Posts Tagged ‘NCSU’
RTP scientists look to sun to fuel energy research hub
Friday, July 23, 2010, 7:22 pmNorth Carolina’s Research Triangle was bested by California to get federal funding for a solar fuels innovation hub. The U.S. Department of Energy last week awarded the $122 million prize to a group led by the California Institute of Technology.
The news was disappointing for the University of North Carolina, Duke University, N.C. State University and RTI International, which make up the Research Triangle Solar Fuels Institute. That was clear when David Myers, RTI’s vice president of engineering and technology, talked to Science in the Triangle the same day the DoE made the announcement.
RTP-area efforts to develop a liquid fuel from sunlight will continue despite the federal funding setback, Myers said. The solar fuels initiative is one of the most active areas of energy research here and a key ingredient in plans to build the Triangle into an energy research hub.
“The area is vastly underrated in the amount of energy research going on,” Myer said.
Watch more of the videotaped Q&A here:
RTI broadens energy research with federal greenbacks
Wednesday, July 14, 2010, 8:54 amTechnologies that promise to lower greenhouse gas emissions and demand for U.S. oil imports are becoming more prominent on RTI International’s research smorgasbord, which has featured efforts in a related field, air pollution monitoring, as a reliable staple for the past 30 years.
RTI energy lab (Photo courtesy of RTI)
One of the founding members of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium three years ago, RTI has scientists working on projects that include the capture and reuse of carbon dioxide – the most prominent greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere – production of bio-crude from organic waste and a nanotechnology light bulb that promises to be more energy efficient than a fluorescent light and doesn’t contain harmful mercury.
Stimulus funds the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded in the past year to help the economy recover fueled RTI’s stepped-up energy research. Of the institute’s $750 million in estimated revenue this year, energy research will contribute about $12.5 million, said RTI spokesman Patrick Gibbons.
Is your barbecue causing water pollution?
Monday, June 14, 2010, 6:49 pmFarmers’ market managers tell me that consumers are becoming incredibly knowledgeable, quizzing farmers about their use of chemicals and antibiotics in order to be well informed about the food they eat. Now here’s a new question to ask farmers when you buy pork: what are you doing to protect the environment?
Here’s the background. Hog production is one of the cornerstones of North Carolina’s agricultural economy, with more than 10 million hogs produced annually in the state, or roughly one pig per person. In recent years, most of these hogs have been raised in indoor operations known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs.
But consumer demand is driving a movement back to pasture-raised pork, and about 100 farmers in the state are responding to the call for hogs raised in natural conditions that many people consider more humane.
Consumers are driving the market for pasture-raised pork. Photo by Lisa M. Dellwo
NCSU engineering students unveil their EcoCAR
Saturday, May 1, 2010, 7:05 pmN.C. State University engineering students participating in the national EcoCAR Challenge for the first time Saturday showed off their entry: A Saturn Vue that runs up to 65 miles on electricity.
NCSU's EcoCAR
To reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption, the NCSU team installed a large lithium-ion battery pack behind the front seats of the crossover SUV. Up front is a diesel engine from an Opel Corsa, a European fuel-sipper, to power the wheels on longer-distance drives.
The NCSU team had less than six months to take the vehicle apart to where only a blue shell remained and rebuild it to specifications they had determined the previous school year.
On May 8, a carrier will pick up the car and take it to the General Motors Desert Proving Ground in Yuma, Ariz., where less than two weeks later it will be judged in more than a dozen technical events against entries of 15 other teams from Canadian and U.S. universities. Read more…
If the U.S. falls off the flat earth, so does RTP
Sunday, April 11, 2010, 5:41 pmNeal Lane, a physicist who in the late 1990s was President Clinton’s top science advisor, worries when he looks at federal spending on research and development.
R&D spending as percentage of federal budget, FY 1962-2009
Sure, federal spending on R&D more than tripled in the past 50 years to about $147 billion in fiscal year 2009, as Lane pointed out Saturday in a talk at N.C. State University. But R&D’s share of all federal spending has been shrinking from nearly 12 percent during the height of the Apollo program in the late 1960s to about 5 percent in 2009, according to numbers from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Lane, a professor at Rice University and a senior fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, is particularly concerned about federal funding for research in physics, mathematics and engineering, the disciplines that brought forth computers, the Internet and mobile devices such as the cell phone. Read more…
How much life is there in Second Life?
Sunday, April 4, 2010, 4:45 pmMore than 2,000 researchers and educators from 69 countries attended the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference last month, including Tony O’Driscoll of Duke University and Brent Ward from RTI International in Research Triangle Park.
Like the other attendees, O’Driscoll and Ward didn’t travel to VWBPE in person. They sat in front of a computer and had their voice-activated avatars teleport to one of 20 specially constructed virtual islands, where the conference took place over 48 continuous hours. Some of the islands resembled the Guilin mountains in China, an Irish seaside cottage and Stonehenge, the famous English prehistoric monument.
Brent Werber
Wada Tripp, O’Driscoll’s avatar, gave a presentation on 3-D learning, which requires students to interact in simulated, or virtual, environments. Brent Werber, Ward’s avatar, moderated a panel at the conference.
O’Driscoll is a professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and Ward provides RTI researchers technical assistance as the research institute’s director of commercialization. Both are professionals holding positions of responsibility, but neither thinks twice about slipping into his “digital sockpuppet,” a computer-generated persona that lives in Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world maintained by Linden Lab of San Francisco. Read more…
Duke’s Dan Ariely on how we cheat
Thursday, March 11, 2010, 9:20 pm
Dan Ariely
To better understand stock markets or economic recessions, Dan Ariely likes to go where push comes to shove.
The Duke University professor is a behavioral economist who’s been in demand since the economy tanked nearly two years ago. The reason for his popularity is in his research.
Ariely looks at things that make no sense: Why does the price of an energy drink determine how many puzzles we solve? Taking a cue from his mother’s job as a parole officer, he also looks at behavior we know can get us into trouble, such as procrastinating and cheating.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether Ariely has an experiment going. Read more…
RTP Weekahead 3/1
Sunday, February 28, 2010, 6:35 pmEvents taking place the week of March 1 in the Research Triangle area that are open to the public: Read more…
RTP Weekahead 2/22
Sunday, February 21, 2010, 9:21 pmEvents taking place the week of Feb. 22 in the Research Triangle area that are open to the public: Read more…
