Ben Coxworth

Although wave power is attracting a lot of attention as a renewable energy source, it is possible to generate power from still water. All you need is an electrolyzer, which separates water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen, then feeds them into a fuel cell. Electrolyzers, however, require catalysts to get the process rolling. While hydrogen production catalysts aren’t much of a problem, the platinum catalysts used for oxygen production are expensive, don’t last very long, and the creation of them incorporates toxic chemicals. This Monday, however, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced the development of a new oxygen production catalyst that is 200 times more efficient than platinum. The nickel-borate-based catalyst has been licensed to Sun Catalytix, which is hoping to be producing safe, super-efficient electrolyzers within two years.  Read More

Four mechanical engineering undergraduates from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), have installed a computer and eight velocity sensors on a surfboard, in effort to create the ultimate surfing experience. While the students ride the board across the waves, the sensors register the speed at which the board skims along the water, then send that data to the computer, which proceeds to transmit it wirelessly to a laptop on the beach. The computer also saves the data on an internal memory card. The students built the board for their senior design project, but also as a part of Ph.D. student Benjamin Thompson’s science-of-surfboards project, in which he hopes to design the "perfect" board.  Read More

It would seem kind of strange if you were driving on a back road at night, far from any known source of electricity, when you suddenly came across a working streetlight. Such a thing is possible, however, and could even become a common occurrence. That’s because Lighting Science Group now manufactures solar powered LED streetlights, that can run entirely independent of local power grids. Even if the availability of electricity isn’t an issue, Lighting Science states they are also brighter, more efficient, and require less maintenance than regular HID streetlights. Those claims obviously impressed somebody, as the company’s PROLIFIC Series Roadway streetlights are now being installed on a 23-kilometer (14-mile) stretch of Mexico City’s elevated Viaducto Bicentenario superhighway.  Read More

If you’re a fan of the military strategy game Risk, then you definitely might be interested in this: on October 13th, Bonhams Auction House in London will be selling off an “extremely rare” copy of The Game of War, a complex military board game dating from 1890. Unlike Risk, which is played for amusement and to shed excess friends, The Game of War was designed to be played by real military officers, to train them for the upcoming First World War. It was based on Kriegsspiel, a war game invented by Lieutenant Georg von Reiswitz in the early 19th century for training officers in the Prussian army. If you’re interested, however, be sure to stop by the bank machine on your way there – the game is expected to fetch between £1,500 to £2000, or US$2,330 to $3,100.  Read More

Recently, 29 students from Northwestern University in Illinois planned a terrorist attack. Researchers from the university were subsequently able to learn details of the attack, even though the students never admitted to anything. How was this possible? Well, essentially, the researchers read the students’ minds. More specifically, they monitored their P300 brain waves – brief electrical patterns in the cortex, which occur when meaningful information is presented to someone with “guilty knowledge.” In this case, it was a mock planned attack, but the research team believe their process could be used to prevent the real thing.  Read More

A vegetarian diet, according to its proponents, has a lighter ecological footprint, reduced resource impacts, and lower carbon emissions than the non-vegetarian equivalent. A new fast-casual vegetarian restaurant chain, however, is taking “eating green” to a whole new level. Otarian, which already has locations in New York and opens in London this Friday, is the first global chain to carbon footprint all of its menu items according to the internationally recognized PAS 2050 standard. Not only can diners see the carbon figures for each item listed on the menu, but foods that generate too large of a footprint are simply not offered. The restaurant is also testing out the World Resources Institute's new product carbon foot printing standard, which Otarian claims “will help diners to understand the environmental impact of their food choices in a highly measurable and quantifiable way.”  Read More

Augmented Reality, or AR, is currently one of the hot areas for mobile app development – for some reason, people seem quite smitten with the idea of being able to point their mobile device’s camera at a street, and having information about the buildings and businesses that appear on their screen superimposed over the images in real time. Now, a prototype mobile AR device is being tested, that concentrates more on topography than urban exploration. The Marmota mobile AR can tell you things like what the names of those mountain peaks over there are, what their elevation is, and how far away they are.  Read More

Laptop computers are appropriately named, as they do sit nicely on your lap. If you’ve ever tried using one down there, however, you’ll know that it’s not the most ergonomic set-up imaginable – you have to bend your head down, keep your knees up, and feel your thighs getting toasty warm from the computer-generated heat that is evidently not able to disperse into the air. In order to position laptops in other ways, various companies have offered laptop stands to put on your desk, devices for turning your lap itself into a desk-like computer workspace, gizmos that allow you to swivel your laptop over from the passenger seat of your car, or that let you use it beside your bed. If only there was one that held your laptop in front of you while you were lying on your back... there is, of course, and Hong Kong-based company Omax has a variety of them to choose from.  Read More

Last month, we told you about an experiment with air-purifying concrete that was recently conducted in the Netherlands. Researchers resurfaced 1,000 square meters of a busy road with concrete paving stones that contained titanium dioxide (TiO2), a photocatalytic material that removes automobile-produced nitrogen oxides (NOx) from the air and converts them into nitrate with the aid of sunlight. When the air was tested up to one-and-a-half meters above those stones, NOx levels were found to be 25 to 45 percent lower than above regular concrete on the same road. Now, a similar study is underway in Germany, and is already showing promising results.  Read More