Christopher Mims,  Technology Columnist  -  Wall Street Journal Stephan: Several readers wrote to ask me, as one put it, "Don't you see any good news, any positive trends?" The truth is I haven't seen a lot of good news trends, even when I search sites like EcoWatch, which always try to report good news. But in my search, I did find this fascinating story about Benjamin Franklin's genius and a breakthrough it is causing today. Franklin was a lifelong meditator and, in my view, the only "conscious" Founder. As but one of many examples of this, he created philanthropy in the United States and children to this day are being educated by his funding. So this is my lede today. Franklin’s original model—which he first demonstrated to the public in 1749 as a rotisserie to cook a turkey—is an illustrative of his genius. Reproduction of an electrostatic motor designed by Benjamin Franklin at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Credit: Richard W. Strauss / National Museum of American History Smithsonian Institution   A technology pioneered by Benjamin Franklin is being revived to build more efficient electric motors, an effort in its nascent stage that has the potential to be massive.   A handful of scientists and engineers—armed with materials and techniques unimaginable in the 1700s—are creating modern versions of Franklin’s “electrostatic motor,” that are on the cusp of commercialization. It’s reminiscent of the early 1990s, when Sony began to produce and sell the first rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, a breakthrough that’s now ubiquitous. Franklin’s “electrostatic motor” uses alternating positive and negative charges—the same kind that make your socks stick together after they come out of the dryer—to spin an axle, and doesn’t rely on a flow of current like conventional electric motors. Every few years, an eager Ph.D. [...]

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