The Solar Decathlon is a competition in which 20 teams of college and university students compete to design, build, and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house. The Solar Decathlon is also an event to which the public is invited to observe the powerful combination of solar energy, energy efficiency, and the best in home design.

The event takes place on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., October 12 – 20. The team houses are open for touring everyday, except Wednesday, October 17, when they will close for competition purposes. An overall winner is announced on Friday, October 19 at 2 p.m. See the schedule for more information.

Teams of college students design a solar house, knowing from the outset that it must be powered entirely by the sun. In a quest to stretch every last watt of electricity that’s generated by the solar panels on their roofs, the students absorb the lesson that energy is a precious commodity. They strive to innovate, using high-tech materials and design elements in ingenious ways. Along the way, the students learn how to raise funds and communicate about team activities. They collect supplies and talk to contractors. They build their solar houses, learning as they go.

The 20 teams transport their solar houses to the competition site on the National Mall and virtually rebuild them in the solar village. Teams assemble their houses, and then the active phase of the Solar Decathlon begins with an opening ceremony for students, media, and invited guests. The teams compete in contests, and even though this part of the Solar Decathlon gets the most attention, the students really win the competition through the many months of fund raising, planning, designing, analyzing, redesigning, and finally building and improving their homes. The public is invited to tour the solar homes and event exhibits during much of the competition.

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2007 Schedule of Events – Solar Decathlon
October 12 – 20, 2007

The National Mall, Washington D.C.
Opening Ceremony
* 10 a.m., Friday, October 12

Houses Open
* 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., weekends
* 11 a.m. – 3 p.m., weekdays

Houses Closed
* For 1 – 2 hours while jury evaluations are taking place October 13 – 16 and October 18 – 19
* All day Wednesday, October 17, the houses are closed for controlled temperature and relative humidity measurements.

Consumer Workshops
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and other event sponsors are offering solar energy and energy efficiency workshops for consumers. Workshops are offered on Wednesday, October 17, while houses are closed for controlled temperature and relative humidity measurements. Workshops will not be offered on Thursday, October 18, during Building Industry Day.
* Weekends, 10 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 1 p.m., 2:30 p.m., and 4 p.m.
* Weekdays, 10 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 1 p.m., and 2:30 p.m. (except Thursday, October 18)

Building Industry Day, October 18
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and other event sponsors are inviting representatives from the Building Industry to attend workshops and tour the team houses.
* Team houses are open 11 a.m. – 3 p.m.
* Workshops offered at 9 a.m., 10 a.m., 11 a.m., noon, 1 p.m., 2 p.m., 3 p.m., and 4 p.m.

Winner Announced
* 2 p.m., Friday, October 19

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Several years ago, SunPower, a unit of Cypress Semiconductor, (CY) realized the top metal plate was reflecting the sun’s rays, cutting efficiency by reducing the percentage of sunlight converted to electricity. So the company decided to put both plates beneath the silicon. It now has an industry-high efficiency of 22% vs. an average of 16%, says analyst Dan Ries of Monness, Crespi Hardt & Co. That means fewer panels are needed to produce power, shaving installation costs and making systems more affordable for homes, which have smaller roofs than most commercial buildings.

SunPower, which says it will earn about $90 million on $740 million in sales this year, expects its prices to be competitive with grid power by 2012, says Vice President Julie Blunden.

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All the chatter on the message boards during the outage slowly got around to the subject of switching to Linux; there is no way such a thing could ever happen to Linux users. This is not what Microsoft wants to read, especially on its own forums. The Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) plan became a genuine disadvantage over the weekend when the server that verified users went down and began to disable operating systems around the world.
A hacker attack on the WGA servers could shut down literally millions of machines whose users stupidly subscribed to this supposed “advantage,” which does little more than look for pirated copies of the OS. If this WGA were designed right in the first place, the computers that found the server inoperative when they checked in to it should have internal code that validates their OS until the server comes back up. Maybe it is too hard for Microsoft’s 20,000 coders to manage this sort of thing. Too logical.
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It is a battery that looks like a piece of paper and can be bent or twisted, trimmed with scissors or molded into any shape needed. While the battery is only a prototype a few inches (centimeters) square right now, U.S. researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who developed it have high hopes for it in electronics and other fields that need smaller, lighter power sources. The battery uses paper infused with an electrolyte and carbon nanotubes that are embedded in the paper. The carbon nanotubes form the electrodes, the paper is the separator and the electrolyte allows the current to flow.

Some students were working on methods to dissolve paper and cast it into membranes for use in dialysis machines. Meanwhile, other students in RPI’s materials science department were trying to make carbon nanotube composites using polymers. The two groups got together and realized they could use paper instead of polymers and combine the two projects. Then came another group of students, also at RPI, who said the project — a thin sheet black on one side and white on the other — looked like an electrical device. And over a period of about 18 months, the groups developed the projects, into a battery, a capacitor and a combination of the two.

This collaborative effort involved the Rensselaer departments of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemical and Biological Engineering, the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Rensselaer Nanotechnology Center.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzDDXHTkUm4]

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So-called ‘second generation’ biofuels – made from lignocellulosic feedstocks like straw, grasses and wood – have long been touted as the successor to today’s grain ethanol, but until now the technology has been considered too expensive to compete. However, recent increases in grain prices mean that production costs are now similar for grain ethanol and second generation biofuels, according to an open access paper [http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/114801267/PDFSTART] published in the first edition of Biofuels, Bioproducts & Biorefining – a scientific journal launched to explore the emerging bioeconomy.

The switch to second generation biofuels based on biochemical and thermochemical conversion processes will reduce competition with grain for food and feed, and allow the utilization of materials like straw which would otherwise go to waste. The biorefineries will also be able to use dedicated lignocellulosic energy crops: short-rotation trees like poplar, eucalyptus or willow, and grass species such as miscanthus, switchgrass or sudan grass, which can be grown on land less suitable for farming than traditional row crops.

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The typical Western diet may be more than just hazardous to the health of patients treated for colon cancer. New research suggests it may be deadly. Former patients in the study who ate the most red and processed meats, refined grains, fats, and sugars were about three times as likely to die or have their cancers recur as patients who ate these foods the least.

While there is no shortage of evidence linking the so-called Western diet to an increased risk for developing colon cancer, the study is among the first to examine the impact of such a diet on survival among patients treated for the disease.

The findings must be confirmed, but Dana-Farber Cancer Center oncologist Jeffrey Meyerhardt, MD, a researcher on the team, says they cannot be ignored by colon cancer patients or their physicians. The study appears in the Aug. 15 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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