Green Chemistry - Teaching students to develop chemicals that don't harm us.

Over the past decade, colleges and universities across the country have begun to offer courses in green chemistry, some even awarding Ph.D.’s in the field. UC Berkeley intends to do something more. Their idea  is that the best way to make chemistry sustainable is to bring together the chemists who will invent new molecules with the biologists who will unravel their toxicological effects, the future business leaders who will sell the products made from those molecules, and the policy makers who will regulate them. And because all this is happening in what is generally regarded as the nation’s most prestigious school of chemistry, where more than a thousand Ph.D. and undergraduate students grind away in classrooms and laboratories every day, there’s reason to be cautiously optimistic that green chemistry is on track to become the field of chemistry itself.

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Light Bulb Ban Would Save Consumers $12.5 Billion by 2020, Eliminate 33 Power Plants

A U.S. House bill that would pull the plug on a phase-out of traditional incandescent light bulbs, would jeopardize $12.5 billion in consumer savings by 2020, according to a study by efficiency-advocacy groups.

The average household’s energy costs would be cut by 7 percent or $85 every year when the standards are fully in place, according to the analysis released today in Washington.

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California Cities Start Recycling Roads

With transportation infrastructure in a sorry state in California—the proliferation of potholes in Los Angeles, for example, is incredible—more cities are turning to a method of repairing roads by recycling them. The cold in-place recycling process involves shaving off the top two to four inches of asphalt on a damaged road, pulverizing it and mixing it with additives, and then laying it back down and grading and compacting it. It's all done by a single train of machines and a road that's repaired this way can be used again the next day (a protective "overlay" is added a week later).

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