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Due to aesthetics, most US homeowners won’t buy a light colored roof, even if it reduces their air conditioning bills by reflecting, instead of absorbing, solar heat.  So the question for scientists interested in increasing energy efficiency is, can one make a roof that is both cool and dark? Hashem Akbari, Paul Berdahl, and Ronnen Levinson of Lawrence Berkeley National … [Read more...] about Cool Color Roofs

The Berkeley Darfur Stove is a high-efficiency outdoor cooking stove with improved heat transfer characteristics, high combustion under draft, improved mechanical stability, and a design that uses very few parts and can easily be built with hand tools and the simple equipment that is typically available in remote areas of the world. The stove provides women in refugee … [Read more...] about The Berkeley Darfur Stove

Residential buildings consume over 20 percent of all energy used in the United States. When homeowners make upgrades that reduce energy use, they not only save money in energy costs, but they reduce the need to generate power, and its associated air emissions. Home Energy Saver™ (http://hes.lbl.gov/consumer/), funded by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy … [Read more...] about Energy Saved, Benefits Earned

Imagine waking up each morning and discovering that twenty percent of all plants in your garden had disappeared over night. They had been eaten. Equally astonishing would be the discovery in the afternoon that new plants had taken their place. This is the norm of life in the ocean. Without the ability to accurately observe these daily changes in ocean life cycles, over vast … [Read more...] about LBNL Device Monitors Ocean Carbon