant strains of bacteria have appeared in recent years.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky will be joined by representatives from several invited countries to announce plans for an international forum to advance carbon and storage technologies. In addition, Secretary Abraham will announce a government-sponsored, public-private partnership to create the world’s first pollution-free, fossil fuel fired power plant. The announcements follow a briefing to the President by Secretary Abraham, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman.