I usually avoid writing about research that has not been done yet. I get press releases every day about grants awarded to universities and private companies to pursue one research project or another. There is always some reason those grants are awarded, some prior research that indicates a potential finding. The early indications of what could happen in combination with the verification of wonderfulness of the research team demonstrated by six or seven figures of dollars being provided to develop the work results in a press release with promise. The thing is, the potential results often don’t turn out, or turn out very differently than expected. The end product may be very worthwhile in the end, of course. However, disseminating information about research projects at the early stages mostly serves to spread misinformation because a potential finding will be mistaken for a result, and the result that never happened (or has not happened yet) gets out there even though it is not real.

But, I just heard about a project I want to mention, not because it is more likely than other projects to succeed, but just because I think the idea is interesting, and it relates to a larger anthropological problem in the advancement of green technology. Continue reading A big step in battery technology? →