After a precipitous drop last year, the price of crude oil has rebounded. By late October 2009, the price had edged above $80 a barrel, which is more than double the level it had reached earlier in the year. But since it is being compared to mid-2008

THE CONSTANT PURSUIT FOR GAS TURBINE EFFICIENCY ON THE PART OF ENGINEERS MIGHT SEEM A LITTLE OBSESSIVE. But data from the Air Transport Association puts that obsession in context: in the summer of 2008, fuel accounted for more than 35 percent of airl

When Pacific Gas Electric started deploying its technicians to install new electric meters in San Francisco and Oakland, most of the thinking was about the benefits these meters could reap. The new meters would be capable of sharing real-time usage d

Has there ever been a time when more energy technologies were directly competing for research and development funding? Coal power has been the recipient of money to develop carbon capture and sequestration methods as well as other so-called clean coa

LET GO OF THE PAPER. STEP AWAY FROM THE FILE CABINET. No matter how tradition-bound you may feel, when looking for a design document, either current or outdated, these days the best advice is: Boot up the computer. Managing engineering documents elec

A veteran of the Manhattan Project argues for the real-world practicality of nuclear power. By Theodore Rockwell In a conversation about nuclear power, a friend of mine once asserted that a reactor had the potential to go off like a bomb. I told my f

To the Editor: I was dismayed to read the ASME general position statement on reducing carbon dioxide emissions (An Engineering Perspective, July) because it bestows the ASME imprimatur on a political policy about which many basic questions still exis

OWNERSHIP CHANGES By Jean Thilmany In the first half of 2010, Dassault Systmes expects to acquire IBMs customer contracts as well as other operations that sell and support Dassaults Product Lifecycle Management software portfolio. Dassaults line of P