How do you keep gas prices down in the face of a shaky energy policy? Engineers and legumes, of course. The Bush administration issued new rules on Wednesday improving gas mileage requirements for pickup trucks, sport utility vehicles and vans, for the first time covering the largest SUVs on the road like the Hummer H2 and Chevrolet Suburban. If adhered to properly, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) system is expected to save 10.7 billion gallons of fuel over the lifetime of the vehicles sold during the period, officials said.

However, this might not be enough to prevent gas shortages and price hikes in the immediate future. Oil refiners plan to stop using an additive, methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE, which accounts for about 10 percent of the volume of every gallon of gasoline with which it is blended (1.4 percent of the nationwide supply) next month because Congress refused to grant them protection from lawsuits. MTBE will be replaced with ethanol, but there are doubts within the Energy Department and the oil industry about whether there will be enough of the corn-derived fuel to meet the anticipated surge in demand, and whether the country’s distribution system is ready to handle it.

Engineers at the Agricultural Research Service are hard at work developing alternative ways to derive Ethanol from new organic sources. One promising prospect is peas. Chemical Engineer Bruce Dien, teamed with other scientists at the ARS have been working on a process that separates the peas’ protein and starch and uses enzymes and yeasts to ferment the starch’s sugars into ethanol. Read more about what engineers at the ARS are doing to help prevent a national fuel shortage here and here.

Engineers at NASA have found more than one use for their Laser Scaling and Measurement Device for Photographic Images (LSMDPI). This device, contained in a small black box, was initially designed to provide a non-intrusive means of adding a scale to a photograph of an object in space when there is no size reference. Twin lasers, an inch apart, shoot from the box, and add scale to photographs. In other words, the laser offers the ability for someone to look at these special photographs and have a better understanding of just how big or small objects really are. For example, engineers will use this to measure the distance from one part of the shuttle to a dent from a hailstorm.

Since the LSMDPI weighs only a half-pound and can be attached directly to a camera’s tripod, it can also be used on Earth in crime and accident scene investigations. “I think that the greatest contribution that the Laser Scaling Measurement software offers to law enforcement is it ‘un-cuffs’ the investigators hands with digital image evidence by facilitating fast and accurate measurement analysis of anything in a crime scene photo, not just the intended target,” said Kim Ballard, NASA electrical design engineer. Additional uses include oil and chemical tank monitoring or aerial photography. Read more about this exciting new technology.