Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)

Data breaches, hacked systems and hostage malware are frequently topics of evening news casts — including stories of department store, hospital, government and bank data leaking into unsavory hands — but now a team of engineers has an encryption key approach that is unclonable and not reverse-engineerable, protecting information even as computers become faster and

Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm have developed a new technique to prevent pharmaceutical residues from entering waterways and harming wildlife. The new water treatment technology – called membrane distillation – separates drug residues from sewage with the help of district heating, says  who worked on the development project with IVL and

G.E’s big bet on what it calls the “industrial Internet” When Sharoda Paul finished a postdoctoral fellowship last year at the Palo Alto Research Center, she did what most of her peers do — considered a job at a big Silicon Valley company, in her case, Google. But instead, Ms. Paul, a 31-year-old expert in

Tiny Sensors Will Now Let Us Know In Real Time Companies and NGOs spend millions of dollars outfitting people in the developing world with technologies to improve their lives. But do those water filters or new toilets actually make a difference? Instead of waiting for a follow-up study, we can now monitor their effects as

Image via Wikipedia We usually accept it as a given that we can’t change the weather. When it comes to extreme situations like hurricanes or earthquakes, such disasters are labeled “acts of god” because we generally feel helpless to in the face of nature’s wrath. But recently an ambitious Japanese manufacturing firm Ise Kogyo has boldly

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have fabricated the first semiconductor-free, optically-controlled microelectronic device. Using metamaterials, engineers were able to build a microscale device that shows a 1,000 percent increase in conductivity when activated by low voltage and a low power laser. The discovery paves the way for microelectronic devices that are faster

Reconstituted silk can be several times stronger than the natural fiber and made in different forms. When it comes to concocting the complex mix of molecules that makes up fibers of natural silk, nature beats human engineering hands down. Despite efforts to synthesize the material, artificial varieties still cannot match the natural fiber’s strength. But

New ideas about how to distribute content while being user-friendly and setting low fees are the way forward.   San Francisco, CA – In an op-ed published by Al Jazeera on February 18, Princeton ethicist Peter Singer argued that the “case for enforcing copyright laws was strengthened” by the recent seizure of popular file-sharing site