By Malcolm Fuller, contributing writer SANTA CLARA, Calif. – You wake up in your chilly San Francisco apartment (or any chilly place for that matter), and your first instinct is not to crank up the thermostat several notches (too expensive!). Instead you go to your closet, rifle through an array of sport coats and collared shirts. You pull out your

LOS ANGELES–So often, we get ahead of ourselves a consuming public, especially when it comes to technology innovation. Take power generation and smart-grid management. We know that electronics that drive enormous efficiency gains on the grid. After all, our smart phones can guide us to someplace we’ve never been, so why not immediately optimize all our home appliances to help

LOS ANGELES–Ann Karagozian is in some ways a UCLA lifer. The summa cum laude engineering graduate (Class of ’78) has been teaching engineering here on the Westwood campus since she received her Ph.D in mechanical engineering from Cal Tech. Given that, she’s a perfect person to ask two not-unrelated questions. - What’s the state of basic research in this country

SAN FRANCISCO–During the first half of our around-the-country drive in the Chevy Volt, the first conversations started stirring over one of the greatest features of electric and hybrid-electric vehicles: How quiet they are. Problem is, they’re apparently too quiet, at least for the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. Last week, NHTSA proposed adding sounds to EV and PHEVs running below

SUNNYVALE, Calif.–A key part of any stop on the year-long Drive for Innovation was interacting with engineers either examining our Chevy Volt or driving it around. Everyone has a design suggestion. Analog Devices took it to the next level, in the Fall of 2011, by hosting an outdoor reception during which employees put Sticky-note design suggestions all over the car. That sparked

IRVINE, Calif.–Back-up cameras seem almost quaint today, even though the technology is just moving into the mainstream automotive market. That’s because there’s a sense that technology is catching fire really quickly in automotive design and not just at the high end. Earlier this year, as we steered the Volt through the sunny southern California climes, we pulled into Broadcom and

WOODSIDE, Calif.–There are countless technology executives who attach themselves at the hip to the wine industry, either as connoisseurs, investors or outright owners of wineries or vineyards. Then there’s T.J. Rodgers. The Cypress Semiconductor CEO has invested millions of  his own dollars, blown holes in hillsides and stuffed rootstock into steep-sloping hills and imported special German mechanical harvesters, all in

More than a century after the commercialization of the automobile, we find ourselves in another–perhaps the most significant–transition in automotive technology since then: electric vehicles. I bring this up because since Day 1 of the Drive for Innovation I wanted to take the Chevy Volt to some unusual places, like Pikes Peak. But the primary spot I wanted to park

In a way, the Internet's proximity and ease of use is a shame; it enables complex situations to be oversimplified, which, in the long run, can hurt public policy making. There's no better example than renewable energy, which is the supposed salve for our fossil-fuel problem. Now, solar power is being specifically touted as a way to power the cloud's