Another class assignment, this time a one-minute interview-style video of an expert explaining something that he/she is familiar with. My pick – Dipul Patel of ecoVent. Smartphones? Smart homes. from XiaoZhi Lim on Vimeo.
Author: xiaozhi
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.
Explainer for the question: Can the batteries in your laptop catch on fire?
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration grounded Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner fleet recently because of lithium-ion battery fire incidents. Similar lithium-ion batteries are found in many consumer electronic devices such as laptops, cameras and cellphones. Can the batteries in your laptop catch on fire?
Rise and Shine at Haymarket
For one of my classes, I was assigned to head out in the morning before dawn and document how something gets set up. That was why, two Fridays ago, I pulled myself out of bed at 5 am to get to Haymarket at about 6.30am. Sadly, I was only there for ten minutes before someone… Continue reading Rise and Shine at Haymarket
Highlights from AAAS conference 2013 – Family Science Day
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
Highlights from 2013 AAAS conference – Part 1
It is the end of day three at the American Association Advancement of Science conference 2013 and I am exhausted. There are two more days to go, so here’s a very brief summary of some of the event highlights for me.
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
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.
Tiny ‘wires’ and a big step forward for solar cells
This is a pretty exciting piece of news for the solar cells of the future. Although I must admit, I don’t quite agree with the use of the word ‘breakthrough’ in the title of the press release that came out last week – ‘Breakthrough in Solar Cell Research.’