The government documents included in this book are comprised of reports and testimonies from June 2018 to September 2018 on research and development in the United States. The first report examines research and development projects started from 2010 through 2017 on advanced fossil energy. For over 100 years, three fossil fuel sources -- coal, oil and natural gas -- have made up at least 80% of total US energy consumption. While fossil fuels are associated with some negative environmental impacts a such as carbon dioxide emissions, the predominance of coal, oil and natural gas is likely to continue into the future. The second report focuses on considerations for maintaining US competitiveness in Quantum Computing, Synthetic Biology and other potentially transformational research advances. Federal support in such areas can accelerate innovation and drive technological advances and promote US competitiveness in the global economy. The third and final report focuses on additional actions needed to improve licensing of patented laboratory inventions. The GAO was asked to review agency practices for managing inventions developed at federal labs, with a particular focus on patent licensing. This report examines the challenges in licensing patents and steps take to address and report them.

Among the many treasures in the collections of the Science Museum in London is the complete workshop of the Scottish engineer James Watt (1736-1819), acquired in its entirety from the attic of Watt's Birmingham home in 1924, where it had been left as an industrial shrine since his death in 1819. Watt is best known for his pioneering work on the steam engine, but the workshop contains very few engine-related items. Instead, it is filled with jars of chemicals, sculpture-copying machines and materials, a profusion of instruments and objects and evidence of Watt's many diverse projects. Traditional biographies of Watt have concentrated on the steam engine, but Ben Russell tells a richer story, exploring the processes by which ephemeral ideas were transformed into tangible artefacts and the multifaceted world of production upon which Britain's industrial revolution depended. James Watt: Making the World Anew is a craft history of Britain's early industrial transformation as well as a prehistory of the engineering profession itself.It explores the motivation for making things, looking not only at what was produced but also why, drawing on a rich range of resources - not just archival material and biographies on Watt but also objects themselves, and sources from fields as diverse as ceramics, antique systems of proportion, sculpture and machine making. Generously illustrated, James Watt is a unique, expansive exploration of the engineer's life, not as an end in itself but as a lens through which the broader practices of making and manufacturing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can be explored.