Stanford has three classes up for online registrations: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI), Introduction to Databases and Machine Learning. Since opening registration this August, over 100,000 people have registered for these three courses combined.

All three courses begin on October 10th. As with the Introduction to AI course, there is a basic track and an advanced track. The basic track requires participants to watch lectures and complete quizzes while the advanced track also requires homework and exam participation. Both tracks provide a certificate of completion.

With everything free, there are some limitations. These classes do not count as Stanford university credit and do not provide direct access to the instructor. I might not be an expert in computer science, but I am definitely interested enough to follow at least one of these classes.

Let us know in the comments what you think of Stanford's offer and if you plan to take any of these courses!

Photo by Randomskk via Flickr

A group of Stanford engineering students channeled their love of Star Wars to create a 'JediBot', a Kinect-powered robot that is strong with the force. Check out the video here.

JediBot wields a foam sword (or light saber) which can effectively fight against attack by another foam sword in an epic battle between the powers of good and the forces of evil (insert maniacal laugh, mwahahahahahahahaha).

Kinect hacking has been extremely popular since the device was released last year for the Xbox 360. The Kinect includes several cameras and infrared sensors which allow it to detect moving objects with a great deal of accuracy.

Programmed into the JediBot are a series of attack motions. Under normal conditions, JediBot would only be able to fight if it knew what attack was coming and could plan out its next move. However, thanks to the Reflexxes Motion Libraries developed by Stanford visiting entrepreneur and researcher Torsten Kroeger, JediBot can react to events on-the-fly in less than a millisecond.

While we might not see JediBot's roaming the street anytime soon, the ability for the robot to interact in real time could have a lot of wide ranging implications for the future of robotics.

By one estimate, there are 10 million alcoholics in the US. Photo Credit: Ralf Roletschek

Joseph McHugh is an artist who lives in San Francisco. Like his father before him, Joe had always been a drinker. But recently, it started to pick up.

“It sort of got out of control,” he says. “It wasn’t starting at five o’clock, it was starting at noon, when I’d have a couple shots and so forth.”

He was having blackouts, he says. He remembered nothing, but people would tell him stories of what he’d done. “Like what?” I ask him.

“Things I don’t want to even mention, ok?”

What brought McHugh VA Medical Center in San Francisco was a heart attack. It literally terrified him into sobriety. He's been dry a month now, slogging through recovery with other men whose lives have also become simply untenable.

Listen to the QUEST radio story The Search for Alcoholism's Miracle Drug

McHugh’s story is a familiar one to doctors who treat alcoholism, like Peter Banys, Director of Substance Abuse Programs at the VA.

“It's always a crisis,” Banys says. “And it can be a marital crisis, a family crisis, or job termination.”

Alcoholism is a very treatable disease, says Banys. Because of all the recent research, people like McHugh have more options than ever, including AA, therapy, and medication, which can be effective in preventing relapse.

Still, there are some challenges. First of all, the meds are a tough sell, Banys says. He says his patients often think of their alcoholism as a moral weakness.

“One of the things we hear a lot,” he says, “is I don’t want to depend on a drug. They’ve been depending on a drug for 25 years, they don’t want to depend on ours.”

Another problem is that drugs that once seemed promising have often fallen short.

Take Naltrexone, which was approved in 1995. Naltrexone blocks the brain’s opioid receptors, which make alcohol feel good.

“That was the great hope,” says Banys. “It kind of crumbled in our hands.”

On many people, Natrexone has no effect all. They’re just wired differently.

And that’s proven to be a useful insight.

“One of the things that we have to make clear is that alcoholism is almost certainly not a single disease or disorder. I believe that in the near future, we will be talking about “the alcoholisms.”

The fact of these “alcoholisms” means that researchers are now targeting specific kinds aspects of brain chemistry that might be involved in alcoholism.

Howard Fields directs Human Clinical Research at the Gallo Center in Emeryville, an institute devoted to alcoholism and addiction, affiliated with The University of California, San Francisco.

What interests him is something familiar to many of us: Impulsivity. Different people are impulsive to different degrees, just like rats, and other animals. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense.

“You want someone who would throw themselves on the hand grenade and save the lives of other people,” says Fields. “The same people who wind up in prison might be completely different in a battlefield situation. They might be the heroes.”

But in regular life, impulsivity can be a dangerous trait to have, says Fields. “If you score high for impulsivity, you are at greater risk to actually become an abuser or an addict. There’s no question about that.”

Fields says that in some people, impulsivity can be traced back to a specific gene. If you have it, you’re more likely to be impulsive. And it turns out, there is already a drug on the market that targets a function of this gene. It’s called tolcapone, and it’s prescribed to people with Parkinson’s disease.

So what Fields aims to find out is whether tolcapone might actually make people less impulsive. And if that’s true, whether it can help people limit their drinking. This research is now in human clinical trials.

Of course, even if the drug works for some people, it won’t work for everyone. The fact that there are “alcoholisms,” as Peter Banys put it, means that there may never be a single miracle drug.

But whatever the future holds, the goal of treatment will always look more or less the same: More people like Joseph McHugh, who have made the life-changing decision to get and stay sober.

McHugh says it’s hard to know what things will be like, once he’s out of rehab and back with his family. But he’s optimistic.

“I’m sort of glad that everything is where it is now. Because it is a change. It’s a necessary change."

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The nose of the star-nosed mole is much more sensitive than the human hand. Credit: Dr. Ken Catania, Vanderbilt University

Pain is the most common reason for trips to the doctor's office. So it makes sense that pain treatment is a huge part of our healthcare system, costing more than 100 billion dollars a year. But how exactly pain works is still a mystery in many ways.

Like any normal 9-year-old, Maddie Burkhardt was playing outside with her friends last summer, racing around in a pedal go-cart.

"And my foot slipped and it went under the go-cart. Like it got bent backwards," she says.

Maddie broke a bone in her foot. So, her mom, Danielle, took her to see a podiatrist, who put her in a series of casts.

"And every time he took the cast off, he said 'ok, you should feel much better now.' And she was just like 'no, it's killing me," says Danielle.

As the weeks went by, it became clear that Maddie's pain wasn't normal. "She would not allow anything to touch her foot at all. And we didn't really know what was going on," says Danielle.

Listen to the QUEST radio story The Science of Pain

Even a light touch, like the wind blowing, was incredibly painful. "It felt like there was knives in my foot. Like a big elephant smashing on your foot or something," says Maddie.

Maddie was diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome and ended up in a special treatment program at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto.

Dr. Elliot Krane, who heads the program, says "most of the time, pain is the signal that there's a problem and it's a useful sensation to have and a protective one."

But sometimes, our body's warning system goes haywire, like in Maddie's case. Nerve cells send out pain signals even when there's no reason to.

"It's a terrible pain problem," says Dr. Krane. "And it's one that we really don't understand the origins of. And because we understand so little about it, our therapy of it is also very rudimentary.

Krane says Maddie, like most patients, went through a slew of treatments, like physical therapy and pain medication. It took months to recover. "I can't exactly run really yet, but I can walk faster and I can play with my friends and do a lot more," Maddie says.

For the most part, doctors rely on opiates like morphine to control pain. But those drugs aren't very targeted. The challenge is that pain is very difficult to study. "There's other things and other processes in the body which are measurable in some objective fashion: heart rate, blood pressure, temperature. But how do you measure pain?" asks Dr. Krane.

Looking to Nature for Solutions

In a lab at the University of California-Berkeley, Diana Bautista has the same questions about pain. "Many people are trying to figure out how to do this. And we decided to look to nature to solve this problem."

Bautista is an assistant professor of biology at the University of California-Berkeley. She's peering into a large plastic tub filled with dirt.

A star-nosed mole at UC Berkeley. Photo: Kristin Gerhold, Bautista Lab.

"So, if you look here in the corner of the dirt, you can see that there's a star-nosed mole. Pretty interesting looking, right?"

Star-nosed moles have a very unique look. Their large pink nose has 22 finger-like tentacles that they use to feel for food in the dark tunnels where the live.

"What we don't see, that you need special high-speed video to see, is that they're actually tapping very rapidly the surface," says Bautista.

Compared to our fingertips, the mole's star has 10 times more nerve cells. "It's much more sensitive than the human hand."

That lack of sensitivity in human skin makes it difficult to study pain, because our nerve endings are so spread out.

We also have about 20 different kinds of nerve cells. Some detect pain, some detect light touch. Others detect hot and cold. "And so it's very difficult to study one in isolation or to separate the pain cells from the light touch cells."

That's where the star-nosed mole comes in. Its star is densely packed with light touch cells, but not a lot of pain cells. So Bautista says, studying tissue samples of the mole's star can reveal the differences between nerve cells.

"How does one cell feel the prick of the pin and the other feel the feather? We don't know what happens in those nerve endings," says Bautista.

Bautista says knowing what happens in normal nerves can tell a lot about when nerves don't work normally – like when diabetes patients experience numbness or cancer patients have hypersensitivity. That comes down to the biochemistry inside the cells. For that, Bautista is also studying another organism.

Peppers Targeting Nerve Cells

"These are Szechuan peppers that are from the Chinese prickly ash," Bautista says, handing me the peppercorns.

"Chew them a little bit in the front of your mouth."

As I chew, my tongue becomes slightly numb. "It feels like a little buzzing, tingling sensation," says Baustista.

The peppercorns aren't hot, but they do have chemicals that are working on my sense of touch. "We know that they target special receptors and cause those nerves to be excited just as if somebody was tickling your tongue," says Bautista.

That's a trick that humans could copy. "By indentifying the molecular mechanisms, we could really go in and design better drugs and come up with better therapies and alternatives for treating conditions like chronic pain," she says.

Bautista hopes the research will lead to more targeted pain drugs, so patients like Maddie Burkhardt will have an easier recovery.

Check out the star-nosed mole in action:

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Photos by L.A. Cicero

Stanford researcher Zhenan Bao is on the quest to develop "super skin" that could help us detect disease and other biological functions.

Bao's built a flexible sensor that is so sensitive to pressure it can feel a fly graze down on it. Bao is now working to have this artificial skin be able to detect chemicals and other biological functions that would otherwise go unnoticed. The skin will eventually be solar powered, using super stretchy and durable polymer solar cells that generate electricity.

"You can imagine a robot hand that can be used to touch some liquid and detect certain markers or a certain protein that is associated with some kind of disease and the robot will be able to effectively say, 'Oh, this person has that disease,'" Bao told the Stanford Report. "Or the robot might touch the sweat from somebody and be able to say, 'Oh, this person is drunk.'"

The "brain" of the artificial skin is a flexible transistor. The skin is touch sensitive due to the transistor containing a thin, highly elastic rubber layer, molded into a grid of tiny inverted pyramids. As pressure comes down on the transistor, this fine layer changes thickness, altering the current flow through the transistor. The sensors have from several hundred thousand to 25 million pyramids per square centimeter, corresponding to the desired level of sensitivity.

In using the super skin to detect a particular biological molecule, the surface of the transistor has to be coated with another molecule to which the first one will bind when it comes into contact.

"For any particular disease, there are usually one or more specific proteins associated with it – called biomarkers – that are akin to a 'smoking gun,' and detecting those protein biomarkers will allow us to diagnose the disease," Bao said.

To learn more about Bao's research, visit Stanford Report.

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UC Santa Cruz plant biologist Jarmila Pitterman studies an albino redwood tree

How many times do we parents of preschoolers hear that question each day? "WHY do birds fly? WHY does the wind blow? WHY do bees buzz? WHY are trees green? WHY do I have to eat my broccoli?"

"Because I SAID so."

"WHY??"

Science begins with our curiosity. The first step is to start asking questions, probably most often “Why?” and “How?” And as much as we wish it were different, in science, "because I said so" is never answer enough. You have to back up your case with some proof, or at least some compelling evidence. And even then, your case will likely not be accepted on its face as truth, but tested and re-tested, re-asked and re-proven via a time-tested set of agreed-upon steps. This is known as the Scientific Method: 1) Ask a question. 2) Construct a hypothesis. 3) Experiment. 4) Analyze your results 5) Repeat if necessary and draw your conclusions. 6) Communicate your findings. While we all come into our questions with personal or cultural beliefs, the scientific method attempts to remove the beliefs of the scientist when testing a hypothesis point the way towards a verifiable fact or facts.

Which, brings us to the rare and unusual albino redwood trees. We already know the facts about trees, right? We can usually answer the preschooler's question about why trees are green. But what if the tree is anything but green?

We don't actually have all the answers to that one. We can hypothesize that these ghosts of the forest must be mutants, and lack chlorophyll. But that’s the easy part. What we don't know, is WHY they lack chlorophyll, and survive. That's a trick that few trees anywhere in the world — if any– can pull off. So right now, we're guessing. And we can do better.

That’s what the research scientists at Stanford and UC Santa Cruz are out to discover. Believe it or not, until now the Redwood genome has never been sequenced. Stanford geneticists want to pinpoint the mutation or mutations that cause these trees to be albino. Plant biologists from UC Santa Cruz seek to determine how these trees survive and grow without chlorophyll and its instrumental role in providing energy for the plant.

In the QUEST Science on the SPOT story "Revisiting Albino Redwoods, Cracking the Code," we follow Stanford geneticists Ghia Euskirchen and Barry Starr from the redwood forests to the lab as they work to uncover the root of the mutation that causes albinism in redwood trees.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

In another Science on the SPOT installment, "Revisiting Albino Redwoods, Biological Mystery," we meet UC Santa Cruz plant biologist Jarmila Pitterman and tag along as she and her students study the inner workings of the unusual albino redwoods.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

This story is just beginning. They’re only in step 3 in the process; experimentation. But in time, the redwood genome will be sequenced. We will know where the mutation is. We will know how these albino trees survive and grow. And in the process we may learn things about the genetic heritage of redwood trees. We may learn more about how all redwood trees live and grow. We may learn how redwood trees adapt to things such as disease or climate change. The answers are endless. They are just waiting for someone to ask: why?

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Stanford and Intel take on visual computing.

To hear Stanford Professor Pat Hanrahan tell it, computer simulation of human behavior and appearance could someday become so life-like that a trip to the mall will be replaced by trying clothes on a virtual 3-D model of yourself.

That day may come a little sooner thanks to a research partnership Stanford has made with chip maker Intel. The technology company will fund research at the new science and technology center with $2.5 million a year for five years.

This center is the first of half a dozen science and technology centers that are being opened across the US, focused on driving innovation in computing and communications that could help make Hanrahan's vision a reality.

The center at Stanford will focus primarily on visual computing. The other universities in the Stanford-based center are the University of Washington, Cornell, Harvard and Princeton, as well as University of California campuses in Berkeley, Irvine and Davis.

"As high-end visual interfaces have become commonplace, our expectations have risen. A few years ago no one knew what multi-touch smartphones, tablet computers, Internet-enabled 3-D high-definition television, e-readers were, now they do," Hanrahan said during a press call to announce the program. "We will focus on visual computing, user experience and user interaction, with a range of devices that will emerge in the next decade."

Cell phone cameras could become tools in new forms of sculpting and drawing. Games will become more collaborative, with more life-like settings.

Take a common problem such as not being able to place a face with a name. Hanrahan envisions a time when you'll be able to use your camera phone to take a picture and look up the name. For governments, there are also major implications for this kind of technology. Law enforcement may be able to discern the law-abiding from the lawless using computers that analyze images.

"In the future, our smartphones, laptops and personal cameras will be doorways into augmented realities," said Hanrahan. "Our whole lives will be augmented and social networking will get more social. Facebook might become a virtual world where we meet with friends online."

Stanford students will get the real-world experience of working on campus with Intel scientists; Intel, in turn, will benefit from the creative ideas of these bright young researchers.

To learn more about this project, visit: http://visual.stanford.edu/

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Stanford researcher Ingmar Riedel-Kruse. Photo by L.A. Cicero

Games are practically omnipresent in our society, filling our social networks, computers and phones. A team led by Stanford researcher Ingmar Riedel-Kruse has taken gaming to an entirely new level, introducing life itself into games.

Riedel-Kruse and his lab have developed the first biotic video games. The player's moves directly influence the behavior of living micro-organisms in real time as the game is being played.

Players are able to influence the basic biological functions of single-celled organisms. The team's goal is for players to learn about biological processes and interact with them without having to go through the rigorous process of formal experimentation.

In total the team has created eight different games that allow players to interact with paramecia (the single-celled organisms used in numerous biology experiments). In one of the games, paramecia move around a small fluid chamber. A camera collects images of the paramecia moving around and sends the images to a video screen that has a game board of a soccer field superimposed on the image. A microprocessor tracks the movements of the paramecia and keeps score as the paramecia "kick" the virtual ball around with their movements in the chamber.

In Biotic Pinball, the player injects a chemical into the fluid at calculated moments, causing the paramecia to swim in one direction or another.

If you're worried about the effects these games may have on single-celled organisms, Riedel-Kruse assures that these organisms have neither a brain nor any ability to feel pain, so they are not causing any harm.

Riedel-Kruse tells the Stanford University News:

"We hope that by playing games involving biology of a scale too small to see with the naked eye, people will realize how amazing these processes are and they'll get curious and want to know more…the applications we can envision so far are on the one hand educational, for people to learn about biology, but we are also thinking perhaps we could have people running real experiments as they play these games."

To learn more about the biotic games being developed, check out this video.

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Artist's rendering of exoplanets around a star. (credit: NASA)

A team of researchers, led by NASA scientists in Mountain View, announced on Thursday the discovery of at least two Saturn-sized planets outside of our solar system orbiting the same Sun-like star.

News of these extra-solar planets or ‘exoplanets’ marks the first major discovery from the $600 million Kepler mission which launched in March 2009 on a quest to find planets similar to Earth in their composition and size that could possibly sustain life.

“The mission is designed to find several hundred such planets if they exist” said William Borucki, Principal Investigator of the Kepler science mission, based at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View.

The two new exoplanets which the astronomers named Kepler 9-b and Kepler- 9c – are 2,000 light years away in the Lyra constellation, and were found after analyzing seven months of data from 156,000 stars. Scientists believe the two planets are comprised of hydrogen and helium and are slightly less massive than Saturn, with the bigger of the two planets – Kepler-9b – orbiting the Kepler-9 star in 39 days, about twice as long as the orbit time for the other planet.

In 1995, a Swiss team found the first exoplanet passing in front of a star. Since then, there have been nearly 500 exoplanets discovered, though most of these have been large, Jupiter-sized planets that wouldn’t be capable of supporting life.

These large exoplanets were found with ground-based telescopes but now missions like Kepler and the European Space Agency’s COROT mission, which launched in December 2006, add an additional tool for exoplanet discovery with space-based telescopes that are powerful enough and presumably close enough to detect smaller, Earth-sized exoplanets.

“Mankind has been asking the question, ‘are there other planets out there, is there other life out there?’”, said Borucki. “In the next few years, we'll have answers to some of these questions.”

To help answer these questions, the Kepler spacecraft telescope is positioned 18 million miles from Earth, staring at hundreds of billions of stars. It can view more than 100,000 stars at a time that are a few hundred to a few thousand light years from the sun. A light year is roughly 6 trillion miles.

The telescope instrument is more than three feet wide, armed with an array of light sensor detectors akin to those found in a digital camera, only more powerful. But instead of taking pictures of a star, it measures the temporary dips in brightness from a star when a planet transits, or passes in front of the star.

By measuring these dips, how often they occur and how long it takes the planet to transit the star, scientists can confirm the existence of an exoplanet and how far it is from its star. By adding Kepler’s measurements to ground-based telescopes measuring the properties of stars, they can calculate the planet’s temperature, its mass and they can even infer the composition of the planet– whether it contains a rocky core or is mostly gas, for example.

Transit signature of a multi-planet system (credit: NASA)

Scientists said that it’s too soon to definitively confirm the existence of a third possible planet – about 1.5 times the radius of Earth – orbiting the Kepler-9 star. If it is confirmed, it would be the smallest exoplanet found to date transiting a star.

But this small planet would still be too hot to exist in the ‘habitable zone’ where water and possibly life could exist, given its close, 1.6 day orbit around its star. Similarly, the surfaces of the two confirmed gas giant exoplanets are estimated to be more than 2300 degrees Fahrenheit.

Still, by studying the orbits of the new exoplanets, scientists hope to uncover additional information, such as the formation and migration of planets as they gravitationally pull and tug at each other when orbiting the same star.

In June, the Kepler team announced they had identified more than 700 “candidate” exoplanets after the first 43 days of data collection, including six candidate planetary systems that appeared to contain more than one transiting planet in them.

But the challenge scientists have when identifying smaller exoplanets that transit in an orbit similar to Earth is that such transits occur only about once a year, compared to the more frequent, shorter transits associated generally with hotter, larger planets. So they need a sequence of four transits, typically, to get enough reliable data to confirm the existence of Earth-size planets, which is why the Kepler mission was designed to run for nearly four years.

Scientists are already looking ahead to future missions which may be able to expand upon Kepler’s discoveries.

“There are missions on the planning board that may be able to tell us what the atmospheres are like around these planets, do they have water in them, do they have C02 in them like our Earth’s atmosphere, do they have oxygen?”, Borucki said.

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A view of Stanford's campus, taken from Hoover Tower. Photo by Sheraz Sadiq

Originally reported for KQEDnews.org.

In 1888, when famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted drafted his master plan for Stanford University in Palo Alto, he drew the academic buildings along an east-west axis to efficiently make use of heat and light from the sun.

Now, more than 100 years later, a new generation of eco-centric builders and designers are embarking on a $250 million project to raise, retrofit and re-power buildings across the 8,000-acre campus, in the hopes of slashing Stanford’s greenhouse gas emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels in just 10 years.

The plan tackles energy demand in existing and new buildings, while also laying the groundwork for a new energy supply loop that powers, heats and cools the 125 biggest buildings on the main campus.

“It’s one of the most far-reaching efforts in the nation for a major research university to make a total transformation of a complete campus energy system”, said Joe Stagner, a civil engineer who directs Stanford’s Department of Sustainability and Energy Management.

Despite the steep price tag, the university estimates that by going greener it will save be saving lots of green – $639 million by 2050 through lower utility bills and operating costs.

Under the plan, which received preliminary approval by the Stanford Board of Trustees last fall, the energy savings are expected to build up with time. By 2050, the campus is projected to emit only 50 percent of the greenhouse gases it emitted in 1990.

“And that's a minimum, it doesn't mean that we're going to stop at 50 percent”, said Fahmida Ahmed, manager of sustainability programs at Stanford. She and Stagner wrote the new energy and climate plan that serves as the university’s sustainability roadmap and presented it to the Trustees in October 2009.

Although Stanford has pursued recycling, composting and energy efficiency since the 1980s, until just a few years ago, it lacked a single, cohesive campaign to shrink the university’s carbon footprint – a task made more urgent by Stanford’s steady growth spurts. By 2025, two million square feet of new academic buildings and housing are expected to be built for 2,400 additional faculty, staff and students.

“The whole idea to attack greenhouse gases gained momentum in 2006 and 2007,” said Stagner. “University stakeholders, including faculty from the Woods Institute to members of Students for a Sustainable Stanford and faculty and even some alumni, all of them let the university’s leadership know that they wanted Stanford to be more sustainable”, he added.

On average, the campus generates 262,000 metric tons – nearly 580 million pounds – of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases each year through direct sources such as generating electricity each day at an aging campus power plant, and indirect sources such as airline trips and commuting miles driven by faculty and staff. If no new initiatives are undertaken, pursuing instead a “business-as-usual” level of energy consumption and energy generation, Stanford is expected to produce 325,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases by 2020 and nearly 400,000 metric tons by 2050.

Stagner and his team realized early on that energy conservation improvements alone could not achieve substantial greenhouse gas reductions for a campus growing at such a fast clip.

“We had to come up with a comprehensive energy model that includes energy demand on one side and energy supply on the other side to inform how to best prioritize our work, to see what had the best return, environmentally, and the best bang for our buck”, said Stagner.

The biggest environmental gains, his team discovered, would come from overhauling the campus’ natural gas-fired power plant which has operated for more than 20 years and accounts for nearly 90 percent of the campus’ greenhouse gas emissions.

Since Stanford is situated in a Mediterranean climate, many of its buildings need simultaneous cooling and heating. Currently, the cooling system pipes chilled water into buildings to cool them and also remove excess heat that builds up inside them. As the water extracts the unwanted heat from buildings, it warms and is piped back to the central energy facility where massive cooling towers exhaust the excess heat from the water into the atmosphere. The loop continues, with the water being re-chilled at the central energy facility and sent back out to the buildings.

Conversely, heat and hot water are supplied to buildings in a separate loop. It uses steam, which is made as a byproduct of burning natural gas to generate electricity to power the buildings. The steam cools into hot water after it has been sent to the buildings, and then it is sent back to the central energy facility, where it is reheated and sent back out.

In October 2008, during a year-long audit of the campus’ hour-by-hour energy use, Stagner experienced an ‘a-ha moment.’

“I took a look at the data and saw that the potential for reusing the waste heat to heat the campus was much larger than we had hoped for and got very excited about the possibilities,” said Stagner.

Stagner realized that nearly half of the campus’ heating needs can be met through bypassing the cooling towers and reusing most of the heat which would otherwise be exhausted into the air. This new scheme of heat recovery is being called “regeneration.” Through it, the campus will also cut its water use by nearly 20 percent since less water would be used by the cooling towers.

The project won’t happen overnight, however. It will take five to 10 years, and university crews will have to dig up 10 miles of underground pipes that are currently designed to distribute steam – not hot water — to buildings.

When all of that is finished, the campus will be able to burn less natural gas to make electricity and will instead be able to buy electricity from utilities or from direct suppliers using renewables like solar and wind to green up the grid.

The electricity will power up to five new multimillion-dollar “heat recovery chillers.” The machines will form the backbone of the new energy loop, where warm water that would have been sent to the cooling towers instead will now be sent for further reheating and piped back out as 170-degree water to provide heat and hot water to buildings.

By the end of this year, Stagner will present to Stanford’s trustees an update of the heat recovery system and the broader energy and climate plan, which is receiving one last peer review to see if further greenhouse gas reductions are possible under it. But he and his team are already moving forward.

Stanford's new heat exchange unit. Photo by Sheraz Sadiq

Campus map showing the buildings where pipes carrying steam will need to be replaced by pipes carrying hot water. Photo and image copyright Stanford University

On a patch of land behind Memorial Auditorium, for the past six months, workers have been installing a $750,000 heat exchange station next to Stanford’s new business school, the Knight Management Center, which will open later this year. The station is needed to convert the steam currently made by the campus power plant to hot water, which will then be distributed through new pipes snaking underground that will serve 12 new and existing buildings when it fires up next summer.

Other universities, including the University of Rochester in New York and Auburn University in Alabama, also have converted from steam to hot water to meet their heating needs, but not to the extent Stanford plans.

In addition to the engineering plans, Stanford also is working to change the behavior of its students, professors and staff.

“We live in an eco-minded area,” said Ahmed, whose office worked with students to create a guide to sustainable living that describes how to reduce water and electricity use and act sustainably beyond the dorms and dining halls. “But for conservation to be a part of daily experience there needs to be incentives that we relate to and feel encouraged about.”

One Stanford program, for example, establishes an annual baseline of average kilowatt-hours used for an individual school or administrative unit based on past consumption trends. Then, it allows that school or unit to keep whatever money is saved if it falls under its budget for energy spending. In three years, the program yielded a three percent decrease in energy use and $830,000 for the energy-saving participants.

Last year, a penalty component was added, so now departments that go over their budgets are supposed to pay back to the university the cost of excess electricity they used. The Office of Sustainability wouldn’t reveal which departments were penalized, pointing out instead that “there are sometimes valid reasons for their energy usage going up” and that the budgets for electricity use “can and will be revised over time as a trend appears.”

“If an academic department isn’t responsible for its energy expenditures or budget, it is in the same position as a renter in an apartment who isn’t responsible for paying for the utilities. The renter has no incentive for energy efficiency or water efficiency. It’s just human nature,” said Stanley Young, a spokesman for the California Air Resources Board, in Sacramento.

Stanford junior Ishan Nath wrote an editorial last fall in The Stanford Daily, calling for an expansion of the incentive program so students could pocket some of the cost savings from lower energy use in their dorms.

“It seems that the double benefit of reducing greenhouse gas emissions while saving money is something we should be taking advantage of in any place we can and I think it’s really important that Stanford is leading in this direction,” he said.

Another key part of the Stanford plan to reduce greenhouse emissions is to retrofit existing buildings.

There are nearly 200 buildings on campus that are larger than 20,000 square feet, roughly the size of a small supermarket. A 2004 study found that 12 buildings accounted for 33% of the campus’ electricity use.

“We put together a new program to look at a single building in detail and go top to bottom and find energy savings opportunities,” said Scott Gould, a senior energy engineer with the Department of Sustainability and Energy Management who oversees the Whole Building Retrofit Program.

In 2007, the campus approved $15 million in funding to retrofit these energy-intensive buildings, many of which contain research labs built in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Some have annual energy bills of $2 million to $3 million each.

Two building retrofits are currently taking place, one at Gilbert Hall, which houses the biology department, and the other at the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine. The fume hoods in them are being fitted with valves that can more efficiently regulate the flow and exhaust of air, so that instead of 10 air exchanges in an hour, there may only be six or eight. New valves also will control the total amount of air supplied to a room.

“It’s a technology that wasn’t available in the ‘70s”, said Gould, whose job is compounded by the fact that the retrofit work needs to typically take place over short periods of time to minimize the impact to the still-active labs.

It’s easier to design super-energy efficient buildings from the start than going back and retrofitting old ones.

A view of the Y2E2 building. Photo by Sheraz Sadiq

The greenest building on Stanford’s campus – and a model for future construction – is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Energy + Environment Building, known as “Y2E2.” Opened in 2008, the four-story, L-shaped building uses 38 percent less energy and 90 percent less total water than older buildings – the latter feat accomplished in part by using recycled water for flushing toilets and rainwater for irrigating landscaping. Four atriums funnel natural light through angled skylights, and they also serve as the building’s lungs, drawing in fresh air and circulating heated air through vents that open and close automatically throughout the day.

A skylight inside the Y2E2 building. Photo by Sheraz Sadiq

Looking down the atrium inside the Y2E2 building. Photo by Sheraz Sadiq

Stanford also has solar power demonstration projects at seven locations on campus but they generate enough power currently to meet only two percent of the campus’ energy needs. Ahmed acknowledged that solar power has the potential to meet 10 percent of the sunny campus' energy needs, but the university is continuing to track progress on solar power technology before committing to its wider use on campus.

So far, students seem pleased with the university’s level of planning and implementation around sustainability.

“It’s a period of tremendous uncertainty in what’s going to happen with California’s climate policy,” said Nath. “Without knowing that, it’s impossible to fairly plan for what type of renewable energy to use, and it’s difficult to compare the financing to see what’s the best decision.”

John Ten Hoeve is president of the Stanford Solar and Wind Energy Project, a group run mostly by graduate students trying to promote renewable energy at Stanford. “I believe I speak for the group when I say that we are very pleased with the new climate and energy plan”, Ten Hoeve said, while complimenting its Office of Sustainability for being “open-minded” to opportunities to cut Stanford’s carbon load.

Stanford’s plan focuses on more near-term energy supply and conservation steps to curb campus emissions, but doesn’t fund much renewable energy at the moment. A chart laying out the expected emissions savings as color-coded wedges from building retrofits, heat recovery and other initiatives, has a wedge that corresponds to emissions savings through electricity generated by renewable means, like solar, wind and geothermal power.

Ten Hoeve pointed out that the ‘green electricity’ wedge doesn’t kick in fully, however, until 2035. “If Stanford were to produce its own renewable energy, through a few well-sited local wind turbines for example, it would be great PR for the university at little to no cost, which is why we hope it will happen sooner than later”, he said.

Some students think that an array of solar panels, such as the one adorning the Y2E2 building, do more than just green the grid.

“It’s important to have them in places where people can see them and when they come to Stanford, they’ll say, ‘oh, maybe solar panels are developing enough to be used on a wide scale’”, said Nath.

Junior Eli Pollak, a member of Students for a Sustainable Stanford, said he’s impressed by the Stanford plan, but would have liked to have seen more students involved in drafting it.

“In keeping with Stanford’s educational mission, it would have been beneficial for the administration to have drawn on the intellect of the students and the students could have gained real-world experience to address climate change and see how a large institution approaches climate change and energy planning,” Pollak said.

Stanford isn’t alone in trying to improve energy efficiency and reduce its carbon footprint.

The American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment has recruited nearly 700 college and university presidents to cut more than 30 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually across their campuses.

“The niche that we were filling was helping people learn from each other,” said Paul Rowland, executive director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, an organization that has created a tool to help universities and colleges that have signed the climate commitment measure and report their annual greenhouse gas emissions.

The first university to have achieved carbon neutrality, Rowland said, is the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, which it did in part by purchasing renewable energy credits to offset its greenhouse gas emissions.

Stanford has declined to join the organization ever since 2006 when it was first asked.

“Stanford commits to reductions it can meet. Committing to carbon neutrality without having the solutions at hand must have seemed not very authentic to the administration at the time,” said Ahmed.

Stanford’s energy and climate plan also does not endorse the use of carbon offsets or renewable energy credits, citing in part their “regulatory uncertainty,” which suggests the university is more focused on projects campus officials can directly observe, control and monitor to track the progress on its emissions reductions.

The chancellors of the 10 campuses that make up the University of California system have, however, signed onto the ACUPCC. The UC campuses have set a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2014 and to 1990 levels by 2020, while also eliminating all waste sent to landfills by 2020. After these targets have been met, the UC sustainability policy directs the campuses to pursue carbon neutrality “as soon as possible.”

“Over the past five years, the UC system has saved $15 million by replacing aging lighting, heating and ventilation systems and expanding the monitoring and metering of campus buildings,” said Matthew St. Clair, director of the UC sustainability efforts.

At UC Berkeley, energy efficiency projects such as changing leaky heating and cooling systems and installing more efficient lighting in its buildings, some of which are more than 100 years old, has cut the campus’ electricity use. At Tang Center, home to the university’s health services, an analysis revealed that the air circulation system was running 24 hours a day. So a new air circulation system was installed, saving the university each year enough electricity to power 46 single family homes.

UC campuses are also exploring projects that will generate a total of 10 megawatts of on-site renewable energy by 2014. To date, three of them – Irvine, Merced and San Diego – have one-megawatt solar panel arrays installed at each of their campuses. The solar array at Merced spans nearly nine acres and provides the campus with nearly 20 percent of its annual energy needs.

“As a public institution that includes a mission of public service, we need to demonstrate to the taxpayers and voters of California that we are being good citizens in reducing our environmental impact, cutting costs through efficient resource consumption and modeling sustainability leadership”, said St. Clair.

Stanford’s Stagner said he similarly feels that colleges and universities don’t need to wait for a blueprint from the government to start tackling climate change, adding that they have a responsibility to “to help create the scientific, human, cultural, and political solutions to it, and to educate tomorrow’s leaders so that they may continue to work on this challenge and advance civilization toward a sustainable future."

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