The Homely Scientist

Need a daily dose of ideas to help save energy (and the planet…but that is such a huge concept, too distant for many…stick to stuff closer to home and you)?  Check out LiveEarth’s Twitter feed:

Shading windows. It can lower your home’s temperature and reduce your cooling costs by 30%. Source: Twitter / LiveEarth070707

This tip is especially good right now as the hottest part of the summer is coming our way in the Northern Hemisphere (the Dog Day … which are named such because Sirius the Dog Star become visible this time of year).  Another great one is to put a fan at the top of the stairs to your cellar (if you have one) to bring cold air up from there.

The LiveEarth concert is this weekend.  I’m going to try to listen to it as much as possible, but since it should be a nice weekend I think I’m going to get everyone out of the house for some fun.

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Last week I talked about how we could be looking at a disaster of Biblical proportions (think Noah) if some of the major ice sheets melted, now comes word that the largest of the world’s ice sheets, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, is safe for the time being:

While studies of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets show they are both at risk from global warming, the East Antarctic ice sheet will “need quite a bit of warming” to be affected, Andrew Mackintosh, a senior lecturer at Victoria University, said Wednesday.

The air over the East Antarctic ice sheet, an ice mass more than 1,875 miles across and up to 2.5 miles thick centered on the South Pole, will remain cold enough to prevent significant melting in the near future, the New Zealand-led research shows.

But it eventually may become vulnerable to the effects of rising sea levels driven by the melting of other ice sheets, Mackintosh’s team found. Their research was published this week in the journal Geology. Source: Wired News - AP News

This news doesn’t get us off the hook, but at least a huge wave covering most of the coastal cities of the world isn’t looming on the near-term horizon.

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Insulating buildings is one of the most important aspects of the building process.  Insulation not only has to, well, insulate, but it also has to not grow nasty things and last for a long time (who wanted to rip open all their outside walls every few years–if ever).  Insulation, which is typically fiberglass now, does take resources to make and isn’t recyclable (although it is made from recycled glass).  Now, what if you could grow insulation?  Yeah, grow.  Couple smart guys figured out how to make a growing medium for oyster mushroom spores that could become suitable insulation material:

Placed in a dark environment, the cells start to grow, digesting the starch as food and sprouting thousands of root-like cellular strands. A week to two weeks later, a 1-inch-thick panel of insulation is fully grown. It’s then dried to prevent fungal growth, making it unlikely to trigger mold and fungus allergies, according to Bayer. The finished product resembles a giant cracker in texture.

“It really allows for a myriad of uses,” said McIntyre. He said they’ve envisioned modifying the product to make structural panels that could be grown and assembled onsite to produce sustainable homes.

“Green building materials should be evaluated on the idea of cradle to cradle,” said Evelyne Michaut of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In the cradle-to-cradle industrial model, goods should either be fully biodegradable or reusable, limiting waste and pollution, according to Michaut, a sustainable city advocate from Santa Monica, Calif.

“That’s the ultimate environmental reference,” she said, adding that it seems like Greensulate is on its way to fulfilling that criteria.

For Bayer and McIntyre, their next step will be creating larger pieces of Greensulate to use in building a wall. From there, they’ll perform further testing to see how the product stands up to various elements, including saturation and humidity. McIntyre said they have one two-year-old sample that’s been exposed to the elements and shown no sign of degradation. Source: Mushrooms become source for eco-building - Yahoo! News

Cool stuff.  Of course, it’s a little ways from being a part of your next building project, but it shows the amazing untapped potential of natural materials.

Hat tip: Boing Boing

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 When I’m ranting and raving about alternative energy and lauding companies like Google, I talk about being able to feed into the system and get credit for it.  Looks like the Province of Ontario is finally getting it:

One of the key elements in the incentive programs is a solar “feed-in” tariff that pays people and organizations with solar panels cash for any electricity they feed into the grid. In the United States, utilities offer credits for solar power; a homeowner or business can reduce their electricity bill with these credits, but at best end up owing nothing to the utility.

With feed-in tariffs, solar panels become profit centers. In Germany, the government gives panel owners around 45 cents for every kilowatt hour fed into the grid, which is more than a kilowatt hour costs.

“You can go to financial planning meetings and you’ll see people with spreadsheets calculating hours of sunlight and the potential revenue,” said Jeff Osborne, an analyst with CIBC World Market in a recent interview. “Half of the solar power in Germany comes from farmers.”

Ontario has adopted a feed-in tariff for solar that will provide 42 cents per kilowatt hour. The response so far has been positive. After the feed-in tariffs were unfurled, a North American company has said it will build solar power plants that will produce 60 megawatts of power, said the representative from the Ontario Power Authority. Source: Ontario: The new frontier for alternative energy | CNET News.com

Now if we can get more governments and utilities on board with this, we’d be getting much farther along in our global need to reduce emissions.

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LOL!  Not really, but learning from how gecko’s stick to walls and even glass, scientists are working on better and better adhesives.

Unbundled, their nanotube tape was nearly as adhesive as a live gecko, but as these same tubes were clustered into bundles, their strength went up. By the time the authors optimized the combination of fiber length and bundle width, their tape was over four times stronger than a gecko: a square centimeter was sufficient to support nearly four kilograms. Although this was weaker than the initial strength of a standard piece of adhesive tape, the “gecko tape” had staying power. Its adhesive properties remained stable over time, while those of the adhesive tape dropped below those of the gecko tape after about five minutes.

Because of its reliance on van der Waals forces, the gecko tape had some unusual properties. These forces can work between any two surfaces, allowing the tape to stick to Teflon with roughly half the efficiency of its adhesion to a charged surface. Because the forces are proportional to surface area, peeling the tape works remarkably well: for most angles, peeling gently reduced the surface area, allowing the tape to come off with little force and no damage. Source: Gecko-inspired tape sticks to Teflon

See van der Waals forces are a really cool part of physics.  It’s attraction between molecules that can now be tapped into with carbon nanotubes.  Will we see this gecko tape soon? Probably not, but we could have some cool products coming from nanotube research anytime now.

Hat tip to Wired

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I saw this profiled on the Discovery Channel this week.  The boat looks, um, odd, but saved tons of fuel.

The boat, conspicuously named Sun21, is the first of its eco-friendly kind to attempt the journey. The 46-foot catamaran made the trip — from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas — in just under a month, and according to MW-Line, the operating costs are 20 to 45 times lower than traditional motorboats. Source: Solar-powered Swiss boat crosses the Atlantic - Engadget

So if we think about a ship with solar power plus a biddies-powered engine, you could make a huge dent in the consumption of fuel by maritime shipping.  Yes, we have to do something and fast and it’s going to take all of us working together with innovative and radical ideas to pull it off.

Yep this is one of them.

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While biodiesel is cool (and according to the article below you can drink it…eeewww) manufacturing is still not 100% there.  So here comes the handy home biodiesel test:

Biodiesel is sort of like buying cheese. Some of it is fantastic, and some isn’t so hot.

Enter the pHLip, a testing system from CytoCulture, which specializes in oil spill technology. Place a few drops of the biodiesel you are thinking of buying into the vial, shake it up, and then let it stand. If the fluid on the bottom stays cherry red, you have yourself good biodiesel, says Randall von Wedel, principal researcher at the company. Source: A handy home test for biodiesel | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Okay, one problem that I see is how are you going to do this at the gas station?  I see this is better for a local operation, but still a great thing.

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 Chemistry sets are getting a tad passe, if not whimpy.  Well, try this book on for size:

Controversy over potentially hazardous chemistry experiments is nothing new. This amazing book only lasted two editions because it was considered too dangerous for children. Now, only 126 copies exist in libraries. Fortunately, a beautiful PDF version is available online. Modern texts still shy away from child-damaging pyrotechnic experiments but contain hundreds of very important projects. Geekkids can learn about gases and solids, acids and bases, atomic structure, osmosis, chemical bonding, solvents, crystallization… everything. Source: Geekdad - Wired Blogs

I downloaded the book and started to skim it.  Holy crap there was stuff I wouldn’t consider trying outside of a very well equipped lab (fume hood and all safety stuff on hand), scarier there is stuff I wouldn’t try even in a lab.  I’ve handled some really, really nasty stuff (carcinogens, mutagens, explosive mixtures, and highly exothermic reactions), so I’m not a lab wuss, but wow making hydrogen sulfide gas?  Chlorine gas? Heck no.

Now, in the interest of science, it’s a great read.  A supervised read for the older kids.  Oh and remind them that you can’t pull batteries apart anymore (you’ll understand if you read it).

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 Sad news this week…

Mr. Wizard Passes Away at 89 Source: Geekdad - Wired Blogs

I always liked Mr. Wizard over Bill Nye and others.  Another icon of science education passes on.

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 Today is not one of my better post title days…regardless…

Jean-Baptiste Denys, personal physician to France’s Louis XIV, is generally credited with performing the first human blood transfusion, although some sources award that distinction to Englishman William Lower. What is not in dispute is the year — 1667 — and the patient — a 15-year-old boy who had been bled so much by his doctor that he required an infusion of blood.

The source is also not under dispute: Whoever the physician was, he used a sheep’s blood. And, somehow, the kid recovered. Source: June 15, 1667: First Human Blood Transfusion Is Performed

Sheep’s blood!  Egad!  Well good thing the kids lived.  Hmm, wonder if there were previous attempts.  Did you know that blood typing (A+, A-, O+ …) wasn’t figured out until 1907!  Holey smokes!

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