Pipistrel-USA, a team from Pennsylvania has won the NASA CAFE Green Flight Challenge by flying an electric plane 200 miles in less than two hours.

The Google-sponsored contest was created to spur development of electric airplanes and efficient aircraft designs and with a first-place prize of $1.35 million, it could very well succeed at that.

The contest took place at the Sonoma County Airport in California and required entrants to fly 200 miles in two hours while using less than one gallon of fuel per occupant or the electricity equivalent. Pipistrel-USA's plane, the Taurus G4, had two occupants and used less than a two-gallon equivalent of electricity.  Check out the video above of a flight demonstration of the Taurus G4.

Both the winning Pipistrel-USA and the second place team flew electric airplanes. Only three teams out of 14 that registered met the contest's requirements.

via Wall Street Journal

A new study done by an engineering professor at Stanford University has found that the energy efficiency of computers doubles roughly every 18 months, and has done so since the very first general purpose computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) that was built in 1956.

With help from Intel and Microsoft, Professor Jonathan Koomey was able to gather information about computing devices from 1956 until now and with this new finding, Koomey is revising and improving Moore's law -- the observation that computer processing power doubles every 18 months.  Fortunately, the things that contribute to that power improvement (reducing component size, capacitance and communication time between them) also increase energy efficiency.

This finding has great implications for the future of computers and battery-powered devices.  As we constantly increase the performance power of computers and gadgets, we'll be improving their energy efficiency as well -- a much needed trend as we become more reliant on our portable devices.

Also, theoretically, we're far from the limit of how much electricity we can save.  In 1985, physicists projected that we could improve computer energy efficiency by a factor of 100 billion and since then we've only hit a factor of about 40,000.

via MIT Tech Review