The California state budget crisis is causing scientific havoc. Already strapped for funds, frantically applying for stimulus money, now researchers at University of California schools must also worry about their employer (the state of California) having no money, salary cuts, increased tuition and fees for their students (the people that work in the labs), and the exodus of coworkers. What will this mean for science? What will this mean for California? Continue Reading »

There’s been a lot of recent hubbub about “smart” electricity grids and how they can improve our current grid’s reliability and reduce energy bills, yet at the same time help protect the environment. However, not everyone sees eye to eye, and the economic stimulus bill’s huge Smart Grid appropriations only fueled the debate further. At the heart of the battle some critics insist that the gains are not worth the costs, while others claim building such a grid is impossible in the first place. With $3.375 billion in grants for Smart Grid development and $615 million for Smart Grid demonstration projects at stake, the debate is not likely to subside any time soon.

Continue Reading »

Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently announced that the DOE would greatly slow its support of research on automotive hydrogen fuel cells. He cited a number of technical challenges that are still unresolved. Given that a hydrogen-car economy is at least 20 years off, he proposes throwing the resources to areas with the potential of quicker impact, like plug-in vehicles. However, I would argue that hydrogen offers the greater long-term  potential and that research should be expanded to include not only hydrogen fuel cells but also direct combustion of hydrogen and methods of effectively storing hydrogen. These may be 50-year scenarios, but we need to be doing the research now. Continue Reading »

I know that recently I’ve been focused on rail transit in America, but here in Philadelphia we’ve had some exciting news in the last few days. On 15 July our mayor’s office announced that Philadelphia’s recycling had increased 46% in the past 12 months. This is important because on 5 January 2009 Philadelphia became the largest city on the East Coast with single-stream recycling—a major effort to combat one of the worst recycling rates in the country. Philadelphia is not alone in its choice of single-stream recycling.  Continue Reading »

A new Pew report on science, scientists, and the public reveals we should be minding several gaps between scientists, the larger publics, and science. But some gaps are often obscured by our focus on the gap between what scientists know about science and what the general “public” knows. Those who study public understanding of science have termed this the cognitive deficit model and have found it insufficient to describe the problem fully. Continue Reading »

Ralph Gomory, president emeritus of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, put out an article last week in the Huffington Post making a case for keeping large-scale manufacturing within American shores. Gomory was responding to the starry-eyed pundits who promised rosy futures of the Information Age, in which all Americans would become “knowledge workers,” while all blue-collar jobs were offshored to developing countries. This idea grew more potent as the rhetoric of the “New Economy” flourished during the Clinton-era optimism of the late 1990s: since labor is cheap in China, we can send all manufacturing jobs there. In the meantime the United States can focus on advanced research and development. An ideal case of international division of labor. Or is it?

Continue Reading »