efficiency

Kirk Sorensen's Google Tech Talk on liquid-fluoride thorium reactors, a design that could burn nuclear waste and use thorium as fuel. It draws on Oak Ridge National Laboratory work from the 1950s and 60s.

A 2009 Google Tech Talk by Nicholas Zakas on the hidden performance pitfalls of JavaScript. It covers what is fast and slow in the language and how to avoid common bottlenecks.

A Google Tech Talk on Yahoo's 14 rules for faster web pages and the YSlow tool. It covers front-end practices like avoiding @import and fixing ETags, with live analysis of popular sites.

A Google Tech Talk by the author of Kilim, a Java library for lightweight actor-style message passing. It argues that message passing can replace shared-memory concurrency and claims performance competitive with or better than Erlang for huge numbers of actors.

A 2006 Google Tech Talk by Robert Bussard on inertial electrostatic confinement (polywell) fusion as a cheap, clean alternative to conventional thermonuclear reactors. He argues it could be made viable with modest funding.