Kent Harrington

Honeywell recently unveiled a new technology that could have far-reaching effects beyond the $150 billion plastics industry: a commercially viable one-step process to convert methane into ethylene, one of plastic's über building blocks.

Earlier this month oil man Riggs Eckelberry was not to be found at the Houston Offshore Technology Conference. Why? He had fracking on his mind, and more precisely, a technology that promises to resolve the issue of polluted fracking water.

Two companies, Dow Chemical and Bayer MaterialScience, are steadily introducing new materials to give blade designers more options in the race toward 9 and 10 MW turbines.

A new flying wind turbine by Mankani Power recently stole the show as ARPA-E showed off some of its projects. ARPA-E is the Department of Energy's investment program that invests in high-risk, potential high-gain energy projects.

Columbia professor Jingyue Ju, early co-inventor of the fluorescence energy transfer labeling technology that enabled the development of high-throughput DNA sequencers, finds himself in the middle of a patent protection lawsuit that will affect some of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies.

Twin Creek's new process for producing solar cells solves one of solar manufacturing's most severe bottlenecks. It replaces the current wasteful practice of cutting blocks of silicon with wire saws, proposing instead a highly efficient process that results in photovoltaic cells only 20 microns thick. The result is a process that reduces the amount of processed silicon by 90 percent.