Via Elana Schor, a group of automakers, utilities, and shipping companies have banded together to form the Electrification Coalition, which will lobby for a massive federal push toward electric vehicles in the coming months.

In the winter of 1984, a young scientist named Steven Chu was working as the new head of the quantum electronics division at AT&T's Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. For months, he'd been struggling to find ways to trap atoms with light so that he could hold them in place and study them better. It was an idea he'd picked up from an older colleague, Arthur Ashkin, who had wrangled with the problem all through the 1970s before finally being told to shut the project down--which he did, until Chu came along.