Talking Points Memo, Contributor
Articles
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Battery Maker A123 Systems Says It’s Not The Next ‘Solyndra’
Despite unveiling what it says will be a revolutionary new vehicle battery last week, Massachusetts-based firm A123 Systems is fighting skepticism that it will become the “next Solyndra,” the California solar company that went bankrupt in August 2011 after receiving a $550 million loan...
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'Strong Case' For Natural-Gas Car Research, National Lab Says
A government-funded laboratory that helped pioneer the battery technology behind many electric vehicles, including the Chevy Volt, has recently begun to focus on developing technologies to improve natural gas-powered vehicles, in anticipation of government and industry soon seeking to bring...
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Nanotech Solution To Hydrogen Fuel Puzzle From Brookhaven Lab?
A team of researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, has opened the door to a future of clean, cheap hydrogen fuel by ditching a popular platinum catalyst in favor of one based on two low cost alternatives, nickel and molybdenum. Until now, the manufacture of hydrogen gas has...
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Alcoa Building-Exterior Panels 'Eat' Smog From (A Few) Cars
Pittsburgh-based aluminum giant Alcoa has developed a new coating for its aluminum building panels that passively sucks in airborne pollutants and transforms them into harmless substances. Appropriately enough, the new panels are getting one of their first commercial tryouts at a new regional...
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NASA Ready To Show Off Algae Biofuel Research Project
NASA has developed a system that captures carbon dioxide and helps to prevent pollution from wastewater while creating renewable algae biofuel, fertilizer and possibly animal feed, too. NASA calls its system OMEGA, for Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae, self-contained bags of...
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Buoyed by record monthly sales of its Chevy Volt hybrid electric plug-in car in March, General Motors will resume production of the Volt at the Detroit Hamtramck plant one week early, the United Auto...
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Renewable Fuel Standards Fall Far Short Of Non-Corn Ethanol Goal
The Environmental Protection Agency released its 2012 Renewable Fuel Standards on December 28, a month after they were due and with a drastically lower target for the amount of ethanol derived from non-corn sources than Congress originally called for four years ago. The new renewable fuel standards...
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Motorcycles Are More Polluting Than Cars, New Device Shows
When cable TV’s “MythBusters” program recently investigated the idea that emissions from motorcycles are gentler on the environment than emissions from cars, they burst the bubbles of eco-enthusiast motorcycle riders—and put a small New York company’s innovative...
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Obama's Biofuels Announcement Encouraging, Challenges Remain
In the middle of his much-publicized bus tour into the nation's agricultural heartland on Tuesday, President Obama announced a new initiative to kickstart the U.S. biofuel industry, which among other things would create more jobs for rural communities in the biofuel production chain. The...
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China Builds And Tests Its Own Robot Car
The select global fleet of self-driving cars has a new Chinese addition, and the developers claim the intellectual property behind it was created entirely at a Chinese university. After gaining early publicity five years ago, the robot-driven vehicle made the trip between the interior Chinese...
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Researchers Turn To Plants And Animals To Fuel Sustainable Car Development
Edible car contests are a fixture at college campuses and grade school science classes, where whacky fun combines with an exercise in engineering and imagination, but it seems that foodstuffs are no longer confined to scale models. But as illustrated by Ford's newly announced use of soybean oil to...
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