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Though it will cost just a few dollars, a new device may actually be the key to managing our aging power infrastructure and maximizing clean power. Recent rolling power outages and power failures over the past few years have highlighted just how vulnerable our power grid is to disaster. The White House just announced a $250 million loan bonanza for major smart grid deployment, but a 4-millimeter-thick chip that costs just a few dollars may actually be the key to ensuring that our aging power grid infrastructure doesn't die on us

Developing countries lack both clean water and clean energy sources. By converting soiled water into energy and clean water, a new project could wipe away both problems. Waste to fuel facilities are nothing new--in the past few years, we've seen chicken poop-powered fuel cell plants , a scheme to use astronaut poop for fuel in space, and a town that's converting wastewater sludge into thermal energy.

"I'm smack in the middle of all of this, and it's hard to imagine legislation right now that we would know how to implement, or know what to do with," says Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation.

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A new augmented reality shopping platform for Xbox Kinect will allow users to try on clothes in true 3-D, share photos with friends, and store wish-listed items on smartphones for shopping on-the-go. Virtual reality shopping just got a lot more real--and could soon become a lot more mainstream.

At this week's Research@Intel event, Fast Company had the chance to see some of the tech giant's freshest research-stage projects--from cheap power for the developing world to simple plug-and-play home energy monitoring. When a computing giant like Intel decides to get into the energy management space, it's safe to assume that big things are coming. We've seen hints of it before--Intel announced in 2009 that it was working on energy management systems for buildings--and at this week's Research@Intel event, Fast Company had the chance to see some of the company's freshest research-stage projects that could soon be changing the way the world uses and generates electricity.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Like an opera singer hitting a note that shatters a glass, a signal at a particular resonant frequency can concentrate energy in a material and change its properties. And as with 18th century "musical glasses," adding a little water can change the critical pitch. Echoing both phenomena, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a unique fluid-tuned "metasurface," a concept that may be useful in biomedical sensors and microwave-assisted chemistry.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A group of physicists working out of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, have succeeded in proving what was until now, just theory; and that is, that visible photons could be produced from the virtual particles that have been thought to exist in a quantum vacuum. In a paper published on arXiv, the team describes how they used a specially created circuit called a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) to modulate a bit of wire length at a roughly five percent of the speed of light, to produce visible "sparks" from the nothingness of a vacuum.

Vasu Kulkarni is using his computer engineering and entrepreneurship degrees to elevate the playing experience for high-school basketball teams. | Photograph by David Yellen Startup Krossover is bringing number-crunching technology to high-school athletics. DATA ANALYTICS has recently become a red-hot trend in professional sports

"We were blown away by the potential of this technology for the graphic novel," Disney creative director Nashie Castro tells us. The roughly $680 million comic book and graphic novel industry is still heavily reliant on sales and advertising from print--unlike its fellow publishers in the newspaper and magazine worlds, where the transition to digital is farther along

A new wave of DIY engineers is transforming innovation into something that can be done at the kitchen table. Thank the maker movement for the technology that's changing the way we think about prototyping.

In a game of one-upmanship, a Chinese team of physicists has figured out how to entangle eight photons simultaneously and to observe them in action; the previous record was six. In a paper published in arXiv, the team from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, describe how they were able to convert a single photon into two entangled photons, using a nonlinear crystal, and then how they repeated that process with one of the paired photons produced, while holding the other in place, producing another pair, and then did it repeatedly until they had eight photons all entangled together, all held in place and all observable for a period of time.

The humble webcam has enabled many things: racy adventures on Chatroulette ; Skype chats with Grandma; remote learning. With this week's launch of YouEye , the hope is that the webcam will become a powerful--and inexpensive--new tool in user-experience testing for companies looking to quickly evaluate the effectiveness of their websites. YouEye pays people recruited from the client’s site, outsourced panels, or YouEye’s panel an average of $7 each to evaluate things like online advertising and attention spans by tracking their eyeball movements via their own webcams.

Readers respond to our cover story about Etsy founder Rob Kalin, a feature about spying on the competition, and Jason Fried's column about running a flat company. The World of Etsy Our cover story about Etsy founder and CEO Rob Kalin [" Rob's World ," April ] sparked a lively online debate

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