Photo by Sarah Deragon, PortraitsToThePeople

I am lucky enough to live in Hayes Valley, I’ve been living here for about four years now and have been privy to great community engagement; especially around the park at Hayes and Octavia. There is such a diversity of people that congregate in the park and one of the new neighbors has definitely added to the charm of the environs – Smitten Ice Cream.

The first flavor I tried was salted caramel, and it was hands down the best ice cream I had ever tasted. Since then, when I have guests visiting, I make sure that one of the local stops is Smitten. The ice cream is made to order only using the freshest local ingredients and it is frozen within 60 seconds using liquid nitrogen with a freezing point of -321 degrees F or 76 degrees Kelvin giving it a unique texture.

I heard Robyn Sue Goldman, owner of Smitten and Cory Bloome, the engineer responsible for fine tuning Robyn’s first prototype to mix the ice cream, speak about Smitten on Wednesday, January 18th at Nerd Nite. Smitten’s story from wagon to the Hayes Valley location is a great blend of quality and innovation. Robyn’s initial vision with Smitten was to get closer to the cow. With traditional ice cream that is frozen with conventional techniques, the texture is often stabilized with additives, emulsifiers or preservatives which mask natural ingredients. Old-fashioned ice cream in contrast has a few simple ingredients but takes quite some time to freeze. Introducing liquid nitrogen enabled Robyn to create ice cream the old fashioned way without the wait time.

The first ice cream machine was created and tested by Robyn through trial and error over many years. One of the major hurdles was to create a mixing apparatus that could properly and consistently mix the ice cream, without over-freezing or under-freezing any portion of it, which is easy to do with liquid nitrogen. She developed and later patented her creation of two swirling mixing arms with a helix design. She named the unique, patented mixer "Kelvin," giving tribute to the measurement of intense cold. Kelvin’s design, with the help of liquid nitrogen, creates a lower ice cream-freezing temperature while perfecting the mixing technique, resulting in the formation of smaller ice crystals in the finished product. These exceptionally small ice crystals are the reason why Smitten Ice Cream is so intensely creamy. To test her invention, Robyn initially hit the streets of San Francisco with Kelvin strapped on top of a Radio Flyer wagon and made incredible ice cream to-order. Popularity for Smitten Ice Cream grew, and the need for a store became tangible.

Before a store could be created, Kelvin needed to be refurbished and approved by UL, the regulatory agent. That is where Cory Bloome came in, affectionately dubbed “The Kelvin Doctor. Cory was the engineer who took Robyn’s prototype and list of improvements and fabricated the next generation of Kelvin’s for the store.

The four Kelvins are now busy mixing at the Smitten storefront at 432 Octavia St. (@ Linden St.). Try it for yourself if you find yourself in the neighborhood. Ice cream is served each day starting at noon. Monday through Thursday and Sunday, the ice cream is put away at 9pm; yet, Friday and Saturday you can come as late as 10pm for your fix.

It's a problem in hospitals, too. Just take the neonatal intensive care unit at the University of California San Francisco.

On a recent morning, Mardi Thompson was swaddling a baby the size of a burrito with firm assurance. She's been a nurse here for 13 years.

Some of the babies who come through here were born prematurely. Others were born with congenital defects; some part of their internal anatomy didn’t develop the way it’s supposed to.

"Maybe their diaphragm is missing, or part of their intestine is outside of their chest," says Thompson. Some suffer from a condition called esophageal atresia, in which the child's feeding tube isn't properly connected to her stomach. That condition affects roughly one in every 4,000 children.

Working with Tools Too Big for the Job

They are what Sanjeev Dutta refers to as "plumbing problems."

Dutta is a pediatric surgeon at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, in Palo Alto, where he operates on children with these and other problems. He says often, the instruments he uses when he does these surgeries weren’t built for tiny babies. They were made for adults.

"We struggle with instruments that were never designed for the type of patient we are working on, and we adapt."

Dutta says the issue here isn’t safety. Most of these surgeries are, by now, pretty routine. But pediatric surgeons have to improvise in ways other surgeons don’t.

Working with tools that are several times too large for his tiny patients, Dutta is sometimes forced to stand a foot and a half away from his patient.

Size isn't the only problem pediatric surgeons face. Many pediatric procedures are specific to infants and children, fixes to problems that, unaddressed, would be fatal. In such cases, often the right tools simply don't exist.

Partly because of problems like these, pediatric surgeons have a reputation as being mavericks, people who are particularly good at improvising the tools they might need to operate successfully. No one fits that mold as well as Michael Harrison, at UCSF.

A History of Improvisation and Innovation

Harrison is known as the father of fetal surgery. He says twenty years ago, when the field was just getting started, his team had to make almost everything from scratch.

"We had to make all the tools and devices that allowed the fetal surgery, [the tools for] the the mom, and opening and closing the uterus. All that stuff we had to make up, because the tools were ten times too big."

Harrison describes this era — the 1970s and early 80s — as a golden age of pediatric surgery, a time when you could rig up a new tool or procedure, run tests on animals, if necessary, and then bring it into the operating room. He says he never felt like they had a choice.

"It’s almost a moral imperative. It’s usually in a circumstance where this kid is going to die. The only way we think we might be able to save him is this new way. We’d have to have this thing. Let’s do it. And that’s what we can’t do now."

In the mid 1970s, the FDA began regulating surgical devices, much the same way it regulates drugs. It can take a decade to get a device through the regulatory process, sometimes longer for pediatrics.

Harrison says this — along with the fact that many pediatric surgical procedures are rare — has had a chilling effect on medical device manufacturers.

"The market is too small to justify the research and development for new devices," he says. "That’s the fundamental problem."

In 2007, Congress passed the Pediatric Medical Device Act, which set aside a small pot of money, administered through the FDA’s Office of Orphan Products, to spur innovation in the field of pediatric surgery.

The program was initially intended to receive $6 million for each two-year cycle, but appropriations have come out much lower: $2 million dollars for 2009-2010 and $3 million for 2011-2012.

The idea is to bring together doctors and engineers to solve problems in pediatric surgery. These are the kinds of partnerships that Mike Harrison has been trying to forge for a decade. He says it can be a culture clash.

"We’re, you know, sort of blood and guts. We're saying, 'hey we've got to have this device, we’re going into the operating room tomorrow.' And they were thinking nanotechnology and PhDs."

Developing Tomorrow's Kid-Sized Tools

But the FDA money is making these partnerships routine at a handful of institutions across the country, including Georgia, Michigan, and here in the Bay Area.

The Magnetic Mini Mover uses two rare earth magnets to slowly reconfigure a sunken chest, similar in concept to orthodontics. Courtesy UCSF.

UCSF has received about a million dollars since 2009. That money has supported the development of tools to treat scoliosis, kidney failure and sunken chest, among other conditions. The pectus, or sunken chest device, is in clinical trials.

In Palo Alto, Sanjeev Dutta has paired up with an engineer named Pablo Garcia, from SRI International, in Menlo Park. In 2009, he and Sanjeev Dutta received 500 thousand dollars to fund their collaboration.

Garcia says there was an adjustment period on both sides, as he and Dutta learned how to collaborate. "When you actually put yourself in shoes of surgeon, things you thought were important actually are not. And things that you overlooked turn out to be the driving factors."

At one of their first meetings, says Garcia, Dutta asked whether a certain robotic instrument could be made smaller. "Sure," said Garcia. "But it'll take five to ten years."

One of the projects Garcia has developed in collaboration with Dutta is a catheter used to deliver nerve blocks to kids who have broken, for example, an arm or a leg.

Current catheters, says Garcia, "are placed blindly, based on anatomical landmarks, and they often get dislodged. So the catheter we designed has some features in the tip that allow it to grab onto the tissue, lock onto it, and navigate it in a more effective way than the current catheters."

One of Dutta's favorite tools is a device used to treat esophageal atresia. The surgery is complex and often invasive. Dutta says many surgeons rely on the same techniques they've been using for decades. A newer, less invasive method is becoming more common, but it's technically very difficult. Dutta and Garcia have developed a tool designed to make the less invasive procedure much easier, so that more kids can recover faster, and with less scarring.

A prototype tool used to perform cutting and spreading functions in the treatment of esophageal atresia. Courtesy SRI International.

The tool is just a prototype now, with many stages of trials standing between it and the operating room. With Dutta and Garcia's FDA funding running out, they'll need to find other ways to fund their work on this and other devices. Dutta hopes that private philanthropy can bridge the gap between R&D and commercialization.

Dutta says he knows, from the perspective of a commercial manufacturer, that the market for a tool like this is just too small to be profitable. "Eyes glaze over," he says, "if they hear ten thousand cases a year."

But what people need to realize, he says, is that the market could be a lot bigger. What’s helpful to kids could be useful in adult surgeries, too.

"What we need to do is figure out how we can connect the two markets," he says, "and make them sort of symbiotic."

In other words, Dutta and others are learning how to be not just surgeons, but entrepreneurs. Their business will be nurturing these products to the point where someone else will see the profit in making them.

Landfills, like this one at Hunter’s Point, produce methane, which can be used for electricity and fuel. Photo: kqedquest.

Trash that ends up at a landfill is the ugly stepsister of hipper, cooler compostable kitchen scraps and recyclable bottles and cans. But landfill trash has more of a future than you might think. As garbage decomposes, it gives off methane. Methane, when floating around in the atmosphere, is a harmful greenhouse gas; it traps 20 times more heat than CO2. But methane’s other moniker is natural gas, and is an important energy source. Methane from landfills can be captured and used to generate power and fuel vehicles—often the very same garbage trucks that brought the trash to the landfill in the first place.

Landfills are not just giant heaps of rotting trash. At the base and sides of a landfill, the trash is separated from the natural world by thick plastic liner, which prevents the effluvia from decomposing garbage from entering the environment and contaminating the groundwater. The trash itself is strategically stacked in layers of cells—landfills can be hundreds of feet deep. Within the landfill, different microbes break down the trash via anaerobic digestion. The microbes produce methane gas as a waste product. There are other gases produced too; this mix of gases produced by anaerobic microbes is called biogas.

Old landfills are punctuated by pipes that collect the biogas, which is then burned to prevent the gas from entering the atmosphere (and prevent the neighbors from smelling the stink). Open flares are just what they sound like—little burning flames of methane. Closed flares filter out the contaminants before the smoke is released. Flaring the biogas at the landfill is probably the most common way of dealing with it. But it is an unfortunate waste of a potentially valuable fuel source.

Newer landfills are built with methane collection in mind from the early stages of construction. Pipes can be buried in the landfill as it is filled with trash. Pipes can also be placed in wells drilled through the trash after the landfill has begun to be filled. A vacuum system collects the gas as the microbes produce it. The amount of gas a landfill produces depends on the volume of trash and the age of the landfill; eventually, the gas production will peak and then begin to taper off. Today’s big landfills, however, can produce biogas for decades.

The methane collected from landfills can generate electricity via a turbine or internal combustion engine. Often some of the electricity is used at the landfill to run equipment, and the rest is sold to the local utility.

Methane from biogas can be converted to compressed natural gas, which can be used as fuel for vehicles. In some areas, regulations stipulate that large fleets of vehicles (with more than about 50 trucks) are required to run on clean fuel. When biogas is converted to compressed natural gas, the vehicles can refuel at the landfill. Building a system that converts biogas into compressed natural gas is a big investment, but the fleet saves on fuel costs for decades. These kinds of biogas systems can be installed at anaerobic waste digesters at places like wastewater treatment plants, not just landfills.

Altamont Landfill has taken things a step further, converting landfill biogas into liquefied natural gas. First, impurities are removed, and then the gas is cooled down to a liquid state. This liquefied natural gas is used to fuel Waste Management’s garbage trucks. Altamont Landfill’s liquid natural gas system is the largest in the world.

Obviously, we should buy only what we need, recycle what we can, and be careful to compost everything that’s compostable. But it’s nice to know that something useful can come from plain old trash.

The new all-electric Nissan Leaf. (Photo: Josh Cassidy)

This week, California officials are voting on the toughest new regulations in the country to promote cleaner cars. If passed, by 2025, 15% of new cars and trucks sold in the state would have to be powered by batteries, hydrogen fuel cells or other technology that produces little or no air pollution.

These kind of tough mandates have been tried before and they failed. But officials are confident that era of electric vehicle as finally arrived in California. That’s becoming the case in the Bay Area, which has been a strong market for advanced cars since the first Prius came out a decade ago.

“This is a Prius V,” says Joe Testa at Downtown Toyota in Oakland, showing one of several new Prius models that Toyota is releasing this year. “It’s the longer, wagon style, so it has a little more room.” Testa says there’s already a waiting list for the new Prius Plug-in, which comes out in March.

Toyota came out with hybrids ahead of other carmakers, maybe because the company anticipated changes in the market. Or, as some believe, it was due to a California state agency.

“We have been at the forefront of encouraging, and some would people would say forcing, new technologies. The Prius hybrid electric vehicle is an example of that,” says Tom Cackette. Chief Deputy Director of the California Air Resources Board.

California’s Clean Car History

Cackette says to see California’s legacy of shaping national car policy, you have to go back to 1975. The state had a growing smog problem, so the air board required cars to have catalytic converters. The federal government followed. California then tightened air pollution rules for cars. And tightened them again. “And almost in every case, the federal government would follow two, three, four, five years later.”

Today, new cars emit 99 percent less smog than cars did in the 1960s. “It’s probably the most successful environmental program in the world,” says Cackette.

Now, California has a new goal: dramatically cutting greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change. Transportation accounts for 40% of the state’s emissions. “The number one strategy to reduce greenhouse gases is these car standards,” he says.

The proposed standards would cut greenhouse gas emissions from new cars in half by 2025. “We actually worked very closely under the federal government under the Obama Administration and we’ve jointly developed the standards. So they won’t just apply in California. But they’ll apply nationwide.”

Meeting these tougher standards will raise car prices by about $1900, but Cackette says those costs would be offset by fuel savings.

Jumpstarting Electric Car Sales

On top of that, California is taking an even bolder step, requiring automakers to sell increasing numbers of clean cars in the state. By 2025, they’d have to sell almost a million and half vehicles that run on electricity or hydrogen fuel cells.

The thing is – California has tried this before. And it didn’t work. “I guess I would call it a little too visionary perhaps,” says Cackette. In 1990, the Air Resources Board mandated that 10 percent of new car sales be “zero emission” cars by 2003.

“Obviously that didn’t happen. The price of gas was cheap in those times. The price of the technologies were high,” he says. The air board loosened the rules to include hybrid cars and cleaner gasoline engines, which he says drove carmakers to develop them faster.

Now, Cackette believes that technology has come of age. Nissan is selling the all-electric Leaf and Chevy is selling the Volt, a plug-in hybrid. And there’s another big difference.

Automakers Onboard

“The car manufacturers were adamantly opposed to the concept of government telling them they needed to build a new type of technology. That’s changed.”

“You are seeing more agreement between automakers and California and the federal government,” agrees Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers in Washington DC.

“Automakers have invested billions of dollars in these technologies. And so in some ways we have similar interests. Our interest in recouping our investment is now aligned with the societal imperative to get more of these vehicles on the road,” she says.

Bergquist says meeting the mandate calling for carmakers to sell a certain number of clean vehicles will ultimately depend on consumers. “There’s still a concern about what the consumer acceptance of these technologies is going to be and that can make a mandate very scary.”

Groups Push for Tougher Rules

“We think California could be bolder,” says Don Anair is with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit group that supports even stronger clean car rules.

“We need that technology to advance for the technology cost to come down and make these vehicles accessible to more and more consumers. By having a more aggressive standard, that gives more certainty to investors that California is committed.” Anair wants to see tougher standards sooner rather than later, since it takes 15 years on average for the entire fleet of cars on the road to turn over.

If the new rules are successful, electric cars could be adopted at a much faster pace. Tom Cackette of the Air Resources Board says they’re doing all they can to encourage consumers to buy them, including funding a popular rebate program and working with companies to build an electric car charging infrastructure.

“Right now, you’ve got to sort of have a jumpstart to this whole process and in the absence of a jumpstart, there’s a chance that it will fail,” he says.

A projection of how zero emissions vehicles like electric cars will be 87% of all cars on the road in California by 2025. Source: California Air Resources Board.

Do you have a unique voice that sets you apart from the crowd? Contribute your stories to QUEST!

KQED QUEST is looking to add new voices to our blog, which already offers commentary from our producers, reporters, and local writers from our partner institutions at Chabot Space & Science Center and The Tech Museum.

We're looking to include folks who are actively involved in the science, environment and nature blogging community – e.g. have a blog, guest post on others' site, and comment / participate in relevant discussions. And we're looking locally. Our blog has a strong SF Bay Area focus, though we do occasionally cover and/or perform analysis on how this stuff elsewhere that affects the Bay Area.

What we cover

QUEST’s geographic coverage is from Mendocino to Monterey and from Sacramento to Santa Clara, and generally covers 9 content areas: astronomy, biology, chemistry, engineering, environment, geology, health, physics and weather.

Requirements

• Original posts, 3-500 words with at least 1 image. Schedule determined on availability, but weekly or bi-monthly is preferred.
• Posts should relate back to at least one of our 9 themes for the program: Astronomy, Chemistry, Engineering, Physics, Weather, Geology, Biology, Environment, Health.
• Topic should be something about which you have some expertise and/or passion.
• A unique voice and ability to follow our QUEST writing guidelines (see below).
• Experience with WordPress or similar blogging platform.
• Willingness to occasionally be assigned a post topic by the editor as current events dictate.
• Respect for copyright and fair use.

Would I get paid?

Yes – we offer a small stipend on a per post basis.

Alrighty, then. How do I apply?

Email us a note and bio to questeditor@kqed.org explaining what you'd like to write for us. Please also include some links to relevant blogs you admire, and/or participate in, and why. Send us a writing sample or two (links are fine), and we'll review it in the next couple weeks. Last day to submit is February 1st. Our hope is to bring aboard a few new bloggers by mid-February.

Some beats we're interested in

Although we want to hear from a wide range of writers, here are a few coverage areas we're keen on in particular:

• Bay ecology background and issues
• Science education
• Silicon Valley / engineering innovations
• Hacks, DIY, and hands-on science activities
• Hiking and outdoors (with a science focus)
• Food science
• Convergence of art & science
• Nature & science photography

Writing Guidelines

(As laid out by our managing editor, Paul Rogers)

Why does my grandmother care? A key requirement of QUEST bloggers will be to explain scientific and environmental issues in a way that the general public can understand. Our audience is mostly made up of people who aren’t scientists or environmental activists. Posts should explain why the topics they are writing about are relevant to Bay Area residents.

Get to the point. Studies have shown that readers spend only a minute or two on most web sites before moving on. The average reader reads about 200 words a minute. Write tight, and lively. Keep it interesting and informative.

Avoid jargon. The purpose of good writing is to communicate clearly. Don’t use complex, esoteric scientific terms. Instead of saying "non-point source pollution," say "polluted runoff." Instead of "extravehicular activity," say “space walk.”

Be personal. Relate personal experiences. Speak in the first person. Tell them where you saw the blue herons or which movie best depicts what a real moon base might look like. Find your own voice and write in a compelling, approachable way.

Be passionate. Write about subjects and topics that you care about. Please don’t feel you have to stick to a script or formula. Express yourself.

Drive traffic to the blog. Place a link in your correspondence and comments to the blog. Mention it on other web forums.

Write for the bigger picture. Don’t view the blog as a place just to promote your institution or pet cause. Keep in mind your audience is made up of a wide diversity of people, with wide interests.

Speak your mind, but check your facts. Or your audience will do it for you with painful results.

Know your fellow bloggers. You'll be part of a vibrant community with fresh ideas and discussions nearly every day. Don't be afraid to comment on their posts, or link to their entries. Have fun with it! Dreary bloggers or insufferable policy wonks need not apply.

From hackerspaces to banana slugs, flying telescopes to cheese — it's been a quite a diverse year of storytelling here at QUEST. Here's a round-up of the top 10 video and audio stories and blog posts (based on page views) that you've enjoyed from the past year. Please let us know what other stories you've enjoyed in the comments section below, and if there's anything you'd like to see in the coming season!



VIDEO:

Nanotechnology Takes Off

Stem Cell Gold Rush
Science on the SPOT: Banana Slugs Unpeeled
Berkeley Lab Physicist Shares Nobel
Science on the SPOT: Open Source Creativity – Hackerspaces
Super Laser at the National Ignition Facility
The World's Most Powerful Microscope
The Science & Art of Cheese
Mt. Umunhum: Return to the Summit
The Fierce Humboldt Squid

AUDIO:

Up All Night on NASA's Flying Telescope</a>

The Lost Lagoon
Energy-Saving Windows Get Smarter
The Amazing Transformation of San Francisco's "Sludge Puddle"
Supercomputers Hit an Energy Wall
From Tunnel to Tap: Quake-Proofing Our Water Supply
"A Big, Captivating Idea": The Bay Area Ridge Trail
Architecture for the Birds
Gulls Threaten South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Work
In a Sea of Energy Data, Utilities Try to Inspire Conservation

BLOG:

Explosive hypothesis about humans' lack of genetic diversity
Diet Sodas May Not Be As Harmless As You Think
Health Officials to Consider Tightening Vaccine Exemptions
Scientists Understand Heart Disease Better, Still Give Bad Advice
The Megalodon's Descendants
Famous African American Scientists & Innovators: Part II
Swine Flu – A Virus or a Bacteria?
Cyber Wolves in (Fire)Sheep Clothing
Why Do Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears?
15 Months Later, Rediscovered San Francisco Plant Thrives

Photo courtesy of visual velocity pc.

Yorba is a non-profit startup in San Francisco that is on a mission to bring quality multimedia programs to the free desktop. Founded in January 2009 by Adam Dingle, Yorba's team has created Shotwell, one of the most widely used open source photo management applications (similar to iPhoto on the Mac).

From its modest offices it the Mission, Yorba's team of half a dozen developers are not driven by the thrill of a big payout or getting rich quick — they're fueled by the idea of bringing multumedia software to the world. All Yorba's software is 100% free and available to anyone on the free desktop.

What is the free desktop?

Beyond the Mac and Windows war lies a different type of operating system — the free desktop. Operating systems such as Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian are built by a community of developers who provide them for free to end users like you and me. While open source operating systems have commonly been the stomping ground of uber nerds (more commonly known as "neck beards"), they have become increasingly user friendly and offer a variety of applications akin to what you might find on your Mac or Windows computer. Best of all, they are entirely free to run, copy and distribute to friends.

Anyone with some spare time and a passion for programming can write applications for open source and release it to the community. Quality can vary drastically among applications, and not all of the same user friendliness to their Mac/PC counterparts.

Adam started Yorba out of the frustration of not being able to find good audio recoding software for the free desktop when he wanted to record his guitar riffs. From that moment, the idea was born to create Yorba and build a variety of multimedia software that could be easily used, freely distributed and of excellent quality.

Screenshot of Shotwell, Yorba's photo manager

Adam is passionate about Yorba's mission and future. He says, "We want to see a world where artists working with photos, audio and video can use a free desktop for their work, where they have excellent free software for working with these media types and where they themselves can participate in the development and evolution of that software. We think that San Francisco is a great place for this to happen because it has a strong culture of art, technology, freedom and generosity, all of which are related to our goals".

Sounds crazy, right? Build a company to give software away! Well perhaps it is, but through private donation Yorba has continued on its mission. Thanks to Yorba's work, millions of people around the world have been able to access high quality multimedia software for free. For many that are unable to afford commercial software, Yorba (and the free desktop) provide opportunities otherwise out of reach.

Today the company has four applications available for users of the free desktop. Its photo manager, Shotwell, comes installed with Ubuntu. Fillmore, a multitrack recorder, and Lombard, a video editor, round out the multimedia applications.

Yorba is hiring. If your interested in working for Yorba or contributing code to their software, you can! To learn much more and to try out its software, visit Yorba.org.

Every day our lives are affected by the work of chemical engineers who specialize in solving problems through the use of polymers. Simply put, polymers are long “macro-molecules”, formed by combining carbon or silicon atoms with other elements like hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. The combinations form long chains of repeating chemical structures, each with a unique set of chemical properties and characteristics. Depending on the atoms used and their arrangement, engineers and chemists use polymers to create almost anything from a soft toothbrush bristle to a tough bullet-proof vest.

Some polymers occur in nature, like cellulose, amber, shellac, and natural rubber. Other polymers are manufactured by chemists and engineers, and are referred to as synthetic polymers. In an ongoing quest for better and more useful materials, these scientists aim to make substances tough enough to work in the bitter cold of Antarctica or under the immense pressures encountered thousands of feet below an ocean’s surface.

Becki Ramsay, Chemical Engineer at Parker- Hannifin Corp. in Cleveland, Ohio.

As a part of the “Great Job!” series that highlights exciting careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), a production crew with WVIZ/PBS ideastream®, in Cleveland, Ohio, spent a day with Becki Ramsay. Becki is a chemical engineer with the Hose Products Division of Parker-Hannifin Corporation. She and her team create hoses from synthetic polymers to meet the design specifications they get from mechanical engineers.

During our interview, Becki expressed to us why she decided early on to become an engineer.

Eventually, Becki decided that she was interested in polymers so she continued her studies to eventually become a chemical engineer.

As a result of her work with Parker, Becki and her team create hoses that remain flexible and convey power through hydraulic fluids while operating under the most extreme environmental conditions, whether it’s sub-zero temperatures or in an application that will pulse it millions of times. These hoses are absolutely critical in the operation of machinery used in industries such as construction, mining, forestry, transportation, and more.

Inside this Burst Test Chamber, hoses are filled with water and pressurized until they explode.

Every day, Becki works with chemists and other engineers to create and test the quality of new materials. On the day of our shoot, we visited the Burst Test Chamber. The chamber is made of armor-plated steel and bullet-proof glass. Inside the chamber, hoses are filled with water and pressurized until they explode. Many of the hoses have bursting points in excess of 14,000 pounds per square inch. That would be like getting hit by an explosion with more than 15 million pounds of force, or having to lift three space shuttles! During one of the tests, the hose exploded at nearly 16,000 pounds per square inch!

It was a fascinating day for us. Sometimes we take so much for granted that we don’t think about the interesting careers and interesting people who change our world with their inventions every day. Look around your house. If you look closely enough and think deeply enough, you’ll be amazed, too, by the number of everyday conveniences we have because of the ingenuity of chemical engineers like Becki Ramsay and the many other polymer scientists just like her.

Nestled among the trees, streams and undeveloped land in Northern Wisconsin rests an environmental, societal and political challenge. The pristine area, with its proximity to Lake Superior, the largest fresh-water lake in the world, is why its residents choose to live there, but the area is also home to 25 percent of the country’s iron ore reserves, a commercial value of $200 billion.

Pete Rasmussen and Jamey Francis embody the conflict residents in the area face. Both are from the area. Both went away for college. Both moved back to enjoy what the area had to offer. However, the former doesn’t want to risk the change an iron ore mine could bring, the latter feels the mine would staunch the change that’s already occurred.

The four and a half mile stretch of land in question straddles Ashland and Iron Counties in an area colloquially called Wisconsin’s Northwoods. Since 1965, Iron County, an area where a history of mining is celebrated through streets signs and family history, has seen its population decline by 80 percent. Some, like Francis, see the proposed mine and the thousands of jobs it offers either directly or indirectly as a chance to save the county with the one of the highest unemployment rates (8.6% in September) in the state.

“There’s not going to be any opportunity that I can see in the near future other than this mine,” said Francis, an apparel salesman and city councilman in the town of Hurley. “This is an economic game changer.”

The company proposing to develop the mine, Gogebic Taconite (GTAC), has sponsored community events for most of the last year and held open houses throughout the region in an effort to drum up support. GTAC has also lobbied Wisconsin lawmakers to change state law to treat ferrous mining separately from sulfide mining as Michigan and Minnesota do. Iron ore mining uses water and magnets to extract the iron while sulfide mining uses chemicals to remove the deposits.

Among the legislative changes the company wants is a finite time line for the Department of Natural Resources to approve or deny a permit request. GTAC is also interested in being granted the ability to mitigate damages to currently protected wetlands by creating 1 ½ acres of wetland for every acre damaged in the process.

Critics fear the legislation is code for simply ramming through a strip mine without concern to the environment.

“The possibility of poisoning the water for future generations isn’t worth it to me,” said Rasmussen, a freelance photographer, web developer and carpenter in the area. “We’ve known it would be a struggle up here to get by, and it is for a lot of folks and they have to maybe take a couple of jobs. But it’s worth it. It’s part of the price you pay to live in such a beautiful place. And we’re here to protect that.”

The Republican-led legislature is moving forward with legislation to change Wisconsin’s mining laws in order to “get people back to work.” The head of the State Assembly, Rep. Jeff Fitzgerald (R), says there’s “no more important an issue” facing lawmakers in the next few months.

The windows on the SmartHome let in heat during the winter and shade the sun's rays in the summer.

Reduce, reuse, and recycle. We’ve heard it. Some people practice it. But as energy and other natural resources become harder to obtain and conserve, more people are looking toward solutions for a sustainable future. SmartHome Cleveland, first located at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, was designed to create a vision for some sustainable technologies and practices that are available right now to people who are thinking about building or renovating their homes.

One of the biggest challenges in our country is to conserve our energy supply. Energy, usually starting in the form of natural gas or other fossil fuels, is burned or converted to electricity to supply heating, cooling, illumination, and other household conveniences. It is estimated that an average home wastes about 30% of the energy used for heating and cooling due to poor household insulation. The U. S. Department of Energy estimates an annual cost of about $1,900 per household in lost energy savings. And that doesn’t count the energy we use for lighting, appliances, computers, video games, and many other things we might take for granted.

So, what have the designers of SmartHome Cleveland done to address these and other environmental challenges? They have incorporated a variety of technologies to reduce this home’s heating and cooling demands to about 10% of that required by the average home, and they have reduced the need for primary energy consumption to about 30% of that used in the average home. Let’s take a closer look at some of these technologies and the strategies to employ them.

The first design principle was to create an air-tight system of super insulation. This involved installing an insulated concrete foundation and walls one foot thick that use a combination of synthetic foams and natural cellulose. High-performance triple-pane windows seal in the heat and keep out the cold. Even the joists and beams in the house’s construction were insulated to prevent conduction of the home’s heat to the outside. Even the little bit of heat that would normally escape to the outside is channeled back into the incoming air.

Large windows with a southern exposure are used to allow the sun’s heat energy into the home during the winter. Instead of a furnace, the SmartHome uses the sun’s heat energy and a small, ductless, air-source heat pump to provide winter heating. The inside-outside air exchange in the house is rated at about 0.6 changes per hour. A typical home exchanges its internal air supply with the outside about 3 to 6 times per hour. By comparison, a drafty, poorly-insulated home might be exchanging its complete air system with the outside as much as 20 times per hour! In northeast Ohio, with winters averaging about 30 degrees Fahrenheit, you can calculate that you might have to heat a poorly insulated house 33 times for every 1 time in the SmartHome!

A solar panel array and a storage/conversion system provide the home’s electricity. Enough electricity is generated to power the heating-cooling-ventilation system and the energy-efficient appliances and LED lighting. The large southern windows also provide a special kind of directional shading. In the summer, when the sun is higher in the sky and more heat energy is concentrated in the northern hemisphere, the shading reflects the sun’s rays back toward the outside. The heat pump, insulated walls, and roof also help to maintain a comfortable summer temperature.

Outside the house, the roof, a rain garden, and pervious pavement channels up to 500 gallons of rain water and storm runoff to a storage cistern and irrigation system. This reduces the demand on the city sewer system and provides recycled water used to keep the shade trees, lawn, and garden plants healthy during the hot Ohio summer.

In the end, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History hopes people will “warm up” to this “cool house” by using components of SmartHome Cleveland design to improve our community’s use of its natural resources. In October 2011 the SmartHome was moved to a residential neighborhood in Cleveland’s University Circle area and will serve as a real home for a family so that further innovation and development can be conducted on its systems.

For more information on saving energy in your home, download the U.S. Department of Energy’s “Energy Savers Booklet (pdf).”

Additional audio, video, and images: "What Makes a Smart Home Smart?" Sound of Ideas radio report, WCPN ideastream.