Norfolk Southern Railway No 999 is the first all-electric, battery-powered locomotive in the United States. But when one of the thousand lead-acid batteries that power it dies, the locomotive shuts down. [ + ]

Electronics company Rohde & Schwarz has been working intensively over the last year on relaunching its website. [ + ]

Raspberry Pi, that low-cost, credit-card-sized computer that is exciting the programming and development world, has opened a store that offers total beginners an easier way to find everything they need to get going, in one place and for free. The Pi Store will make it easier for developers of all ages to share their games, applications, tools and tutorials with the rest of the community. [ + ]

Plessey’s MAGIC (MAnufactured on GaN ICs) High Brightness LED (HBLED) products have won the Solid-State Lighting Application Category of the Elektra Awards 2012. The winners were revealed last week at the European Electronics Industry Awards ceremony in London. [ + ]

HexaTech has received a $2.2 million award that will enable the development of a new power semiconductor technology for the modernisation of the electrical power grid. [ + ]

A team of interdisciplinary researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has developed a new method for significantly increasing the heat transfer rate across two different materials. Results of the team’s study could enable new advances in cooling computer chips and lighting-emitting diode (LED) devices, collecting solar power, harvesting waste heat and other applications. [ + ]

Glyn and Energy Micro, a Norwegian manufacturer of ARM-based ultralow-power microcontrollers, have signed a distribution agreement which includes all activities in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, BeNeLux, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, New Zealand and Australia. [ + ]

Scientists at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Ames Laboratory have discovered new ways of using a well-known polymer in organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) which could eliminate the need for an increasingly problematic and breakable metal-oxide used in screen displays in computers, televisions and mobile phones. [ + ]

Decking your home with Christmas lights soon won’t include the hassle of burnt-out bulbs or broken strands. Scientists at Wake Forest University have made a new kind of light from mouldable plastic, which can glow in any colour, won’t shatter and won’t leave you with the problem of searching for the one bad bulb on a strand of dozens. [ + ]

A proof-of-concept, scale-model electric car has demonstrated electric power transfer via the car wheel to the vehicle for the first time. This could dramatically reduce the batteries needed in electric cars. [ + ]

National Instruments has announced that the NI Instrument Driver Network (IDNet) has reached a new milestone of 10,000 instrument drivers for automating stand-alone instrumentation. [ + ]

World demand for primary and secondary batteries is forecast to rise 8.1% per year to $132 billion in 2016. Demand for secondary batteries is expected to rise at a faster rate than demand for primary batteries. [ + ]

Committed to speeding the adoption of new technology for engineers and enthusiasts, the element14 Community has launched the Code Exchange to complement its Raspberry Pi Group. [ + ]

According to a new market research report, emerging memories are expected to replace most of the conventional technologies like flash memory as the market for next-generation memory reaches more than  $90 million by 2017. [ + ]

ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe and Solliance are working together to create organic photovoltaics that can be incorporated into flat steel products for use in the construction industry. [ + ]