DOE

In 2009, science got a hefty shot in the arm from the federal government's stimulus spending. Now U.S. citizens can see exactly how their taxpayer dollars go toward funding video games that test autism responses, or discovering lakes hidden beneath the Antarctic ice sheet.

Darpa's addiction to out-of-this world schemes has rubbed off in the best way on the government's more peaceful push for an energy revolution. Liquid metal batteries, bacteria that convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into gasoline, and artificial enzymes for carbon capture represent just a few of the 37 projects that have received $151 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy's new ARPA-E agency.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (Arpa-E) takes its inspiration from the Department of Defense's mad science lab Darpa, and has $400 million in initial funding to help seed a number of cutting-edge projects over the next two years. Among the first round projects, 43 percent are small businesses, 35 percent are educational institutions, and 19 percent are large corporations.

Biofuel is one of today's ecoconscious buzzwords. Recently, however, the most popular biofuels, like corn-based ethanol, are starting to cause their own set of problems. For example, more and more crop land is being devoted to growing corn for fuel instead of food. This has led to a spike in food prices that is being felt around the world. Palm oil, another popular biodiesel fuel, is extracted from palm trees that grow well in places like Brazil.

"Cellulosic ethanol technology is a lot closer to reality than a lot of articles would have you think," said Jacques Beaudry-Losique, manager of the Department of Energy's Biomass Program this morning at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting. After some well-publicized studies stated that corn-based biofuels might exacerbate CO2 damage to the environment, focus has shifted to these so-called "second generation" biofuels that use non-food crops such as switchgrass, wood chips or crop residues (e.g. all the parts of the corn plant that are currently wasted after harvest--the stalk, leaves and "cob").

It's a slow-motion horror movie: Nuclear waste leaks from underground storage shafts and seeps toward a river, where it contaminates drinking water used by millions of people. That's exactly the scenario unfolding at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in rural Washington State.The solution, too, sounds like a page ripped from a Hollywood screenplay: Insert two industrial-strength electrodes deep into the ground, and melt the soil-along with everything around it-into solid glass, trapping the toxic waste for thousands of years. The U.S.