In the News, October 2009

In Stockholm, Sweden, the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physics was announced today. Three physicists were named as “the masters of light, who have provided new tools for scientific exploration.”
Read press release

Charles Kao, Willard Boyle, and George Smith were this year’s winners. The Nobel Foundation is scheduled to announce the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry Wednesday, October 7.

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This week the 20 teams participating in the 2009 Solar Decathlon are constructing their homes in the ‘solar village’ in front of the Washington Monument.

The competition is set to begin Thursday, October 8. Sixteen of the teams competing are from U.S. universities, others are from Spain, Germany, and Canada.

The energy-efficient homes are required to be powered exclusively by the sun. There are ten contests that each house will be scored on. Visit the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon website for all the information and updates from this year’s competition.

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Even in the wake of the “first power station in the U.S. to pump a portion of its carbon dioxide emissions underground,” the immediate future of carbon capture and sequestration (CSS) is still on hold.

MIT research engineer Howard Herzog, MA B ’74, says that “until there is a market, the technology won’t take off.”

However, funding and investment in CSS continues. There are also technical challenges to overcome, including possible seismic activity from adding too much pressure deep beneath the earth’s surface. Read article

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