University of Washington researchers have invented a cellphone that requires no batteries — a major leap forward in moving beyond chargers, cords and dying phones. Instead, the phone harvests the few microwatts of power it requires from either ambient radio signals or light.

The team also made Skype calls using its battery-free phone, demonstrating that the prototype made of commercial, off-the-shelf components can receive and transmit speech and communicate with a base station.

With the introduction of CBETA, the Cornell-Brookhaven ERL Test Accelerator, Cornell University and Brookhaven National Laboratory scientists are following up on the concept of energy-recovering particle accelerators first introduced by physicist Maury Tigner at Cornell more than 50 years ago.

CBETA tests two energy-saving technologies for accelerators: energy recovery and permanent magnets. An energy recovery linac (ERL) like CBETA reclaims the energy of a used electron beam instead of dumping it after the experiment. The recovered energy is used to accelerate the next beam of particles, creating a beam of electrons that can be used for many areas of research. The beams are accelerated by Superconducting Radio Frequency (SRF) units, another energy-efficient technology pioneered at Cornell.

There is growing interest in developing offshore wind and wave energy facilities in the Pacific Northwest. But not much is known about the sediment and animal life along the sea floor in the region.

Today marks the one year anniversary of Pokémon GO’s worldwide release that sent crowds hiking through parks, meandering into streets and walking for miles in search of Pokémon, those cute little digital characters that appear in real locations on your smartphone.

When it comes to the distant universe, even the keen vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope can only go so far. Teasing out finer details requires clever thinking and a little help from a cosmic alignment with a gravitational lens.

Climate evolution shows some regularities, which can be traced throughout long periods of earth’s history. One of them is that the global average temperature and the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere usually go hand-in-hand. To put it simple: If the temperatures decline, the CO2 values also decrease and vice versa.

As Tropical Depression 4 was getting organized in the central Atlantic Ocean the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission or GPM satellite peered into the storm and measured rainfall within. The system became Tropical Depression 4 on July 6.

Structural geologist Michele Cooke calls it the “million-dollar question” that underlies all work in her laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst: what goes on deep in the earth as strike-slip faults form in the crust? This is the fault type that occurs when two tectonic plates slide past one another, generating the waves of energy we sometimes feel as earthquakes.

Could cellulosic biofuels – or liquid energy derived from grasses and wood – become a green fuel of the future, providing an environmentally sustainable way of meeting energy needs? In Science, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy-funded Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center say yes, but with a few important caveats.

The Swedish-based carmaker, Volvo, will build only electric or hybrid-electric cars beginning in 2019, making it the first big auto company to abandon conventional gasoline-powered engines. 

The legendary auto manufacturer, now a wholly owned subsidiary of a Chinese company, had earlier set a goal of selling one million electric cars and hyrids by 2025. “This is how we are going to do it,” President and CEO Hakan Samuelsson said in a statement.