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Okay, so the US Congress is moving on a bill to foster the sale of new fuel-efficient cars and trucks. Dubbed CARS, for Customer Assistance to Recycle and Save, the cash-for-clunkers rebate looks like it might be available at car dealers sometime soon.If CARS passes Congress and gets the President's signature, the government will dish out vouchers valued from $3500 to $4500 to car dealerships. So, if you trade-in an eligible vehicle and purchase a new one, they will pass along that hefty discoun...

Since AT&T gained the exclusive US rights to the iPhone they have added two-and-a-half million subscribers to their rolls. Not a huge number compared to the world’s total number of wireless subscribers, estimated at two hundred and seventy million by the industry; but a serious enough number to put a dent in the competition.The same is true for those who desperately want to use a Palm Pre phone but don’t have a subscription to Sprint Nextel. Or, we are told, those who are Google ...

Given the exciting reports leaking out of Iran, it’s easy to marvel at how a handful of determined people and a little bit of innovative technology can help sow the seeds for democracy right under the nose of a tyrannical dictatorship – even if it’s not exactly what’s actually going on. I, too, am not immune to the hopeful signs coming out of one of the oldest and most socially complex nations on the planet. Sadly, my enthusiasm is tempered by a little historical perspect...

I love batteries. One of the first engineering toys I enjoyed when I was a youngster back in the early 1950s was a dc motor that my father and I built from a kit. A pair of series-connected D cells powered the motor. It was quite a treat when my dad gave me two shiny new Burgess D cells when the old ones wouldn’t turn the armature anymore. Today, I still get the same satisfying sense of renewal whenever I pop new AAA cells into my camera or PDA. I’m not the only one who goes ape over...

The phone in your pocket rings. You pull it out, look at the screen and don’t recognize the number. Well, you don’t remember everyone’s number, right? Your hello is returned with a voice asking whether you would like to take a call from your mother. In my case I faint, as she passed on some years ago. Others would immediately say, “of course” and then you find you are connected to someone trying to sell you a vacuum cleaner.Well, that’s a kind of nutty scenari...

While lots of folks are talking about generating electrical power from wind turbines and photovoltaic arrays, there's also worldwide concern about a looming global water shortage. There's an abundance of breezes and sunshine, but potable water is a bounded resource in parts of the world, especially in countries where deserts dominate the landscape. That picture is changing, in part thanks to electronics.Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology in Germ...

Having gotten off a ten hour flight from London a few days before, the loss of Air France’s AF447 A330-200 Airbus en-route from Rio to Paris was a reminder that humans are vulnerable to mistakes, misdesigns, and Mother Nature.It now seems clear that somewhere between the Arquipélago de Fernando de Noronha (Brazilian tourist territory about 350 miles Northeast of the mainland city of Natal) – probably on its own navigation, for such a low traveled route, to the civilized Cape V...

The electrical department at my local big box home equipment store stocks myriad compact fluorescent lamp offerings. There are CFLs in standard incandescent lamp shapes, as well as globular lamps. In fact, there are so many CFLs that it's hard to locate conventional incandescent lamps anymore! CFL buyers are enticed with rebates and low prices, and I must admit I've taken the bait. We've retrofitted just about every candelabra socket in our house with CFLs of one form or another.While CFLs cut e...

I’m having a great time watching multi-billion-dollar corporations from General Electric to IBM embracing green energy as a core part of their business strategy: technologies that they would not have touched with a 10-foot pole a few years ago. Whether these companies are motivated by ever-tighter regulations, ever-rising energy costs, or the billions of dollars in economic stimulus money being doled out for green energy projects, the technologies, products, and business practices they are...

It has taken about five years, but members of my family have, this week, become Permanent Residents of Canada. The transition was clean, friendly, and an incredible if long-in-the-making relief.Our immigration lawyer regards all his client families as long-term friends, and although each case is different they all take more time than everyone expects them to take. No doubt our application had complications that other families do not encounter; and, no doubt, there were circumstances that we did ...