Magazine

January-February 2009

Current Issue

January-February 2009

Volume: 97 Number: 1

Colorful lights and clouds of steam make for an interesting predawn image of a coal-fired power plant in Point of Rocks, Wyoming, but it's really a picture of wasted energy. All that steam venting into the air could be used to heat homes, perform industrial processing or generate electricity. In "Getting the Most from Energy," Thomas Casten and Phillip Schewe explore the reasons why the power industry has come to waste so much of its fuel as heat, and how that heat could be used to greatly improve the efficiency of the energy-conversion process in the United States. Waste heat from industrial plants, such as one that melts quartz to create silicon, is a source of energy that does not require the expenditure of any additional fuel.

In This Issue

  • Art
  • Astronomy
  • Biology
  • Chemistry
  • Communications
  • Computer
  • Economics
  • Engineering
  • Environment
  • Evolution
  • Mathematics
  • Medicine
  • Physics
  • Policy
  • Psychology
  • Sociology
  • Technology

Healing Heat: Harnessing Infection to Fight Cancer

Uwe Hobohm

Biology Medicine

Modern immunology plus historic experiments suggest a better way to gear up the human immune system to battle malignant disease

Kashmir Valley Megaearthquakes

Susan Hough, Roger Bilham, Ismail Bhat

Environment Physics

Estimates of the magnitudes of past seismic events foretell a very shaky future for this pastoral valley

The Bones of Copernicus

Dennis Danielson

Astronomy

Twenty-first-century cosmologists, historians and archaeologists continue to seek a true portrait of the great astronomer and his contribution