I recently had a chance to tour Northwestern’s Tiny House project – a student-run initiative designed to raise awareness about living sustainably and with minimal carbon footprint.

It is a *very* small house. At a modest 130 square feet, it’s smaller than some ice fishing houses I’ve been in.

But wow, did the students put some creative thought into their design. It truly is an off-the-grid existence. Power comes from solar panels on the roof. Water for drinking, washing, and showering comes from rain water, collected by the house’s oversized awning/gutter system. The toilet composts waste, which can then be used as fertilizer for gardening.

There’s a loft for sleeping (which actually adds ~50 additional square feet of living space).  A clever, accordion-style couch made of cardboard (recycled, of course) compresses to the width of several thick books. Tables fold flush with the wall. It’s actually pretty comfy.

WGN recently did a feature on Tiny House. Click here to check it out.

Congratulations to co-project managers Molly Baker, Randy Waymire, and the entire Tiny House team!

Watch the Tiny House project website for future opportunities to tour this amazing structure.

by Kelly Gustafson/Medill News Service

It’s a modern-day fortress. Buried behind multiple security checkpoints, fingerprint scans, layers of razor-sharp barbed wire fencing, concrete K rails and supervised card-access points at every entryway stand two mammoth nuclear reactors.

Every inch of the 4,500-acre site is under constant surveillance by cameras and guards that man eight tall watchtowers 24 hours a day.

The Exelon nuclear reactor is in Braidwood, Illinois, a small town about 60 miles southwest of Chicago.  It is a secure place.

But despite its heavily fortified shell and the stigma it bears as a nuclear plant, a tour of the plant revealed that it may be all bark and no bite.

“Exelon Nuclear is dedicated to full transparency,” said Mike Pacilio, president and chief nuclear officer of the corporation, in a press release. “We know that the more the public knows about the safety of the U.S nuclear industry, the more confident they feel about nuclear power as a source of safe, abundant and clean energy.”

Exelon released the statement as we approach the anniversary of the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, an event that prompted many to question the safety of our own nuclear plants at home.

Watching the aftermath of the nuclear disaster in Japan was scary, but Exelon jumped at the opportunity to fly engineers to Japan. They used their expertise to help where they could and brought lessons back to the States.

The main lesson, according to engineers at Braidwood, was to expect the unexpected and prepare for the unimaginable. The disaster at Fukushima stemmed from a massive power outage that shutdown pumps that cool the fuel.

The plant is engineered to withstand tornadoes, floods, earthquakes and even hurricanes. Braidwood has flood barriers that include watertight doors and elevating the equipment above flood levels.

But the most important safety feature may be the four massive diesel power generators, each with second, third and fourth layers of backups. In an emergency, the generators would provide enough power to pump water from the lake into the fuel pools to keep the nuclear rods from overheating.

“As soon as the crisis in Japan started, we knew we’d get a lot of interest. So we put together a team with news releases, letters to neighbors and community information nights,” said Neal Miller, communication manager at Braidwood.

In the emergency-preparedness center in the heart of the plant, an operator stands by 24 hours. There are drills and procedures for everything: an employee slips and his wounds are exposed to radioactive materials, a 6.9 earthquake rocks the area, or a 747 plane crashes into the side of the building, an operator said.

The over-preparedness theme was comforting, given the colossal amount of power—enough for 2 million homes — the plant produces each year.

Braidwood houses two of Illinois’ 11 reactors that are scattered throughout the state and the nuclear waste stays on site in dry casks. The casks are insulated by 4 feet of concrete and the fuel can stay in there for hundreds of years while the government decides what to do with it all.

One possibility is storing the nuclear waste in Yucca Mt. in Nevada. All of the used fuel from the United States’ 104 reactors for the past 40 years could fit into a football stadium, my tour guides told me, considering one uranium pellet is roughly the size of a pencil eraser.

A new battery prototype has emerged in Japan that turns waste material into electricity.  Sony’s battery is paper-powered and still in the early stages of development, but it may be a new way to charge your cell phone if it is commercialized in the future.  Maybe we’ll finally have a purpose for that stack of old grocery receipts.

The device was demonstrated at the Eco-Products exhibition this past December.  The paper was dropped into a solution of water and enzymes, and after a good shake and a little wait, the battery was able to propel a little fan.  The primary enzyme utilized is called cellulase. It turns the paper into a form of sugar called glucose, which can be used by other enzymes to form electrons and hydrogen ions.

The project builds on work in which fruit juice was used to produce electricity. White ants and termites use the same process for energy when they digest wood. The byproducts of the process are just water and an acid called gluconolactone.

Yuichi Tokita, a senior researcher at Sony’s Advanced Material Research Lab, suggested to BBC News that old greeting cards could also be used as fuel.  The battery is currently powerful enough to run basic music players, but falls short in comparison to publicly-available battery technology.  Nevertheless, Greenpeace still welcomes Sony’s forward-thinking in power generation because the absence of toxic chemicals in the design of this battery makes recycling it a more eco-friendly process as well.

Cool, sexy, and fun are words seldom associated with a home thermostat. Typically it’s turn the dial to the temp you want and forget it.

Nest Labs, inventors of the Nest Learning Thermostat have, quite literally, re-engineered the way I think about heating and cooling my home. It’s little surprise that it took some talented engineers – a former iPod brain at Apple nonetheless – to launch a “Think Different” campaign for home thermostats.

Aside from the super-intuitive user interface – just twist the outer ring of the thermostat and an iPod-like menu emerges – this is a thermostat that sets itself. For the first week it’s hanging on the wall you simply set the thermostat according to your preferences. After that, it automatically configures a daily temperature schedule. Given that it’s December, this means warmer in the morning, cooler mid-day, warm again in the evening, then 62 degrees overnight. The bottom line: energy and cost savings.

Nest has Wi-Fi built in, enabling you to control it remotely via iPad and iPhone apps. It’s ridiculously easy to change your temperature schedule or warm up/cool down your house whether you’re downstairs or a thousand miles away on vacation. If you leave home for a couple days and forget to turn the temp down, there’s an Auto-Away feature that handles it automatically (via motion sensor). Wi-Fi also enables the unit to download software updates and local weather data automatically from the mother Nest.

Even my kids are interacting with the thing, turning the dial ring and temperature down until the little green leaf shows up – a visual indicator that you’re in the “green” energy savings zone. It knows this because it has data on the current outside temp. Cool.

All of this coolness doesn’t come cheap, though. At $249, it’s about $75-$100 more than competitor smart thermostats. But when you consider it’s elegant interface, ease of remote administration, automatic temp setting features, accuracy, and straightforward, step-by-step installation guide (with video), some people will recoup this cost by just being able to install the thermostat themselves. I installed it myself and it was a snap.

As far as energy savings, there’s no question that my family has been paying much closer attention to our home’s temperature. I’m much more likely to remotely drop the temp if we’ll be away for the day. This should result in additional cost savings, even over our old programmable thermostat – a cheapo model that was highly inaccurate. We’ll see in a few months.

Spoiler alert: this article is not about the Occupy Wall Street protests.  This is about something far more awe-inspiring, in my opinion: exploding stars, dark energy, cosmic expansion, and the startling fact that all the matter we can see in the universe is only 4% of everything that’s out there!

Last week I attended the CIERA lecture “Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe,” given by Robert Kirshner, Clowes Professor of Science at Harvard University and author of “The Extravagant Universe.”  He was the graduate advisor of two of the young men who won the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics for “the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae.”  Wait, what?  The universe is accelerating?  Supernovae?

Let’s start with the Universe.  We live in the Milky Way galaxy (right), just one of over 100 billion galaxies in the Universe.  Almost all of the information we gather about the Universe comes in the form of light.  Modern telescopes like the Hubble Telescope have allowed us to literally look into the past, viewing light from galaxies that are over 10 billion years old.  Remember, the Big Bang happened about 13 billion years ago, so 10 billion years ago is getting pretty close to the beginning of the Universe.

These highly advanced telescopes also allow researchers to observe exploding stars called Type I Supernovae, which emit light equivalent to about 4 billion of our suns combined.  All visible light is a spectrum of colors running from red to blue, and light shifts slightly toward red if it is moving away from you, and toward blue if it is moving toward you.  This shift in the frequency of a wave depending on the relative motion of the source and the observer is called the Doppler Effect, or Doppler Shift.  It also applies to sound waves, causing the pitch of a siren to change depending if the ambulance is moving toward or away from you.  When scientists measured light from these supernovae they expected some to be shifted toward red and others toward blue, indicating that some were becoming more distant while others moved toward us.  Instead, they found that all of the supernovae were shifted toward red, or moving away from us, proving that the Universe is expanding!

That seems crazy: surely eventually the attraction of matter and energy for all other matter and energy in the universe should pull everything back together.  The Nobel Prize winners set out to test just that, expecting to find that the expansion of the universe was slowing down.  They measured light from supernovae of varying distances.  They expected the supernovae farthest away to display less of the “red shift,” indicating that they are moving away from us more slowly, and the expansion of the Universe is slowing down.  Surprisingly, they found that distant supernovae are moving away from us more rapidly than closer supernovae.  The expansion of the Universe is not slowing down, but actually accelerating!

And it gets even crazier!  This expansion acceleration should not happen, because gravity tends to pull mass together.  This implies there must be other matter and energy unknown to us, a kind of anti-gravity working to spread things out, or speed up the expansion of the Universe.  These have been named dark matter and dark energy, and we have NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE!  And they make up 96% of the Universe!  We only know that they must exist in order to explain our scientific observations.  We can see the mass of dark matter in action bending the light from galaxies in the Hubble deep field images (below). Dr. Kirshner explained dark matter and energy much like the wind.  We cannot see the wind, but we see the leaves moving, so we know the wind must exist.

And so the scientists have done it again.  We have taken something as beautiful as the starry night sky, and turned it into depressing graphs and numbers indicating we are on a course of cosmic expansion destined to spread out into nothingness.

Now, when we look up into the night sky, we know that all humans are just a speck on the Earth in the Milky Way, and all the stars and galaxies and nebula that we can and can’t see are still only a tiny fraction of the whole Universe.

But I have to say, what we can see is a magnificent and breathtaking four percent, and it takes a pretty extraordinary speck to become aware of so much more.

As much as ten watts of power is dissipated as heat every time someone takes a step.  Mobile devices like phones use between one and fifteen watts.  Sound promising?

Nature News reports on developing technology that would make charging your electronics on the go a walk in the park.  Tom Krupenkin and Ashley Taylor, mechanical engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are working on a technology that may someday be integrated into a pair of shoes to power electronics such as a phone or MP3 player.  The technique they are using is called electrowetting.

Electrowetting typically uses an electric charge to deform a drop of liquid, but when they threw the process into reverse, it generated electricity instead.  By deforming liquid drops between electrode plates, a charge can be generated.  That charge creates an electrical current when included in a full circuit.

There have been attempts to harness walking energy through piezoelectrics, materials that produce electricity when compressed or bent, but only a few milliwatts have been extracted this way.  Krupenkin used a dielectric – an insulator that can be polarized in an electric field – called tantalum oxide to coat the electrodes, and liquid drops lof mercury or a gallium-based alloy called galinstan.

The more droplets used, the more power that can be generated.  Krupenkin estimates that it would take 1,000 droplets to generate ten watts and power anything from a cell phone to a military radio.  There is also hope for this technology’s use in developing countries where electricity is more scarce.

Extensive research has gone into figuring out how to harness hydrogen as a fuel source for cars and homes, and a new discovery has found a way that nature does it.  Nicole Dubilier of the Max Planck Institute of Marine Microbiology led the team of researchers at the Logatchev hydrothermal vent field located 3,000 meters–almost 10,000 feet–below sea level.

As the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft reports, mussels were found to have a special give-and-take relationship with bacteria that use hydrogen as a fuel source. Hydrothermal vents, which were discovered just thirty years ago, occur when the ocean floor is pulled apart by the movement of tectonic plates.  Water that comes into contact with the magma bubbling up between these plates can heat to 400 degrees Celsius, and the rising hot water delivers dissolved minerals from the earth’s crust to the rest of the ocean.  These inorganic compounds are oxidized by microbes in a process known as chemosynthesis, fueling life where sunlight cannot. It was previously known that these microbes could oxidize the sulfide in hydrogen sulfide, but now research has found that some of these bacteria are able to use the hydrogen as well.

The deep-sea mussel Bathymodiolus puteoserpentis is one of the most prevalent species at Logatchev, where they cover hundreds of square meters of ocean floor.  Deep-sea submersibles were used to sample these mussels and run experiments that showed that they were consuming hydrogen.  Inspection back at the surface revealed that there is a bacteria that lives in the gills of these mussels that can use hydrogen as an energy source, just as we hope to do someday.

The mostly widely used substrate, or support material, for solar cells today is glass.  Now, a new technology developed by a team of researchers at MIT allows solar cells to be printed on inexpensive and readily available substrates, like paper – almost as cheap as printing a photograph.  This ability to print solar cells on paper also poses a significant weight advantage for shipping.

According to an article on MIT News, the new technique is very different from the standard methodology for creating solar cells in that it doesn’t use liquids or high temperatures.  Instead, vapors are used to deposit the materials onto the substrate, allowing for the use of a wider variety of materials.  (Vapor-deposition is the technique also used to line potato chip bags with that thin silver layer.)  The layers of materials are printed one on top of the other onto the substrate.

The paper in Advanced Materials is co-authored by MIT professors Karen Gleason and Vladimir Bulović, graduate student Miles Barr, and six others.  The paper solar cell they’ve developed can even be folded up and when unfolded, still produce electricity.  The resilience of these solar cells was further demonstrated by printing one onto a sheet of PET plastic, then folding and unfolding it 1,000 times, and they were still able to wire it up to produce electricity. The cells have even been shown to work after being run through a laser printer, thus being exposed to the heat of the toner-fusing process.

Reality check: it should be noted that the solar cells produced by this method so far are only 1% efficient.  Current silicon solar cell technology is approaching 30% efficiency.  Nevertheless, work continues to make these new flexible solar cells more efficient so that they may be put to practical use.

An illustration by A. Burnham Shute from an early edition of Moby Dick, a literary reminder that whaling wasn't easy.

Given the summer we’ve had here in Chicagoland, many of us are now well versed in power-outage protocol. Flashlight? Check. Extra batteries? Check. Whale oil?

Wait—whale oil? What does that have to do with anything?

As it turns out, quite a bit. Like I mentioned in my previous post, last week I had the opportunity to attend part of UIC’s Summer Institute on Sustainability and Energy, which was supported in part by the Initiative for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern. One of the speakers, Northwestern economics professor Lynne Kiesling, gave us a crash course on the history of electricity innovation and commercialization in the US.

Instead of starting with the electricity celebrities you might expect—our old friends Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, to name two—she went back a bit further and began with a chapter in the story that most of us don’t think about: the one that starts with whales.

Before we started stringing up electrical lines all over the place, we were using oil lamps to light up our lives, and one of the most popular and high-quality options was whale oil. Burning whale oil produced brighter and more consistent light than other popular sources of the time, especially the candle. Its use caught on broadly and demand shot up. By the early to mid-1800’s, whaling was the fifth-largest industry in the US.

But then we ran into a problem. Already a problem was the danger involved in whaling—for those of you familiar with Melville, you know that hunting whales is neither easy nor safe. And, the more whales that were hunted, the more scarce the population became, especially near the US.

So what is the result of  high demand and short supply? That’s right—high prices. (And, in this case, an endangered species—not a minor issue, and one that I’ll get to in a moment.) With high prices came creativity, innovation, and eventually commercial alternatives, like kerosene and electric power. Obviously that’s an oversimplification of the brilliant scientific process and multiple drivers—the price of whale oil being only one—that let to the widespread change. But the end result holds true: away go the oil lamps and up go the power lines.

What I find most interesting about this story is that buried inside is a lesson in sustainability. There was a time not too long ago when a significant portion of the American public looked to whale oil as its source of power, and the companies who procured and sold the oil were very powerful. But it was a limited resource, and fortunately we looked to alternatives (unfortunately, not entirely sustainable alternatives) before depleting the entire whale population. So the moral of the story? What you think you “need” today—say, lots of fossil fuels—might not seem so necessary in the future, if we continue to apply our creativity and innovation to finding and developing sustainable energy sources. Our Earth—including the whales—will thank us.

Last week, I had the privilege of attending a few sessions at the Summer Institute on Sustainability and Energy, an eight-day experience for graduate and undergraduate students hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago and supported by a number of other groups and institutions, including the Initiative for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern.  While there, students heard firsthand from experts about the multitude of energy-related challenges facing our society, many of them quite dire, and possible solutions, many of them quite creative.

One of the most creative can be found right here in Chicago. During his presentation on urban agriculture, Illinois Institute of Technology faculty Blake Davis introduced us to The Plant, a meatpacking facility turned vertical farm. Still under development, The Plant will eventually host a range of eco-friendly food businesses, including a brewery and mushroom farm, in addition to its own aquaponic growing system, through which they raise fruits, vegetables and fish (more on that in a moment).

It will all be operated on a net-zero energy system—in other words, they won’t draw any power from the grid. Instead, the facility will rely on an anaerobic digester, which uses microorganisms to break down food waste, releasing methane gas. The gas will be burned to produce electricity and regulate temperature in the building. So, not only are they off the grid, but they’re utilizing their own waste—and the waste from other businesses in the area—for power. I would say that’s pretty creative.

Equally creative is their aquaponic closed loop system for raising plants and fish. Waste from the fish is filtered, a portion of which is broken down into nitrates that feed the plants. By absorbing the nitrates, the plants clean the water, which is then routed back to the fish. So everybody wins, including the folks working at The Plant, who will sell both the veggies and the fish for a profit.

Similarly, in that the relationship will be symbiotic, the other food businesses in the plant will share resources and creatively utilize waste to form a sustainable network. Their ultimate hope is that The Plant will not only bring some new life (and jobs) to its own Chicago neighborhood, but also serve as a model for other businesses to work together and do the same. You can learn more, find out about tours, and keep track of The Plant’s growth on their website. I recommend checking it out.