Archive by category | Energy

Prime numbers, black carbon and nanomaterials win 2014 MacArthur ‘genius grants’

Yitang Zhang, a mathematician who recently emerged from obscurity when he partly solved a long-standing puzzle in number theory, is one of the 2014 fellows of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.  Read more

IPCC report calls for climate mitigation action now, not later

The world is heading towards possibly dangerous levels of global warming despite increasing efforts to promote the transition to a low-carbon economy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns in its latest report today.  Read more

Updated: White House announces Energy Department nominees

President Barack Obama today nominated Franklin “Lynn” Orr, a chemical engineer at Stanford University in California, as under secretary for science at the Department of Energy. Orr’s nomination was accompanied by that of Marc Kastner, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, to head the department’s office of science.  Read more

US Supreme Court to hear challenge on greenhouse gas limits

The US Supreme Court agreed today to review the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants — a key piece of  the climate change strategy unveiled by President Barack Obama earlier this year.  Read more

National laboratories prepare to shut down

Los Alamos National Laboratory will stop most work on 18 October due to the US government shutdown.

With no end in sight for the US government shutdown that began on 1 October, the Department of Energy (DOE) is now preparing to shut down the sprawling complex of national laboratories that maintains nuclear weapons and performs a range of basic and applied research.  Read more