NSF-funded small business Keen Home has developed a smart vent that opens and closes to reduce uncomfortable hot and cold spots, save energy in unused rooms, and tailor a home’s heating and cooling to fit specific lifestyles. The new wireless system will respond automatically based on users’ habits and presence. Keen Home co-founder Nayeem Hussain explains how the smart vents integrate into daily life. Keen Home is funded through NSF’s Small Business Innovation Research program....

Researchers at the University of Minnesota taught kids the science behind hydrokinetic energy at the USA Science and Engineering Festival.

With one stomp of his foot, Zhong Lin Wang illuminates a thousand LED bulbs--with no batteries or power cord. A professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Wang is using what’s technically known as the triboelectric effect to create surprising amounts of electric power by rubbing or touching two different materials together.

Source: Georgia Institute of Technology

Can we rethink the way buildings use energy? John Ochsendorf, an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture at MIT, is working with his students to change the way buildings are made and how they consume energy.

Richard Cogdell is the Director of the Institute for Molecular Cell and Systems Biology at the University of Glasglow, Scotland. Richard was led to a career in studying bacterial photosynthesis by a desire to learn and understand basic photosynthesis, he "wanted to know how natured worked." In 1995, Richard's research group, in collaboration with others, used protein crystallography to determine the three dimensional structure of a light-harvesting complex from the purple bacterium,...

What is energy balance? It may sound like a strange term, but it basically means equalizing the amount of calories you take in with how much you burn through exercise, metabolism and body processes. Since obesity is one of the leading causes of cancer, Carrie Daniel-MacDougall, Ph.D., M.P.H. and Susan Schembre, Ph.D., R.D., both assistant professors in Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences at MD Anderson Cancer Center, study behaviors and biological processes associated with linking...

As lithium-ion battery technologies mature, the size and energy of these systems continues to increase for emerging applications in transportation, grid storage, military use and aerospace. In fact, broadening the application space for lithium-ion batteries from the consumer electronics industries to these emerging markets increases their size from 1-50 Wh batteries for smart phones and laptops to >50 kWh for electric vehicles (EVs) and MWh scale for utility storage systems. As these...

Summary: Renewable energy sources have been regarded as the most promising means to solve the energy and environmental issues we face nowadays. How to integrate renewable energy into smart grids presents many challenging problems in control and power electronics. A well-integrated smart grid provides the backbone for the high-level functions of smart grids, such as wide-area control, communication, information, marketing and security. In this talk, an overview of the enabling technologies...

Have you seen those big, bulky, breakable photovoltaic cells that now collect the sun's rays? Well, what if solar energy could be harnessed using tiny collectors that could be spray painted on a roof, a wall or even a window? Find out more on this episode of Science Nation. For more Science Nation episodes, visit: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/index.jsp

Teams design and build homes powered by the sun This past October, taking a walk on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., might have been more like taking a walk into the future. Twenty solar-powered homes were sprawled across the mall's west end, transforming it from a park into something that resembled an innovative new housing development. Park purists take note: the transformation was only temporary. The homes were part of a competition. "The Solar Decathlon is a competition for...