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(PhysOrg.com) -- The U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory is now halfway toward completing construction of the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a powerful x-ray microscope nearly half a mile in circumference. Construction started in 2009 on the $912-million facility.

A Black Swan event is a metaphor used to explain a disproportionate, hard to predict event that is beyond the realm of normal expectation in history, science, finance and technology.

This week, the lighting startup company vu1 is beginning to ship a new type of lightbulb that could displace compact fluorescents and LED lamps as the energy-saving bulb of choice. The technology, known as cathodoluminescence or electron-stimulated luminescence (ESL), offers similar energy savings, but provides a more natural quality of light. [break] [More]

As Japanese military struggles to cool overheating fuel rods at the country’s damaged nuclear plant, some suggest a full meltdown might actually be happening somewhere else--in the corporate suites of Tokyo Electric Power Co. Tepco, as it’s known, is a for-profit utility that owns the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and other plants and provides almost 35% of Japan’s electricity ( pdf ). And in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami that brought the country to nuclear crisis, the organization is turning into a lighting rod of political criticism.

(PhysOrg.com) -- As conventional accelerators like CERN's Large Hadron Collider grow ever more vast and expensive, the best hope for the high-energy machines of the future may lie in "tabletop" accelerators like BELLA (the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator), now being built by the LOASIS program at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine--The face-mask and three radiation monitors I'm wearing here are grim reminders that I'm at the site of the worst nuclear accident in history. On April 26, 1986, 1:23:44 a.m. local time, explosions destroyed reactor No.

The sustainability movement is stuck in a slump, a stall, a "trough," as moderator Scott Henderson of CauseShift called it on the PepsiCo Plugged-In Stage at SXSW yesterday. He wanted to give it a kick-start, he said. "How to we get past the idea that someone else is going to take care of it, and start taking action?" Henderson asked his three panelist to present big ideas for how to inspire Americans into action--and these weren't your typical green-is-good approaches

The EPA released a list this week of the U.S.

As an eco-fuel, hydrogen has numerous advantages, including clean emissions. Storing hydrogen, however, has been proven difficult and dangerous--until now. The Department of Energy has achieved a nanotech breakthrough that will allow for the safe storage and transport of hydrogen

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.--Silicon translates sunshine into electricity--and Earth receives enough sunshine in a daylight hour to supply all of humanity's energy needs for a year. But despite being as common as sand, photovoltaic panels made from silicon--or any of a host of other semiconducting materials --are not cheap, especially when compared with the cost of electricity produced by burning coal or natural gas.

Wildcat Discovery Technologies , a San Diego-based startup, thinks it has made a discovery that could, in one fell swoop, make your laptop battery, cell phone battery, and electric vehicle batteries all last between 25% and 65% longer. The key: a pair of new materials---a high-voltage electrolyte material and a high voltage cathode material--that provide vastly improved energy density compared to today's technologies (in technical terms, they have an energy density of over 675 Wh/kg while operating in fuel cells at five volts).

As applications for the 2011 Inc. 500 | 5000 pour into our offices, we thought it would be worthwhile to shine a spotlight on some of the companies that are vying to appear on our ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. (For more information and to apply, go to http://www.inc.com/inc5000apply/2011/ .) One that caught our eye was Cotati, California-based KG Technologies .

It's not easy to design a home energy monitoring device that people actually want to use and pay for. As evidenced by Tendril's recent decision to nix its IDEO-designed dashboard, not even slick devices that look like they came straight from the Apple store will necessarily make it to market (the $200 price tag was deemed too expensive). Enter EnergyHub , a consumer-facing energy management company that thinks it has a solution to the energy monitoring device quandary

Monsanto, the often-vilified agriculture giant, has made a deal that could actually do some good for sustainable development: The company this week formed a partnership with and made an equity investment in algae fuel startup Sapphire Energy (no word on the terms of the arrangement). What's going on?

A big breakthrough in the race for better biofuels was announced this week from the U.S. Department of Energy, where the department's BioEnergy Science Center figured out how to produce isobutanol, a gasoline-like fuel, directly from cellulose (i.e. corn stalks and switchgrass).