energy efficiency

NEC and Rohm are going back and forth on new engineering breakthroughs that will allow integrated circuits inside chips to consume no power when they're briefly inactive between cycles. And unlike most chip-level developments on the edge, we may see the technology in consumer products by the end of the year.

"Absolutely." That's what Barack Obama told Barbara Walters last November when asked if he would make the White House more environmentally friendly. Of course, he wouldn't be the first.

Scientists have long been trying to figure out why early humans became bipedal, and one popular explanation has now been crossed off the list of possibilities. There was a popular notion that we started walking upright to free up our arms so we could carry objects, and babies—apes don't need to worry about this because their offspring can cling to them using their hands and feet. It's like a built-in Baby Bjorn.

But now University of Manchester researchers say the baby-carrying theory doesn't hold, mainly because supporting an infant on your hip or in your arms is too tiring to have been a legitimate factor in the transition to bipedalism.

A new low-cost, nanotech-based approach to power generation developed by researchers at Boston College and MIT could lead to cleaner-running semiconductors, air conditioners, car exhausts and more. The technique, published online yesterday in Science, uses the nanostructures to dramatically increase thermal efficiency.