What if your computer weren’t really a computer? What if the “hard drive” where you store the vital pieces of your life—like work applications, e-mail, and financial and medical information—wasn’t located in a single piece of equipment, but was available everywhere, all the time, as part of a computing “cloud”?
Tennessee business people, farmers, scientists, and political leaders have begun to rally around a shared vision of a statewide economy powered by ethanol, but this fuel has a distinctly Tennessee twist. What sets Tennessee’s vision apart from other states with an eye toward biofuels is the commitment to make that ethanol from sources other than corn—mostly from a hardy plant called switchgrass.
When you step through the doors of the Tennessee Governor’s Academy for Mathematics and Science in Knoxville, it’s clear you’ve entered a radically different kind of school. The walls are covered in posters singing the praises of science and scientists, and the mood during a calculus class is upbeat—to put it mildly.
When you hear University of Tennessee, Knoxville, student Scott Curran talk about “creating a model for campus sustainability,” it’s hard not to get caught up in his enthusiasm. Curran, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering, takes pride in the success of the efforts to not only use biodiesel fuel on the Knoxville campus but also create the fuel from campus resources.
University of Tennessee Distinguished Professor Jimmy Mays’s polymer research has put him on the leading edge of a new clean-energy research initiative that seeks to bring hydrogen fuel-cell technology out of the laboratory and into the marketplace.
