If you want to make your home as energy-efficient and green as possible, should you use gas or electric for your heating and cooling needs? «Fuel type is an important factor because heating and cooling accounts for a significant amount of home energy consumption,» said NIST civil engineer David Webb, one of the authors of…

To boost efficiency in typical households — where people forget to take wet clothes out of washing machines, retrieve hot food from microwaves and turn off dripping faucets — researchers have developed a single device that can track 17 types of appliances using vibrations. The device, called VibroSense, uses lasers to capture subtle vibrations in…

Discussions of the growing plastic waste problem often focus on reducing the volume of single-use plastic packaging items such as bags, bottles, tubs and films. But a new University of Michigan study shows that two-thirds of the plastic put into use in the United States in 2017 was used for other purposes, including electronics, furniture…

Built as part of the sustainable features of a new Australian building, the specially-designed solar chimney radically boosts safe evacuation time in a fire — from 2 minutes to over 14 minutes. In a world-first, researchers designed a solar chimney optimised for both energy saving and fire safety, as part of the sustainable features of…

Speeding is the riskiest kind of aggressive driving, according to a unique analysis of data from on-board devices in vehicles. Researchers at the University of Waterloo examined data from 28 million trips for possible links between four bad driving behaviours — speeding, hard braking, hard acceleration and hard cornering — and the likelihood of crashes.…

First research into impact of wash cycle times shows that shorter, cooler washes: help clothes keep their color and last longer, when compared to warmer, longer cycles; release significantly fewer microfibers into wastewater; significantly reduce color transfer, a major cause of lights and whites becoming duller. Academics from the University of Leeds and specialists from…

No one likes when their favorite clothes develop holes or unravel after many laundry cycles. But what happens to the fragments of fabric and stitching that come off? Although it’s known that washing clothes releases microfibers into wastewater, it’s unclear how drying impacts the environment. Now, a pilot study reports that a single dryer could…

The health impacts of radio-frequency radiation (RFR) are still inconclusive, but the data to date warrants more caution in placing cell towers. An engineering team considers the current understanding of health impacts and possible solutions, which indicate a 500-meter (one third of a mile) buffer around schools and hospitals may help reduce risk for vulnerable…

It has never been safer to fly on commercial airlines, according to a new study that tracks the continued decrease in passenger fatalities around the globe. The study finds that between 2008 and 2017, airline passenger fatalities fell significantly compared to the previous decade, as measured per individual passenger boardings — essentially the aggregate number…

A researcher is examining how the flight routes people take to get to tourist destinations impact the amount of pollution in the air. «This paper provides one of the first efforts to quantify the carbon emissions associated with tourist air travel in the continental United States,» explained Neil Debbage, assistant professor of geography and environmental…