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The tremendous popularity renewable energy is enjoying both within the engineering and financial communities is a mixed blessing because it’s also helped generate a dense cloud of disinformation around the topic. Whether it’s overstating the benefits of corn-derived ethanol, or knocking hybrid cars as less eco-friendly than a Hummer1, the less-than-whole truths and urban legends being slung about by green tech proponents, and opponents, are making it difficult to make rational choices about how best to develop the technologies we’ll need build the kind of future we’d be proud to turn over to our grandkids.   One of the most common urban legends I’ve been bumping into of late is the notion that solar-electric panels and wind generators take more energy to manufacture than they ever produce. In fact, I’d heard this rumor so many times that I began to wonder if there was any truth to it and decided to do a little research.   It turns out that it’s fairly e...

Harvesting energy is in the news, again, as yet another means to save the world from ourselves. We have wind power, wave power and hydro generation as major sources and potential sources of energy -- although the fish environment extremists and the atmosphere environment extremists differ by a dam, or several, on hydroelectricity. But we're also seeing other smaller programs being developed.   A good example of the latter are the energy harvesting modules, EH300/301, from Advanced Linear Devices (ALD). They provide the ability to harvest just about any spare energy around -- at low and high voltages, ac and dc -- whether that energy is continuous or intermittent, and not even a straightforward electrical source.   We are also hearing about developments of tiny fuel cells and nano generators using water squeezed through tiny channels. There are projects to recover energy from the vibration of bridges, or passing traffic. There are even generators that can use the strikes of a human heel to develo...

Since my daughter Anwyn's current passion is horses, I'd decided we'd have a carousel-themed cake with toy horses as decorations for her 11th birthday. When I wrote about the edible four-hole mini-golf course I constructed for her 10th birthday (see my July 2006 editorial), I swore that this year's cake would include mechanical actuators or at least some flashing LEDs in its construction. When I started planning the cake back in January I'd even gone as far as starting to play with our Lego Mindstorm set to see if I could construct a mechanism that would pop a carousel-like tier of the cake off of its base layer and slowly spin it around. Unfortunately, my techno-culinary R&D efforts were thwarted by a busier-than-usual Spring travel schedule which kept me on the road a good part of June and brought me back home the day before Anwyn's birthday party. But despite having less than 24 hours to pull it together, this year's extreme birthday cake turned out as nicely as it did thanks in equal parts to some pa...

You would have had to have been lost in a rain forest in Brazil for the last six months to not be aware of the iPhone from Apple (Google finds about 70,300,000 mentions as of today). The wait is nearly over and the first buyers are already camped outside the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York, as I write. On Friday June 29, 2007 the approximately 200 stores will close from 2 PM to 6 PM to ready the spaces for the 6 PM launch. When a store exhausts its stock, after re-opening at 6 PM, the doors will close again. Additionally, almost 2000 AT&T (the extremely new version of AT&T, that was Cingular Wireless -- what a sad story AT&T has become) stores will be selling the phones on the same day. The rumors of the initial production quantity available vary dramatically and I have heard numbers between 100,000 and 500,000, with a general consensus of around 300,000. Think out the math here: both Apple and AT&T will also be selling the phones online. Will they allocate any of the initial batch to...

When scientific questions are elevated to public significance they are debated in a way that is utterly nonscientific -- eloquence, prejudice, even ridicule sway public opinion when facts are perceived as too arcane for the populace to understand. So, today, I invite you to use scientific techniques to address a fundamental point in the global warming debate. Is it reasonable to expect the general populace to be scientifically literate? We expect citizens to be able to read, why not expect them to remember a little high school science? Or is the problem that scientists so rarely invite the populace to the argument that it is unreasonable to expect them to know the language? Here's your invitation: calculate the percentage increase in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere due to the oil that people burned last year. As you can see, this argument rather lacks eloquence....

When attending conferences, I normally avoid keynote speeches, any panel that involves analysts, and briefings with CEOs. That's because the heavily-scripted materials at such events usually contain so little new information that, according to Shannon's Law, they can be classified as noise. That's why I was pleasantly surprised when Freescale CEO Michel Mayer offered some very useful insights on the future of our industry when he addressed a gathering of the tech media at their annual Technology Forum in Orlando. While the analysis he presented was intended to provide guidance for the traditional electronics industry, it provides some valuable insights and a very hopeful message for those of us interested in green-tech and other socially-responsible applications of technology. One of Mayer's basic premises is that the consolidation we're seeing in the semiconductor industry is mostly a function of a maturing market which cannot sustain the explosive growth it's enjoyed over the last two or three decades. Exp...