Wall Street Journal, 6/3/14, excerpt: In the future, virtual reality won't require strapping a bulky contraption to your head. Instead, imagine stepping into an empty room and then suddenly seeing life-size, 3-D images of people and furniture. Or looking down at a smartwatch and seeing virtual objects float and bounce above the wrist, like the holographic
The year 2013 marked the 18th consecutive year of commercial cultivation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) or now commonly referred to as biotech crops. And in just under two decades, the volume of land on which biotech crops are grown has increased from 1.7 million hectares in 1996 — the first year of commercial planting —
Consumer products containing ingredients made using an advanced form of engineering known as synthetic biology are beginning to show up more often on grocery and department store shelves. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/31/business/biofuel-tools-applied-to-household-soaps.html?hpw&rref=science&_r=0
Federal energy authorities have slashed by 96% the estimated amount of recoverable oil buried in California's vast Monterey Shale deposits, deflating its potential as a national "black gold mine" of petroleum. Just 600 million barrels of oil can be extracted with existing technology, far below the 13.7 billion barrels once thought recoverable from the jumbled
Legions of business leaders, economists, and think-tankers are coming to reclassify water as a kind of buried treasure: "blue gold." Willem Buiter, Citigroup's chief economist, sums up the thinking of many these days: "Water as an asset class, in my view, will eventually become the single most important physical commodity -- dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural
An alliance of food manufacturers, retailers and foodservice operators announced a toolkit to help food sector businesses reduce the amount of waste. The Best Practices and Emerging Solutions Toolkit from the Food Waste Reduction Alliance (FWRA), a cross-sector industry initiative led by the Food Marketing Institute (FMI), the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) and the National Restaurant
There is an old joke in the energy business that advanced biofuels are the fuel of the future, and always will be. But this is the year biofuel production will finally lift off, industry executives say. http://nyti.ms/1t9V0Y9
By 2002, this Scientific American commentary notes, Golden Rice was technically ready to go. Animal testing had found no health risks. Syngenta, which had figured out how to insert the Vitamin A-producing gene from carrots into rice, handed all financial interests over to a nonprofit organization, so there would be no resistance to the life-saving technology
American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise. In Washington, budget cuts have left the nation’s research complex reeling. Labs are closing. Scientists are being laid off. Projects are being put on the shelf, especially in the risky, freewheeling realm of basic research. Yet from Silicon Valley
Quietly whirring away in a dusty field in the Central Valley is a shiny solar energy machine that may someday solve many of California's water problems. It's called the WaterFX solar thermal desalination plant, and it has been turning salty, contaminated irrigation runoff into ultra-pure liquid for nearly a year for the Panoche Water and