All Features
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Plastics are a part of nearly every product we use on a daily basis. The average person in the United States generates about 100 kg of plastic waste per year, most of which goes straight to a landfill. A team led by Corinne Scown, Brett Helms, Jay Keasling, and Kristin Persson at Lawrence Berkeley…
Benjamin Kessler
Suddenly, supply chains are in the spotlight. The practical details of how products arrive on supermarket shelves, for example, gained unwelcome relevance amid last year’s wave of panic buying caused by Covid-19 disruption. At the same time, the environmental damage wrought by wasteful industrial…
Christine Schaefer
If you care about improving your local economy, education, community health, or other aspects of residents’ quality of life, you may benefit from learning about the initiatives of Communities of Excellence 2026. One place you can read a concise summary of the innovative, Baldrige-based nonprofit…
Knowledge at Wharton
Technology firms are the drivers of disruption across industries, but things will play out differently for automobiles, according to John Paul MacDuffie, Wharton management professor and director of the school’s Program on Vehicle and Mobility Innovation.
Tomorrow’s vehicles will be built with…
Knowledge at Wharton
The future of work is hybrid. In the post-pandemic world, many companies will embrace the lessons learned from more than a year of telecommuting and not fully return to the office. Instead, Wharton management professor Martine Haas says, they will adopt a hybrid model with some combination of…
Jim Benson
When we work together, which we all do, everything involves relationships. People request work from other people... that is a relationship. People take jobs that involve bosses and structure... those are relationships. People form teams to get specific types of work done... again, relationships.…
Joshua Pearce
People will recycle if they can make money doing so. In places where cash is offered for cans and bottles, metal and glass recycling has been a great success. Sadly, the incentives have been weaker for recycling plastic. As of 2015, only 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled. The rest pollutes…
MIT News
Buildings account for about 40 percent of U.S. energy consumption, and are responsible for one-third of global carbon dioxide emissions. Making buildings more energy-efficient is not only a cost-saving measure, but also a crucial climate-change mitigation strategy. Hence the rise of “smart”…
Kate Saenko
Last month, Google forced out a prominent AI ethics researcher after she voiced frustration with the company for making her withdraw a research paper. The paper pointed out the risks of language-processing artificial intelligence, the type used in Google Search and other text analysis products.…
NVision Inc.
NVision’s engineering services are helping managers of coal-fired power plants converting to natural gas to determine more quickly where to install updated instrumentation necessary to retrofit turbines to accommodate the new power source.
“By measuring the equipment via laser scanning, then…
Manufacturing USA
The future of advanced manufacturing in the United States is being built at innovative facilities that enable experimentation in process and product development. The people and organizations at these next-generation facilities are part of a collaborative effort to remove barriers of entry and…
Thomas Malnight, Ivy Buche
The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted different responses from company CEOs seeking to ensure their businesses survive. Keeping their employees safe has been the first priority, but beyond that, their task has involved understanding the situation, launching countermeasures, and trying to evolve ways…
M. Mitchell Waldrop, Knowable Magazine
If you were to contact a group of recycling professionals, as one recent survey did, and ask them to list all the ways that consumer product manufacturers drive them crazy, you’d probably hear a lot about “shrink sleeves”—those full-body, shrink-to-fit plastic labels found on beer cans, yogurt…
Ken Voytek
During the past few years, I have written more than a few blogs and papers looking at manufacturing productivity across the 50 states. I wanted to update some of these analyses to reflect more recent data, see what they tell us, and examine how states were performing when looking at the change in…
Alper Kerman
Huh? What? At least that was my response the first time I heard the words "zero trust" when I started working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) in the fall of 2018. Mind you, I was also making a fresh start with an…
Victor Piedrafita
During the last decade, we’ve witnessed the emergence of sustainability issues among the most important business concerns in a firm’s supply chain. An increasing number of firms have reexamined their relations with suppliers and moved forward to build a more sustainable supply network, by not only…
John Keogh
Almost all businesses involved in the food supply chain have experienced effects ranging from a mild shock to severe disruptions during the Covid-19 pandemic, and further disruptions may be ahead this winter.
Yet not all organizations have learned critical lessons, and history shows us some…
K. C. Morris
The Covid pandemic has highlighted the role that manufacturing plays in our society. Manufacturing is important not only for improving our quality of life but also for the necessities of life, from food to toilet paper to transportation and safe and secure housing. As our society has evolved, we…
Celia Paulsen
October happens to be (among other things) Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Dental Hygiene Month, National Bullying Prevention Month, and my personal favorite, National Pizza Month. Plus, it’s Halloween! But I digress. We’re here to talk about cybersecurity.
Every manufacturer should hold…
Jim Benson
Last night I sat down to watch something that would help me barbecue meat better: a two hour-long movie called Barbecue. Simply that, by Australians. I figured it would be about making succulent shrimp or game meats. Something... Australian.
The work showcased people who cook with flame from…
Zach Winn
This story was originally published by MIT News.
Millions of cocoa farmers live in poverty across western Africa. Over the years, these farmers have been forced to contend with geopolitical instability, predatory loan practices, and a general lack of information that hampers their ability to…
Guoli Chen
A novelty in the C-suite not so long ago, the chief sustainability officer (CSO) is fast becoming a fixture in companies of note as climate change and inequality increasingly dominate global attention.
During the past year alone Citigroup, General Motors, and International Paper have each…
Julio D'Arcy
In my synthetic chemistry lab, we have worked out how to convert the red pigment in common bricks into a plastic that conducts electricity, and this process enabled us to turn bricks into electricity storage devices. These brick supercapacitors could be connected to solar panels to store…
Katie Myers
Freight trucks account for 23 percent of U.S. transportation. Transportation is the No. 1 source of greenhouse gas emissions in America. The country’s freight industry is in no position to ignore its impact on the environment and the greater good.
We can break down the trucking industry’s…
Emerson Grey
It’s Sunday night, and you decide to make a quick run to the grocery store. You grab five bananas—one for each breakfast of the work week. Then, at home, you immediately throw two of the bananas into the trash.
Who would buy fresh food and throw 40 percent of it away? Americans do, on average,…
