In the 17th-century, although the English had the opportunity, they chose not to make land on Cuba. They bypassed the island because they saw flickering lights that they believed were the campfires of the Spanish. Those lights were actually fireflies. The humble, yet brilliant firefly probably changed the course of history, which isn’t surprising since [...]

Ed note: This post originally appeared on the original home of Anthropology in Practice. It seemed appropriate to share in light of the SciAm cities feature – particularly as I’m traveling. See you Friday! As the sun sinks over the Hudson River, New York City doesn’t power down. Lights flicker on and soon the famous [...]

Beyond the Light Switch, a Detroit Public Television two-part documentary hosted by Scientific American Associate Editor David Biello, has been awarded a Silver Baton 2012 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, it was announced today. Biello and the production team of Ed Moore, Bill Kubota, Paul Dzendzel, Genevieve Savage and Jordan Wingrove spent more than a year [...]

On Tuesday, September 20, I’m set to moderate a panel on energy efficiency, specifically as it applies in New York City. As part of Climate Week NYC, the panelists will explore what the local utility Consolidated Edison—and some of its partners—are doing to manage electricity use in the city that never sleeps (which means we [...]

The center of the Earth is a roiling ball of heat, roughly 6,000 degrees Celsius as near as we can tell without a sci-fi tunneling effort. The closest humanity has come to that molten core is some 12 kilometers beneath the continental crust in Russia, which isn’t even halfway through said crust and akin to [...]

The smart grid. Sounds good, right? But what exactly is it? And does that mean we have a dumb grid now? "The grid, it is smart today," Laura Ipsen, a senior vice president at Cisco, told the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-e) conference on March 2. "The weaving of IT [information technology] and [...]

For the past year or so, I’ve been working on a documentary project with Detroit Public Television called "Beyond the Light Switch." It’s taken me from the ARPA-e conference in Washington, D.C., to the frack fields of North Texas. I’ve interviewed folks ranging from the McCulloughs, a wheat and wind farming family, to U.S. Secretary [...]

Renewable energy made big national headlines October 12 as a group of investors, including search engine giant Google, announced plans to build a 560-kilometer offshore wind power transmission "backbone" off the U.S. eastern seaboard. The developers of the plan say it will make wind power more economical and enhance the reliability of the existing grid. [...]

Why do the roiling, black clouds of a thunderstorm produce lightning? Ben Franklin and others helped prove that such lightning was discharged electricity, but what generates that electricity in such prodigious quantities? After all, storms generate millions of lightning bolts around the globe every year—even volcanoes can get in on the act as the recent [...]

The problem with generating electricity by harnessing the wind is that it doesn’t always blow (though it may seem that way at times). And, typically, consumers remain intolerant of power interruptions. But there may be a way to ensure a steady supply of wind, according to a new study in the April 5 Proceedings of [...]

Here’s how to make a solar cell from silicon: take one solid block of doped silicon, saw it into thin wafers, layer said semiconductors beneath a panel of transparent glass, connect them to a metal electrode that can channel away the electrons knocked loose by incoming photons and turn it into a photovoltaic device. That [...]

Making aluminum requires a lot of electricity. That’s because the metal bonds tightly to oxygen and it takes a lot of energy to break that bond. In essence, the process of making aluminum is a giant battery with the silvery metal being reduced to purity at the cathode while oxygen bonds with the carbon anode [...]

The entire budget of the U.S. Department of Energy branch that covers today’s energy mix—from cleaning up energy generation’s environmental aftermath to energy efficiency programs and renewable energy development—is $10 billion. That’s enough to "either build one supercollider on the basic end or one nuclear power plant on the applied end," said Kristina Johnson, the [...]

At the beginning of this year, the Golden State officially launched its long-discussed market-based system to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. California’s GHG cap-and-trade program is not the first of its type. Carbon trading schemes are popping up around the world. But, it’s only the second program to takeoff in the U.S. The first, the [...]

The vision is beautiful, if not somewhat tried: a large cluster of 360 foot tall towers encircled with long, slightly cupped blades, similar to airplane wings, spinning in the wind like a wind vane. The result? An outpouring of clean electricity at the Megawatt (MW) scale. That’s what Harry Ruda, CEO of Wing Power Energy, [...]

My favorite element of the electric grid is the method by which it gathers information about power outages. It seems the electric utilities have legions of trained mammals, and when power goes out, mammals in different areas press buttons, and the buttons make a bell ring at the utilities. For pressing the right button the [...]

For wind power, 2011 was a great year. California added more new wind energy to the grid than any other state, according to a report published Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Energy. A number of other states received high honors as well. These include Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Colorado, which churned out at [...]

Today’s suggestion? Get used to it. Days of unspeakable heat? The heat taking the usual storm systems and turning them excessively violent? Lack of investment in infrastructure making recovery from those storms lengthy and piecemeal? Check, check, and check. Remember the “Snowstorm of 88” narratives we all grew up listening to? The next generation of [...]

With excessive heat spreading across the country, people are seeking relief by retreating indoors, turning up the AC, and staying well hydrated. In many parts of the country, particularly the Southeast and Southwest, the heat is exacerbated by ongoing drought, which means water is on everyone’s mind and is being used at increased rates. It’s [...]

Hickory Ridge landfill outside of Atlanta, GA, is full. Like most landfills that reach capacity, it was capped to contain its noxious mix of debris that will slowly degrade over the decades and centuries to come. But unlike most, Hickory Ridge glistens on a sunny day due its over 7,000 thin-film photovoltaic solar panels plastered [...]

Today, more than 80% of the energy used in the United States comes from fossil fuels – specifically from petroleum, natural gas and coal. In the transportation sector, this number is even higher with fossil fuels (almost exclusively petroleum) supplying 97% of the total energy used. But, on the electric power side of the equation, [...]

Electricity is used for many purposes – for example, illuminating a space, cooking food, cooling a store, or running a production line. In Wyoming, more than half of the electricity sold in the state is used for industrial applications. In the District of Columbia, more than 60% is sold to the commercial sector. When searching [...]

Sometimes, the list of things to be paranoid about feels endless: BPA in your water bottles, pesticides on your food, prescription drugs in your drinking water, and nanotechnology in your donuts. Luckily, most of these things will not statistically be responsible for your ultimate demise (you can likely credit heart disease and cancer for that). [...]