ecoVent for our silly apartments

Whenever it gets cold outside, my room’s heat just gets magically sucked out through my exterior wall and window. My Indian roommate has it even worse – she has two exterior walls and windows. These are times when we beg our American roommate, who has the interior room with the thermostat, to turn up the heat. Having lived through my first winter in Boston in a leaky apartment, I was very glad to find that someone was working on apartment heating efficiency: Dipul Patel of ecoVent.

Highlights from AAAS conference 2013 – Family Science Day

17 Feb 2013, Boston, MA - At the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2013 conference in Hynes Convention Center. Photo taken by XiaoZhi Lim

Sunday, Feb 17, was a Family Science Day at the AAAS conference. It was also a day that I had planned to be at talk after talk after talk, so I didn’t expect to get twenty minutes free after lunch to go walk around the Family Science Day exhibitions. Here’s what I saw in twenty… Continue reading Highlights from AAAS conference 2013 – Family Science Day

Chinese New Year, and reflections on combustion

Late Saturday morning, I watched children go down the snow-covered streets with sleds as text messages started to stream in from my family. It was approaching midnight of Chinese New Year in Malaysia, where my family returned every year to reunite with my father’s siblings and their families. It occurred to me that there are a lot of Chinese practices that involve burning stuff. If climate change went up against these deep-rooted traditions, who knows what sort of debate we’ll get into?

Pineapple adventures: Part 1

This is a very special year, because it marks the first (and possibly last, I’m still thinking about it) year that I make my own pineapple tarts. Yes, the pineapple tarts that are an essential item in every Chinese Singaporean’s house during Chinese New Year.

What I did not expect, was that the five pineapples I cut up and cooked into jam would eat all my fingerprints.

An open letter to the EPA

Scorched corn fields in Texas, 2011. Image obtained from Wikimedia.org

Dear EPA officials,

I was quite excited by several headlines this weekend saying that a federal court decision had gone against the ethanol mandate. Considering the devastated corn crop from last summer’s drought, the rule forcing gasoline producers to maintain ethanol levels at ten to fifteen percent is expected to result in almost half of the corn crop ending up as ethanol. It would make a lot of sense for the rule to be relaxed this year, if not forever.