“You have improved our lives in ways that are practical and inspirational,” said President Barack Obama. He saluted the top U.S. researchers with the highest honors bestowed by the U.S. government, the National Science and Technology Medals. At the White House ceremony on February 1, he honored 12 winners for the National Medals of Science [...]

Summer Davos—formally, the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions—is known as a gathering of captions of industry and policy leaders. Increasingly, it is also making room for discussion of science and technology as drivers of the innovations needed for us to continue to thrive in a finite world. I moderated or facilitated [...]

It looks like a solar-powered treadmill, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) say they have created a flat, conveyor belt–like device that could clean up oil slicks far more efficiently than anything used at the Deepwater Horizon site. They key is a nanoparticle-infused, water-repelling mesh coating a conveyor belt. As important is [...]

When attempting to evaluate the overall health of the U.S. electric grid, one potentially important metric relates to outages – how often and how long customers are without power. But, data related to disruptions in electricity service are largely unavailable. In fact, many states do not require utilities to report data related to the impact [...]

When the sun dips below the horizon for the night, most solar panels become interesting roofing tiles, instead of valuable generation resources. During the day, a single cloud can quickly send residential solar power generators back to a fossil fuel-based grid for their electricity. This intermittency in fuel resource availability, combined with the current lack [...]