China will need to subsidize and import natural gas to reach target of 10% of overall energy mix

April 7, 2017November 18, 2016 by Brian Wang

China plans to boost natural gas from 6% of its energy usage to 10% by 2020. However, to affect a large-scale transition from coal to natural gas in China will be far more difficult than it has been in the U.S., where the price of natural gas per unit of energy output is much lower …

LIDAR on a chip should be 1000 times cheaper and scan 1000 times faster to revolutionize self-driving cars, drones, and robots

April 7, 2017August 17, 2016 by Brian Wang

DARPA and MIT are leading an effort to take what are now bulky expensive Light Imaging, Detection, And Ranging (LIDAR) systems and make them small enough to fit on a microchip. LIDAR is one of the key parts of Google’s self driving car. MIT’s Photonic Microsystems Group is developing a lidar-on-a-chip system that is smaller …