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Greetings from Denver, home of the Broncos, some of the most creative suppressions of free speech since Chicago’s 1968 Democratic Convention, and the 2008 Green Photonics Forum. As one would expect, the two-day event was packed with breakthroughs in energy saving solid-state lighting and lower-cost photovoltaic technologies, but the session that was the biggest surprise for me was the session on flexible and printed circuits. Led in good part by the efforts of the Flex Tech Consortium, the technologies to print displays and active electronic components on low-cost plastic substrates have matured over the last decade and may soon have a profound impact on how we design and manufacture many products.Much of the early work on printed electronics was focused on displays, built on discrete substrates but new continuous printing (roll-to-roll) processes are in development. Companies like Konarka, Unisolar and NanoSolar are already using various kinds of roll-to-roll technologies to produce low-cost photovolta...

My town is blessed with miles of sparkling ocean beaches. To keep these beaches pristine, we have ordinances about walking dogs and other animals, such as horses.Animals cannot be trotted along the seashore during the summer tourist season, except in the mornings before beachgoers have arrived in numbers, and in the evenings. Additionally, dogs must be under either voice control (good luck) or on a leash. Most importantly, owners must clean up after their pets.To keep townsfolk on the straight and narrow, we also have an official dog advisory committee. It identifies whether problems exist, and offers recommendations to address any such problems. The dog advisory committee posts signs, and publishes and distributes brochures reminding animal owners of their obligations. The committee also ensures adequate stocks of doggie poop bags, strategically placed at beachfront access points.%IMG_left_full_564%Regardless of these measures, there are still a fair amount of droppings on the beach sands. Taking the bull by...

The father of the Internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has not done with us all yet. Last Sunday (September 14, 2008) he and Steve Bratt (CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium – W3C) welcomed a multitude to the Newseum in Washington, DC, to announce a new initiative for the web. It was, maybe, a little ironic that Berners-Lee should make the announcement at the end of the week when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was fully powered up for the first time, for it was while he was at CERN that he started the work that led to the current Internet, HTML, and the rest. We might all grumble about aspects of the resulting technology (mine is why on earth did he disallow the use of the ampersand in domain names?) but we all benefit from the work that was done by him – and many others – day after every day.The reasons he believes his work is not yet done are multitudinous, but one of the most important to him is that he believes there is no standard of believability in web sites around the world. One of the s...

I was all set to write about my adventures this week at the OIDA Green Photonics Forum, when a press release from the Telecommunications Industry Association hit my desk that urged the EPA to exempt telephony products from certain requirements of the Energy Star certification program (see full text below). The absurdity of this request jerked my thoughts away from energy-efficient solid-state lighting and carbon-free photovoltaic technologies, as I was reminded how the greed and short-sighted actions of small special interest groups keep pushing back the roadmap for a sustainable future until it approaches the outskirts of Oz. At first glance, the TIA request might seem to be reasonable, since the latest Energy Star spec will require devices to consume a half-watt or less in their idle state while cordless phones and answering devices must keep enough of their circuitry on to be ready for an incoming or outgoing call. But, hey - wait a minute - don’t cellular phones already enjoy standby power levels fa...

Google was ten years old last week, born on September 7, 1998 with the need to deposit an angel investor’s check made out to the then non-existent company for $100,000. The company actually celebrates its birthday on a different day every year – when it is convenient for the majority – at The Googleplex in Mountain View, CA.The name Google is a derivative of the word googol, coined by Milton Sirotta. Milton was a nephew of Edward Kasner, a famed mathematician, and googol refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes, 1099 in our engineering terms.The search utility that Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed in their Stanford dorm was originally called BackRub (looking at back-links on web sites) and it was somewhat amazing that they were able to collaborate with one another. Larry was a graduate of the University of Michigan, and Sergey had been instructed to show him around the Stanford campus during a visit. They apparently disagreed and argued with one another on multiple issues. Even afte...

"This is one emergency we can't drill our way out of." – Oil man T. Boone PickensLet's face it. The world currently produces about three times more oil than it discovers in a given period. It doesn't take a mathematician to understand we're using oil faster than it can be replaced. Nonetheless, there's little reason to believe the geopolitics of petroleum will change anytime soon.We all know the demand for oil is primarily fueled (pun intended) by transportation. Populations are growing, and there's a worldwide clamor for automobiles, especially in industrially-developing countries such as India and China. Many more gasoline-powered vehicles on the roads of the world will offset improvements in vehicle efficiency. Petroleum consumption will rise, and rise exponentially. If present trends continue unabated, experts warn the world will use more energy over the next 50 years than in all of previously recorded history. What's not so clear is how unbridled growth and the ceaseless quest for oil wil...

The three remaining orbiters (commonly known as the Space Shuttle) are due to retire in 2010. Will they?The Ares launch vehicle – most of us would call it a rocket – is due to make its first flight in 2009, and its first active mission in 2015 will be to deliver, unmanned, freight to the International Space Station using the Apollo program shaped Orion capsule. The Orion differs from Apollo in every imaginable way, with more room, modern materials, modern computing, modern communications and telemetry, and it should make for a far safer journey. In its launches to the Moon, the Ares-plus-Orion will be part of the Constellation program. Hopefully the lunar exploration vehicle (LEV) this time around will look a little more sturdy than the aluminum-clad version we so hopefully watched on monochrome TV.There have been rumors that Lockheed are behind schedule and that they might not make the 2015 fight dates originally promised. Some Senators (including John McCain) last week sent a letter to the Presi...

When I moved from aerospace electronics engineering to technical journalism a decade and a half ago, I naturally assumed that it would be easier and less stressful to write about technology than to actually work with it. In truth, the workload and stress is pretty much the same (although I now don’t have to worry about any of my creations blowing up) but the sources of stress are considerably different. Surprisingly, many of the biggest headaches I face come not from trying to write about the technology itself but from trying to get information from the companies that produce it. While there are many high-tech companies that are a pleasure to deal with, there are many more who seem to do their best to keep me from learning enough about what they do to stop me from writing about it in a way that’s not an insult to our readers’ intelligence.One of the most common challenges the tech journalist encounters is simply finding people who can actually talk about the technology that goes into their p...

Everyone's talking about saving energy and maximizing automobile fuel mileage. Something totally non-electronic that I've been using for years, that works to conserve gasoline, is a vacuum gauge. A car engine acts like a big vacuum pump, so if you can monitor an engine's vacuum with your eye, you can moderate a heavy foot.The gauge I use on my car is a 1950s-style Sears & Roebuck instrument, but vacuum gauges are widely available today, and you can pick up a modern one at almost any auto parts store. I like my antiquated but adequate Sears gauge because it's made of metal and has a colorful 5-inch dial that indicates engine vacuum over a 270° arc. I can glance at it and get instant feedback.If you want a modern one, there's a nice looking unit, for not too much money, on Amazon. It was a rather easy matter to connect the gauge to my car's intake manifold, ahead of the throttle plate. On a lot of engines there's a tiny plug that can be removed, drilled, and reinstalled. That's what I found on my car. O...

Interoperability is not anywhere near as sexy a topic as the huge chunks of venture capital being pumped into solar energy startups like Nanosolar and Avasolar, but the standards that will allow homes, offices and the equipment inside them to interact intelligently with the power grid will have as much impact on our environment’s future as any solar panels that sit on their roofs. Much of the technology needed to let buildings manage their energy consumption by turning non-essential equipment off during peak load conditions, selling surplus electricity from their solar panels back to the grid, and even using electric vehicle batteries as distributed peak load management systems is already available. The challenge until now has been reducing system costs and getting parts of the solution from different manufacturers to talk to one another. This may begin to change with the HomePlug Powerline Alliance’s recent announcement that it’s working with the Zigbee Alliance and several major utilities ...