Kerry Flynn of Forbes reports on a new system developed by the MIT Senseable City Lab that reduces wasted energy by creating local, personal climates throughout buildings. The system targets and tracks people in a building and synchronizes climate control by sending data to heat-radiating bulbs.
CNN features a new park bench from the Media Lab designed to use solar energy to charge mobile devices. Researchers hope that technologies like the solar-powered bench will help cities use energy more efficiently.
Writing for Scientific American, Melissa Lott reports on how a team from MIT has developed an integrated circuit design that doubles the capacity of existing solar arrays.
In an article for CNN, Thom Patterson reports on how MIT startup Altaeros Energies has developed an airborne wind turbine that they hope can deliver power to the roughly 1 billion people in rural areas without electricity.
Martin LaMonica of The Boston Globe writes about two MIT startups that are aiming to solve long-standing problems with the production of nuclear power. Transatomic Power and UPower Technologies are looking for ways to make efficient use of radioactive waste and develop smaller, cheaper plants, respectively.