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The push for a fossil fuel free future is also pushing a new rush to extraction: getting resources out of the ground for the batteries needed to decarbonize transportation. This article looks at the projects underway and proposed and the debate over how to balance the need to slow global warming with the need to protect endangered species, preserve groundwater and support tribal rights while maintaining heritage sites.

A team of researchers from Stanford's Autonomous Systems Lab, MIT and Lacuna has proposed a road pricing approach that could improve economic equity while reducing congestion. The key idea: Refund tolls in a way that redistributes some of the money from rich to poor and ensures all drivers are as well off or better than they were before.

This year's surge of carbon dioxide emissions to close to pre-pandemic levels is linked to increased consumption of coal and natural gas for power plants and industry--even as transportation emissions remain down and renewable energy use ramps up

Among the concepts presented at this year's NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Symposium in September was Marco Pavone's labs' ReachBot robot for crawling through Martian caves using extendable booms to grasp over long distances.

Tesla, along with other nontraditional chipmakers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, designs their own silicon for AI applications. Chris Gerdes attended Tesla's unveiling for their DI chip and comments on this trend.

Electrical engineer Priyanka Raina explains how we’re moving toward faster, more efficient computer chips for every task in this episode of The Future of Everything.

A research study by the Stanford Graduate School Business on the motorcycle industry found that the longer a company has served a particular market, the more challenging change will be. While specialization can lead to popularity and profits, long lasting specialization and changing consumer tastes, can be fatal especially with competitors ready to address these new trends. 

An international team of experts propose that autonomous systems of all kinds from self-driving cars, care-bots and other robots should learn from the aviation industry by implementing a black box to analyze accidents when they occur and create an audit trail.

Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy and Woods Institute for the Environment will fund three new research projects to make and use plastics more sustainably. One project lead by William Tarpeh, assistant professor, chemical engineering, reimagines manufacturing for plastic car components.

A discovery of a relatively simple pretreatment of catalysts based on palladium could lead to new types of catalytic flares and cleaner-burning car engines that would keep tons of the heat-trapping gas out of the skies.