A doll introduced at February's American International Toy Fair in New York has large, expressive eyes that silently open, blink, look around, and close when a child plays with it.

The doll, called Baby Bright Eyes, is made by NanoMuscle Inc. of Antioch, Calif., and Playmates Toys Inc. of Costa Mesa, Calif. Nano- Muscle supplies miniature actuators to create what the company says are more realistic toys than are presently on the market. The tiny actuator used by the company takes the place of small electric motors used in high-volume markets like toys and automobiles.

This miniature actuator can help a toy grin or take the place of a small electric motor to power a car's door lock, the manufacturer says.

For instance, an automobile includes a large number of small motors. A model year 2000 economy car contains more than 50 small motors and a luxury vehicle has as many as 100, according to NanoMuscle. This number will increase, even as competitive pressures mount within the industry to shrink the size, weight, and cost of devices that drive these applications.

NanoMuscle says that its devices are being used in the automotive industry to power air conditioners, door locks, and instrumentation gauges as well as to adjust the seats and the rearview and side mirrors.

The actuators consume one-fifth the power that existing small motors use and are about one-twentieth the size, according to the actuator maker.

The manufacturers say that Baby Bright Eyes is expected to have her television debut in a commercial sometime soon.

Natural gas prices are expected to top $10 per million BTUs as record high reserves were withdrawn from underground storage during the winter heating season, according to Energy Business Watch.

A report prepared by Energy Business Watch's parent company, Energy Ventures Group L.L.C, an investment firm in Washington, and Foresight Weather, a weather forecasting service based in Boulder, Colo., found that by the end of this year's winter heating season, more than 2,750 billion cubic feet of natural gas were likely to be withdrawn from underground storage. This would be an all-time high.

As of early March, winter withdrawals were averaging 5.8 billion cubic feet per day more than could be explained based upon weather conditions alone, the report found. The report concluded that this is a strong indicator that an under-supply condition exists in the U.S. market.

All told, America's demand for natural gas is expected to reach 36 trillion cubic feet in 2025, up from 22.6 trillion cubic feet in 2002, according to Senate Energy Chairman Pete Domenici (R-N.M.). Most of that gas will be used to generate electricity, Domenici said in a committee hearing on the rising demand for natural gas. He estimates that U.S. natural gas consumption for electricity will double in the next 22 years.
"We can't meet that demand without new production on the Outer Continental Shelf or Alaska's North Slope," Domenici said in a prepared statement."The lower 48 states alone can't supply this country with the gas it is going to need. If we decide not to increase production, we must accept our growing reliance on foreign natural gas as a way of life."

Total natural gas supplies for 2003 are likely to fall 1.5 trillion cubic feet below the Energy Information Agency's most recent forecast.

While demand is growing by 1.8 percent a year, natural gas production is expected to increase by only 1.3 percent a year, creating a widening gap between demand and supply, according to Domenici.

Natural gas currently represents 24 percent of all energy consumed in the United States, according to the Energy Information Agency. By 2020, it is expected to represent 26 percent and will account for 33 percent of all electricity consumed. Currently, the U.S. imports 16 percent of its natural gas; by 2025, that figure is expected to rise to 22 percent.

Ceramics have a lot of great properties: They're hard, lightweight, and heat resistant. Unfortunately, they are also extremely brittle. It doesn't take much of a knock to shatter a teacup—or crack a spark plug insulator.

Now engineers at the University of California, Davis, have developed a ceramic that is reinforced with single-walled carbon nanotubes. Reinforcing an alumina ceramic 10 percent (by volume) with nanotubes tripled the material's toughness.

The idea of reinforcing ceramics is far from new. Engineers have been mixing whiskers of silicon carbide fiber into ceramic recipes for a while, making stuff like high-tech brake pads and lightweight armor."There's been quite a bit of work on this," said UC-Davis engineer Joshua Kuntz,"but none of it has proved to be extremely attractive."

Nanotubes—long, cylindrical molecules made up of carbon atoms—are even stronger than carbon fibers. But researchers who have tried to make nanotube-reinforced materials have had little success."They used higher consolidation temperatures and longer times, so they didn't get as good a composite," Kuntz said."At a high enough temperature, the nanotubes will actually combust."

Researchers can make brittle ceramics tough by adding a pinch of carbon nanotubes.

Looking for a means of keeping the nanotubes intact, Kuntz, Amiya Mukherjee, and their UC-Davis colleagues explored low-temperature ways to form the composite. They hit on spark-plasma sintering, a moderate-pressure technique that enabled the ceramic to form around threads of full-length nanotubes.

The UC-Davis team expects to find even better toughness if it can get the volume fraction of nanotubes up to 20 percent—and keep them evenly distributed throughout the material, Kuntz said. Finding a commercial application, such as high-tech bearings and gears, may be a bigger challenge, he added. At present, single-walled nanotubes cost as much as $1,000 a gram.

The U.S. Department of Commerce's Office of Technology Policy has published a report that examines the worldwide state of fuel cell vehicle development and makes the case for government participation in basic and pre-competitive research as a way of lessening risk to private-sector firms.

According to the report,"Fuel Cell Vehicles: Race to a New Automotive Future," market drivers like plentiful gasoline, the absence of hydrogen fueling stations, and a consumer preference for large, powerful automobiles over clean, efficient ones mean that a hydrogen economy won't develop without the help of public policy and public-private partnerships.

The report lists which hurdles block the way of commercialization, including the slow startup time of fuel processors, the high costs and low durability of fuel cell components, the inefficiency of subsystems, the lack of refueling infrastructure, and the difficulty of onboard fuel storage. This last item is identified by the report as the tallest of the remaining hurdles.

The report goes on to discuss various programs designed to accelerate the commercialization of fuel cell cars and the development of the hydrogen infrastructure.

The 89-page document can be downloaded free or purchased as a book from the National Technical Information Service (www.ntis.gov).

The California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment has issued a preliminary public health goal for arsenic in drinking water that comes in far below the federal standard. The California goal is 4 parts per trillion, whereas the current U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standard is 50 parts per billion. Effective January 2006, the EPA standard will drop to 10 parts per billion.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., has introduced a bill calling for the federal government to regulate the level of perchlorate allowed in the nation's drinking water. The bill would require the Environmental Protection Agency to establish a standard for perchlorate contamination in drinking water supplies by July 1, 2004. Under the EPA's current schedule, 2006 is the earliest date a standard would be finalized.

The Essex Junction Wastewater Treatment facility in Essex Junction, Vt., has selected Northern Power Systems of Waitsfield, Vt., to engineer, build, and install an on-site power system. The system will burn methane gas produced by wastewater processing to generate electricity and heat for the facility. The new cogeneration system will produce more than 400,000 kWh of electricity per year, which is about 41 percent of the facility's current annual demand.

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