electricity

Think about the most complicated machine you’ve dealt with in the past year. Was it a beeping monitor tethered to a high-tech device in an emergency room? Or was it a superfast computer you used at work?

As the long season of darkness sweeps over the country, it’s a natural time to think about lighting – and how dependent we are on electricity during this dim time of year. You can heat your home with several different energy sources, including natural gas, heating oil or wood. But unless you’re living off-the-grid, the […]

At first I wasn’t sure I was reading the CNN report correctly. The story hinged on special pavement that uses the impact of human feet to generate electricity. That’s right. A young man in Britain has invented a device that harvests the energy from a footfall hitting the pavement to power things like LED lights. […]

Just over a century ago, when William Howard Taft was president and I was a young woman, an entrepreneur named Thomas Aldwell started building a dam in the Northwest woods of the Olympic peninsula in Washington.

Those of us who have been around the block a few times will remember the last time gasoline hit $4 per gallon a new industry sprang up. Drivers could buy magnets to attach to fuel lines to allegedly boost a car’s gas mileage by 20 or even 30 percent.