Grad Student Invents
Gravity Lamp
UPI
BLACKSBURG, Va., Feb. 18 (UPI) -- A
U.S. graduate student won second place in a "Greener Gadgets
Conference" competition inventing a floor lamp powered by gravity.
Clay Moulton of Springfield, Va., who received his master's of
science degree last year from Virginia Tech, created the lamp as a
part of his master's thesis. The LED lamp, named Gravia, is an
acrylic column a little more than 4 feet high. The entire column
glows when activated by electricity generated by the slow, silent
fall of a mass that spins a rotor.
The light output of 600-800 lumens lasts about four hours...
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The 200-Square-Foot
House
by
John Moritz, McClatchy Newspapers
SLULING, Texas — In an era of big
homes, Brad Kittel is going small. Very small.
Kittel builds and sells a line of undersized houses that can serve
as anything from a backyard hideaway to an intimate
bed-and-breakfast cottage to an artist's loft and workshop.
His tiny houses are made from salvaged lumber and building
materials, and even though the smallest ones are generally about 200
square feet, they come wired for electricity and outfitted for
plumbing, including a shower and toilet and a loft for sleeping.
"One person could live comfortably here, maybe even two people,"
Kittel said while standing inside a modestly furnished model on his
manufacturing site. "It wouldn't do for a family with kids, but
these things are roomier than they might look..."
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For Some, Survival
Requires Alternative Energy
by Ryan Randazzo, The Arizona
Republic
WHISPERING RANCH, Ariz. — Tucked amid
the cactus and coyotes, nearly 6 miles off paved roads and 60 miles
from downtown Phoenix, is Gordon Briggs' humble desert home.
Three arrays of solar panels on the roof and ground reveal the
extreme effort required to live off the power grid, in the desert.
So do the two small wind turbines that cut the air overhead, the
battery assembly on the porch, and the small refrigerator covered
with insulation in the house.
This corner of the desert is a virtual hotbed of energy-independence
experts because the land was subdivided and sold to investors in the
1960s and 1970s, long before utilities considered serving the
region. Now, bringing public power to the area is even more
complicated...
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Food for Thought:
Dining on Insects
by Michael Casey, Seattle Times
CHIANG MAI, Thailand — Crickets,
caterpillars and grubs are high in protein and minerals and could be
an important food source during droughts and other emergencies,
according to scientists.
Three dozen scientific experts from 15 countries gathered this month
in this northern Thailand city for a U.N.-sponsored conference this
month on promoting bugs as a food source.
A Japanese scientist proposed bug farms on spacecraft to feed
astronauts, noting that it would be more practical than raising cows
or pigs. Australian, Dutch and American researchers said more
restaurants are serving the critters in their countries...
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BUILDING WITH
AWARENESS, The Construction of a Hybrid Home.
Green Energy News
Wouldn’t it be an amazing thing if beginning tomorrow
every new home, and perhaps some commercial and industrial buildings
too, were built without a conventional energy-hungry central air
conditioning system? What if, too, those new buildings generated and
stored their own electricity? And what if every step along the way
the carbon footprint created by the construction of the new building
was considered, and minimized?
The answer? For one thing, new coal-fired powerplants wouldn’t need
to be built. Powerplants are built to meet a perceived need in the
future, to meet economic growth. If the need isn’t expected to be
there, the plants won’t be built.
Writer, director, photographer and editor of Building with
Awareness, Ted Owens, sets the stage to ponder, in the DVD and
accompanying Guidebook, as to what would happen if we actually put
considerable thought into the buildings we construct before one
ounce of concrete was poured.
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