Chicken Feathers to Create Cheap Hydrogen Storage

Chicken Feathers may one day compete with more high-tech solutions such as carbon nanotubes for storing hydrogen for fuel-cell-powered vehicles.

Richard Wool's team at the University of Delaware in Newark heated chicken feather fibres to 400 °C without burning. The process resulted in stable, porous carbonised fibres. When cooled to -266 °C, the material could store almost 2 per cent of its weight in hydrogen - almost as much as carbon nanotubes.

Revolutionary Fringe-Think: Sputnik Observatory

Two years in the making, Sputnik is an “observatory for the study of contemporary culture” — an effort to document, catalog, and share ideas that shape our cultural era by interviewing global thought-leaders in the arts, sciences and technology. With its ambitious mission and inspi(red) vision, the project is a piece of cultural anthropology of the most precious, sorely needed kind.

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Local Tech-Savvy Duo Steps Onto Federal Stage

Aneesh Chopra and Vivek Kundra met nearly a decade ago as entrepreneurs in Northern Virginia's Indian American business community. They worked together in Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's administration and then as technology and innovation advisers on President Obama's transition team. Now the two longtime friends will work in tandem to help meet Obama's ambitious goals of using technology to improve public access to government data, create new jobs, expand broadband services, reform the way health records are stored and build a modern electric grid.

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Bring Your Ideas to life at Camp Invention

Visit http://www.inventnow.org/ to start

Is Information Visualisation the Next Frontier for Design?

As design work shifts to infrastructure and problem solving, sexy infographics are part of the new skill set. You've seen them. Those tag clouds in the right-hand column of Web sites with jumbled type of varying weight and size indicating the relative usage of words. Tag clouds may be the most common example of an emerging field known as "information visualization," an offshoot of graphic design devoted to the clear display of complex information. Executive pay in relation to shareholder returns. Senate voting patterns. The geographic location of cell phones. Similarities among rock albums. Graphic designers are mapping over the known world and posting their graphic interpretations on sites like Visual Complexity.

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