Some articles
Jul. 9th, 2009 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on building structures out of glass.
To truly appreciate how glass can be used structurally, make your way to 233 South Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago. More precisely, make your way 1,353 feet above South Wacker, to the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower.
Once there, take a few steps over to the west wall, where the facade has been cut away. Then take one more step, over the edge.
You’ll find yourself on a floor of glass, suspended over the sidewalk a quarter-mile below. If you can’t bear looking straight down past your feet, shift your gaze out or up — the walls are glass, too, as is the ceiling. You’ve stepped into a transparent box, one of four that jut four and a half feet from the tower, hanging from cantilevered steel beams above your head. The glass walls are connected to the beams, and to the glass floor, with stainless-steel bolts. But what’s really saving you from oblivion is the glass itself.
The boxes, which opened last week as part of an extensive renovation of the tower’s observation deck, are among the most recent, and more outlandish, projects that use glass as load-bearing elements. But all glass structures have at least a bit of daring about them, as if they are giving a defiant answer to the question: You can’t do that with glass, can you?
You can. Engineers, architects and fabricators, aided by materials scientists and software designers, are building soaring facades, arching canopies and delicate cubes, footbridges and staircases, almost entirely of glass. They’re laminating glass with polymers to make beams and other components stronger and safer — each of the Sears Tower sheets is a five-layer sandwich — and analyzing every square inch of a design to make sure the stresses are within precise limits. And they are experimenting with new materials and methods that could someday lead to glass structures that are unmarked by metal or other materials.
“Ultimately what we’re all striving for is an all-glass structure,” said James O’Callaghan of Eckersley O’Callaghan Structural Design, who has designed what are perhaps the world’s best-known glass projects, the staircases that are a prominent feature of some Apple Stores.
Through it all, they’ve realized one thing. “Glass is just another material,” said John Kooymans of the engineering firm Halcrow Yolles, which designed the Sears Tower boxes.
It’s a material that has been around for millennia. Although glass can be made in countless ways to have any number of specific uses — to conduct light as fibers, say, or serve as a backing for electronic circuitry, as in a laptop screen — structural projects almost exclusively use soda-lime glass, made, as it has always been, largely from sodium carbonate, limestone and silica.
“For years, the basic composition of soda-lime glass has not changed much,” said Harrie J. Stevens, director of the Center for Glass Research at Alfred University. It’s the same glass, more or less, that is used for the windows in your home and the jar of jam in your fridge — and that old elixir bottle you bought at an antique store.
It’s basic stuff, but far from simple. “Of course, glass is an unusual material,” said James Carpenter of James Carpenter Design Associates, who has designed glass facades and other structures and was a consultant for the glassmaker Corning in the 1970s. “Since we don’t really know what it is.”
Although there has long been debate as to whether glass is a solid or liquid, it is now usually described as an amorphous solid (there is no evidence that it flows, extremely slowly, over time as a liquid). The noncrystalline structure is achieved by relatively rapid cooling below what is referred to as the glass transition temperature, around 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit for the soda-lime variety.
Cooled further and cut, pristine glass is very strong. But like a new car that plummets in value the moment it is driven off the lot, glass starts to lose its strength the instant it’s made. Tiny cracks begin to form through contact with other surfaces, or even with water vapor and carbon dioxide.
“If you take the freshly made surface and blow on it with your breath, you’ve reduced the strength of glass by a factor of two,” said Suresh Gulati, a mechanical engineer and self-described “strength man” who retired in 2000 after 33 years at Corning but still works for the company as a consultant.
Even one gas molecule can break a silicon-oxygen bond in glass, generating a defect, said Carlo G. Pantano, a professor of materials science at Pennsylvania State University. While glass is very strong in compression, tensile stresses will make these tiny fissures start to grow, bond by bond. “That’s what makes glass break,” Dr. Pantano said. “And if it doesn’t break, it weakens it.”
Protective coatings are one way to avoid new cracks, although they can affect transparency, which is the main reason for using glass in the first place. Changing the glass recipe can also make it harder for cracks to form and propagate. “There is some evidence that you can modify the composition to make it innately stronger,” Dr. Stevens said, although that risks altering other properties or making the glass too costly. (And glass projects are not cheap to start with; the glass in the Sears Tower project cost more than $40,000 per box.)
The manufacturing process can be modified, too, to keep the surfaces of the glass as pristine as possible. In one technique, used for laptop glass, molten glass is pumped into a V-shaped trough, spills over on both sides and flows down the outside of the V, joining together at the bottom into a sheet that continues to move downward as it cools. This way, each side of the sheet is a “melt surface,” exposed only to the air and not touched by any part of the equipment.
For structural purposes, glass is often strengthened the old-fashioned way — by tempering. This puts the surface under compression, so that even more tensile force is needed for cracks to grow.
For flat glass, heat tempering is most often used. William LaCourse, a professor at Alfred, said the process took advantage of one property of glass — that when it cools slowly it becomes denser. By rapidly cooling the exterior of a sheet (usually with air), the surface stays less dense. “Inside it’s still hot, and tries to cool to a more dense structure,” Dr. LaCourse said. “This pulls the surface into compression.”
In chemical tempering, sodium ions in the surface are replaced with potassium ions, which are about 30 percent larger. It’s like taking a suitcase full of summer-weight clothes and replacing the top layer with winter-weight items; the suitcase will bulge at the seams when you try to close it. Glass cannot bulge at the seams, so the surface becomes compressed.
Tempered glass may take longer to crack, but it can still break. Because surface compression must be balanced by interior tension, when tempered glass does break it forms many more smaller pieces than untempered glass, as more fracture lines release more energy. “The more it is strengthened the more pieces it will fly into,” Dr. Gulati said. An extreme example of this is a Prince Rupert’s drop, a small glass ball with a long tail formed by dropping molten glass into water. You can pound on the ball end with a hammer and it will not break, but snip off the tail and the ball will explode into tiny pieces as the tensile forces are released.
In structural applications, breaking into smaller pieces is often preferred, because these have less chance of causing injury. But tempering alone is usually not enough.
A primary concern when building with glass is what happens if and when a component breaks — what engineers call “post-failure behavior.” Unlike steel or other materials, glass does not deform or otherwise give advance warning of failure. If breakage occurs, maintaining the integrity of the structure is paramount so that people on or below it are safe.
That’s where lamination comes in. In a typical project, glass sheets (one-half-inch thick in the Sears Tower project) are bonded with thin polymer interlayers. The interlayers add strength and, should one of the glass layers break, keep the structure together, and the pieces from falling.
But lamination makes fabricating glass for structural uses very difficult. Since cutting into tempered glass causes it to break, each sheet must be polished and drilled for the connecting fittings before it is tempered. Tolerances are extremely small, to avoid potentially destructive stresses in the assembled structure.
“It’s doable,” said Lou Cerny of MTH Industries, who managed the installation at the Sears Tower, where the tolerances were one-sixteenth of an inch. “There’s just not a lot of people who want to get involved in it.”
No wonder, then, that those who build with glass look forward to a day when their structures will be unencumbered by metal or other materials.
“My goal has always been to reduce the amount of fittings in glass,” said Mr. O’Callaghan, whose Apple staircases use stainless steel and, occasionally, titanium to join the glass components.
Already, some engineers are using different glass shapes to reduce the dependence on metal. Rob Nijsse, a professor at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and a structural engineer with the firm ABT Belgium, has used large sheets of corrugated glass, mounted vertically, for window walls in a concert hall in Porto, Portugal, and a museum being built in Antwerp, Belgium. The shape helps stiffen the glass against wind loads.
Other designers think about using different kinds of glass. “There are so many amazing types of glass available,” Mr. Carpenter said. “There’s an enormous potential to transfer some of their characteristics into architectural uses.”
Using a glass that does not expand much when heated, for example, would enable components to be welded together, forming, in effect, a continuous piece of glass. Conventional soda-lime glass expands too much, so welding introduces stresses that can lead to failure.
Researchers at Delft have experimented with welding glass components. But low-expansion glass is much costlier than soda-lime glass.
Other engineers are starting to use adhesives to join glass directly to glass. Lucio Blandini, an engineer with Werner Sobek Engineering and Design in Stuttgart, Germany, used adhesives to create a thin glass dome, 28 feet across, for his doctoral thesis in a clearing in Stuttgart. “I think adhesives are the most promising connection device,” Dr. Blandini said. “It allows glass to keep its aesthetic qualities.” His firm is using adhesives in parts of structures being built at the University of Chicago and in Dubai.
But the long-term strength and reliability of adhesives has not been proved, so most people who work in glass think an all-glued structure is a long way off.
“We have way too many lawyers in this country,” said Mr. Cerny, the installer at the Sears Tower. “It’ll be awhile before we see that.”
On the increase in homeless people that occurs every summer
Summer Brings a Wave of Homeless Families
By JULIE BOSMAN
As the school year sailed to a close last month, Arielle Figueras crossed the stage in her cap and gown and proudly accepted her fifth-grade diploma.
The next day, she was homeless.
Arielle, a petite 11-year-old, and her parents, brother and sister packed their belongings and arrived at the intake center for homeless families in the South Bronx. Though they had been fighting with their landlord for months and their gas and electricity had long been shut off, they refused to leave their apartment while school was in session.
“She was graduating, so we had to wait,” Arielle’s mother, Marilyn Maldonado, said. “We just didn’t want to disrupt their routines. We couldn’t do that to them.”
Many New Yorkers view summer as a time for vacations, camp and lazy days at the beach. But city officials have been preparing for quite a different summer ritual: the swelling of the population of homeless families.
They call it the summer surge, and say that this year could be the worst yet.
Because the homeless population this spring was up more than 20 percent over last spring, possibly because of higher unemployment, officials are girding for an all-time high in the number of families in shelters at once, expecting close to 10,000. Already, the number has reached 9,420.
Other cities are noticing a similar trend. In Toledo, Ohio, one overcrowded shelter has been turning away dozens of people each night. In Charlotte, N.C., a shelter that is typically open only in winter has stayed open for the summer to meet demand, which is 20 percent higher than last summer. Across town, a Salvation Army shelter is so full, it has set up mats on the floors.
The reasons are varied but simple. Landlords who are reluctant to evict during winter are less hesitant when it is warmer. Parents like the Maldonados, who have endured poor housing conditions to spare their children agitation and humiliation at school, finally pack up and leave. And relatives who have taken in families in cramped apartments lose patience when children are suddenly underfoot all day long.
“When school’s open, families tend to stay where they are,” said Deronda Metz, the director of social services for the Salvation Army in Charlotte. “And when school’s out, they’re told it’s time to go.”
In New York, the number of homeless families applying for shelter in the summer has been 28 percent higher than the rest of the year the last three years. Their first stop is the intake center, a 24-hour, sprawling 66,000-square-foot brick building in the Bronx. They must walk through metal detectors, must submit to questioning from social workers and, after hours of waiting for their names to be called, are bused to a temporary hotel room or apartment.
Workers have begun to make room for the hundreds of extra families that are expected at the center this summer. On the second floor, all of the cubicles in one room were dismantled, replaced by rows of plastic chairs to make a waiting room for up to 114 people. Rows of boxy light gray metal lockers — each large enough to hold several suitcases — were installed. Employees at the intake center are being limited to one week of vacation during July and August.
Just a few hours after the public schools let out for summer, families began trickling into the center, their faces tight with stress. One woman walked briskly inside with her young son, who wore a bright blue backpack and held an armful of books. Another woman, who would not give her name, waited outside with her daughter, who had just finished second grade. “My sister said we couldn’t stay with her anymore,” she said, fanning herself for some relief from the humidity. “I said once she’s done with school, we’d get out.”
Arielle’s father, Douglas Maldonado, said that their landlord had stopped making repairs and had altered the building’s electric billing to make the Maldonados pay for other apartments’ power, up to $8,000 a month. But they held onto their apartment just long enough for Arielle’s graduation and for their son, Sabino Figueras, to graduate from eighth grade the week before.
The Bloomberg administration has run into trouble before with its handling of the summer influx of homeless families. In 2002, there was a public relations debacle when officials allowed hundreds of parents and children to wait in the intake office each day, more than three times the number that city fire codes allowed. Other families were placed in an empty men’s jail in the Bronx that was later discovered to have been contaminated with lead paint.
This summer, the administration will use a combination of existing homeless shelters that are not quite full and vacant apartment buildings that have been fixed up for homeless families, said Robert V. Hess, the commissioner of homeless services.
“We have a variety of options, so that we can be as nimble as possible,” Mr. Hess said. “We keep some reserve.”
One essential part of the city’s plan is to place families in hotels temporarily, some of which are used for both homeless people and paying customers.
Mr. Maldonado’s family spent its first few nights in a hotel on 145th Street in the Bronx. One of the mattresses in the room, Mr. Maldonado said, was filthy and stained with urine.
On June 28, Tarshima Dixon, a mother of four, went to the intake center with her 14-year-old son, Jason. Two more sons, Craig Dixon, 13, and Nahjee Johnson, 8, waited outside with their grandmother and cheerfully bounced a basketball on the sidewalk as Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” played from their minivan’s stereo.
The family was evicted in April, and Ms. Dixon’s mother did not have room for all of them. So Ms. Dixon, along with Craig, Nahjee and another son, Gregory, 16, moved into a shelter in Brooklyn soon after. Jason had been living with his father in Camden, N.J., but Ms. Dixon wanted him back with his brothers. They had to come to the intake center to let the city know there would be one more homeless person needing a bed.
“He just finished school this week,” said Ms. Dixon, who added that she was determined that the whole family would move into an apartment by August. “I wasn’t going to bring him here until he was done.”
On energy efficient incandescent bulbs.
Incandescent Bulbs Return to the Cutting Edge
By LEORA BROYDO VESTEL
SANTA ROSA, Calif. — When Congress passed a new energy law two years ago, obituaries were written for the incandescent light bulb. The law set tough efficiency standards, due to take effect in 2012, that no traditional incandescent bulb on the market could meet, and a century-old technology that helped create the modern world seemed to be doomed.
But as it turns out, the obituaries were premature.
Researchers across the country have been racing to breathe new life into Thomas Edison’s light bulb, a pursuit that accelerated with the new legislation. Amid that footrace, one company is already marketing limited quantities of incandescent bulbs that meet the 2012 standard, and researchers are promising a wave of innovative products in the next few years.
Indeed, the incandescent bulb is turning into a case study of the way government mandates can spur innovation.
“There’s a massive misperception that incandescents are going away quickly,” said Chris Calwell, a researcher with Ecos Consulting who studies the bulb market. “There have been more incandescent innovations in the last three years than in the last two decades.”
The first bulbs to emerge from this push, Philips Lighting’s Halogena Energy Savers, are expensive compared with older incandescents. They sell for $5 apiece and more, compared with as little as 25 cents for standard bulbs.
But they are also 30 percent more efficient than older bulbs. Philips says that a 70-watt Halogena Energy Saver gives off the same amount of light as a traditional 100-watt bulb and lasts about three times as long, eventually paying for itself.
The line, for now sold exclusively at Home Depot and on Amazon.com, is not as efficient as compact fluorescent light bulbs, which can use 75 percent less energy than old-style bulbs. But the Energy Saver line is finding favor with consumers who dislike the light from fluorescent bulbs or are bothered by such factors as their slow start-up time and mercury content.
“We’re experiencing double-digit growth and we’re continuing to expand our assortment,” said Jorge Fernandez, the executive who decides what bulbs to stock at Home Depot. “Most of the people that buy that bulb have either bought a C.F.L. and didn’t like it, or have identified an area that C.F.L.’s don’t work in.”
For lighting researchers involved in trying to save the incandescent bulb, the goal is to come up with one that matches the energy savings of fluorescent bulbs while keeping the qualities that many consumers seem to like in incandescents, like the color of the light and the ease of using them with dimmers.
“Due to the 2007 federal energy bill that phases out inefficient incandescent light bulbs beginning in 2012, we are finally seeing a race” to develop more efficient ones, said Noah Horowitz, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Some of the leading work is under way at a company called Deposition Sciences here in Santa Rosa. Its technology is a key component of the new Philips bulb line.
Normally, only a small portion of the energy used by an incandescent bulb is converted into light, while the rest is emitted as heat. Deposition Sciences applies special reflective coatings to gas-filled capsules that surround the bulb’s filament. The coatings act as a sort of heat mirror that bounces heat back to the filament, where it is transformed to light.
While the first commercial product achieves only a 30 percent efficiency gain, the company says it has achieved 50 percent in the laboratory. No lighting manufacturer has agreed yet to bring the latest technology to market, but Deposition Sciences hopes to persuade one.
“We built a better mouse trap,” said Bob Gray, coating program manager at Deposition Sciences. “Now, we’re trying to get people to beat a path to our door.”
With the new efficiency standards, experts predict more companies will develop specialized reflective coatings for incandescents. The big three lighting companies — General Electric, Osram Sylvania and Philips — are all working on the technology, as is Auer Lighting of Germany and Toshiba of Japan.
And a wave of innovation appears to be coming. David Cunningham, an inventor in Los Angeles with a track record of putting lighting innovations on the market, has used more than $5 million of his own money to develop a reflective coating and fixture design that he believes could make incandescents 100 percent more efficient.
“There’s enormous interest,” Mr. Cunningham said. “All the major lighting companies want an exclusive as soon as we demonstrate feasibility.”
Both Mr. Cunningham and Deposition Sciences have been looking into the work of Chunlei Guo, an associate professor of optics at the University of Rochester, who announced in May that he had used lasers to pit the surface of a tungsten filament. “Our measurements show that the treated filament becomes twice as bright with the same power consumption,” Mr. Guo said.
And a physics professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Shawn-Yu Lin, is also seeing improved incandescent performance by using a high-tech, iridium-coated filament that recycles wasted heat. “The technology can get up to six to seven times more efficient,” Mr. Lin said.
Despite a decade of campaigns by the government and utilities to persuade people to switch to energy-saving compact fluorescents, incandescent bulbs still occupy an estimated 90 percent of household sockets in the United States. Aside from the aesthetic and practical objections to fluorescents, old-style incandescents have the advantage of being remarkably cheap.
But the cheapest such bulbs are likely to disappear from store shelves between 2012 and 2014, driven off the market by the government’s new standard. Compact fluorescents, which can cost as little as $1 apiece, may become the bargain option, with consumers having to spend two or three times as much to get the latest energy-efficient incandescents.
A third technology, bulbs using light-emitting diodes, promises remarkable gains in efficiency but is still expensive. Prices can exceed $100 for a single LED bulb, and results from a government testing program indicate such bulbs still have performance problems.
That suggests that LEDs — though widely used in specialized applications like electronic products and, increasingly, street lights — may not displace incumbent technologies in the home any time soon.
Given how costly the new bulbs are, big lighting companies are moving gradually. Osram will introduce a new line of incandescents in September that are 25 percent more efficient. The bulbs will feature a redesigned capsule with higher-quality gas inside and will sell for a starting price of about $3. That is less than the Philips product already on the market, but they will have shorter life spans. G.E. also plans to introduce a line of household incandescents that will comply with the new standards.
Mr. Calwell predicts “a lot more flavors” of incandescent bulbs coming out in the future. “It’s hard to be an industry leader in the crowded C.F.L field,” he said. “But a company could truly differentiate itself with a better incandescent.”
Another article on bees in the city
Buzz kill
Preparing my back-porch beehive is my favorite rite of spring, but this year my flock mysteriously went missing. I'll miss more than just the honey.
By Novella Carpenter
Mar. 13, 2007 |
Bee! I'm expecting you!
Was saying yesterday
To someone you know
That you were due.
The frogs got home last week,
Are settled, and at work;
Birds, mostly back,
The clover warm and thick.
You'll get my letter by
The seventeenth; reply
Or better, be with me,
Yours, Fly.
-- Emily Dickinson
Spring arrived here in Oakland, Calif., and I didn't even notice until the police busted a marijuana-filled warehouse across the street. I was in my garden -- raised vegetable beds in an abandoned lot in the bad part of town -- picking grass and clover for my rabbits, when I heard pounding on the warehouse's metal roll door. Ten black-and-white squad cars screeched up, some emblazoned with the words "Canine Unit." I watched awhile -- the door came up cautiously, the police inched closer -- until, out of the corner of my eye, I was distracted by the most beautiful peach blossoms. Decorating the parking strip between my garden and the just-raided drug warehouse, the blooms were frilly and deep pink, and would have made a good tattoo.
Then I noticed other trees. A weeping Santa Rosa plum, branches like dreadlocks woven with white buds. A three-way grafted apple, each of its girlish pink-and-white blooms promising fruit, a different variety on every branch. Even the eucalyptus across the street, shading the police, was adorned by thousands of filamenty flowers.
All those blooms, but no honeybees.
Like commercial and backyard beekeepers in 22 states around the nation, I recently opened up my beehive for spring inspection, only to discover that my hairy herd had gone missing. For years, the beehive has presided over the deck off my apartment, and the bees bobbed in and out, loaded down with pollen baskets and nectar collected in my garden and in the weedy debris of nearby abandoned lots. But now, nothing.
They left behind no forwarding address nor clues to their whereabouts, and there were no corpses cluttering the hive for my amateur forensic inspection. My flock had simply wandered elsewhere, and likely perished. Bee researchers and and scientists at the Department of Agriculture have christened this unexpected bee holocaust Colony Collapse Disorder and hypothesize that the die-off could be a result of either a fungus, a nicotine-based pesticide, or a virus. (They're working on it.) But in the meantime, CCD could very well spell commercial disaster: for almond farmers whose trees won't be pollinated, for consumers who may face a shortage of apples and peaches and cherries because there are no bees to turn flower into fruit. While my livelihood may not depend on it, as the mistress of one hive on one porch in Oakland, the loss still came with an intense pang of grief, like a death in the family.
When a beekeeper dies, the bees must be informed. I learned this tradition a few years ago, while visiting Slovenia's Apicultural Museum. One of the exhibits was a short film. My mother and I watched as a grandfather trained a lederhosen-wearing boy to be a beekeeper. Shot entirely in golden late afternoon light, it was a bittersweet story, and near the end of the film the grandpa died. A final scene showed the boy hunkered near the hive, his lips moving in a whisper. I knew the boy would have felt the heat of the hive, generated by so many thousands of bees, and that it would have smelled like wax and propolis -- a rich ambrosial aroma. The bees whining through the box would have sounded like a wail. How consoling that act would be in the face of death.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Back then I hadn't yet experienced the loss of a hive -- I was too engrossed in the joyful part. Like installing new packages of bees -- one of life's greatest pleasures. The last one I got, the one that has now died, arrived at the Oakland post office three years ago.
When I pedaled up to retrieve my flock, a few lonely, feral honeybees hovered around the post office. It was April in Northern California, arguably the loveliest month of the year. The postmistress seemed unnerved by their arrival, but admitted she wouldn't mind some honey, if I got the chance. This was Oakland, not Mayberry -- but I nodded and promised anyway. My bike had a basket attached to the front and the humming package fit perfectly inside. As I rode down Telegraph Avenue, I laughed out loud at the bees that trailed us through the traffic and stoplights.
My first colony was a birthday gift, from my beau, Billy, while we were living in Seattle. He loaded me into the car and took me to a small beekeeping shop in the middle of the woods. He promised me a beehive with all the fixings: a smoker, a veil and cap, long, thick gloves, a hive tool, boxes to add as the colony grew, a starter book ("First Lessons in Beekeeping") and a small wire box filled with 3,000 bees and one queen suspended in her own chamber.
I don't have children, but that day I experienced a glimmer of what it must feel like to return from the hospital with a newborn. As we pulled our Dodge Dart away from the forest of Christmas trees, I wondered if I could handle such responsibility. What if I dropped the box? What if they grew up and decided to swarm, or to abandon me? But also, to be honest, I was thinking about getting stung. A lot.
Even if you've been stung before (when I was 12 I stumbled through a yellow-jacket nest and received more than 25 stings), as a beginning beekeeper you worry about your first sting. We're choosing to get stung. It feels a bit transgressive. It certainly seemed so to my next-door neighbor.
"You should move to the country," Trudy said when she saw my buzzing shoe box. She was out on her lawn, trimming the grass with a pair of scissors. Next to her lawn was our raised parking strip garden, a chaotic jumble of tall stalks of fava beans, lettuces and Swiss chard. Most city ordinances allow beekeeping if there is adequate distance from the hive to any neighboring structures. Since we planned to house the hive on our upstairs deck, we were within that legal boundary. And so I marched upstairs to our deck clutching the bee package, hoping I looked like I knew what I was doing.
I put on as much clothing as possible. Triple shirts; a mechanic's jumpsuit; several pairs of socks, hiked up and tucked into my pants; heavy-duty fabric beekeeping gloves (regretting I hadn't bought the more expensive leather ones), and finally, my veil. Swaddled as I was, I could barely put down my arms.
The sun was going down, that lovely April day. I set up the hive to face due east so it would get early morning sun. Installing the bees later in the day avoids confusing them, for they like to spend at least a night in their hive before venturing out. I pried the lid off the bee package and, as instructed, tilted the opening toward the fresh hive body, with its orderly rows of frames just waiting to be filled with honey.
The bees fell out like a liquid, spilling into the box without incident. The bearish man who'd sold them to me had demonstrated how to tap the box out -- like a ketchup bottle -- which I did to get the last of the stragglers. Because of my fear and the sheer volume of my clothing, I had a slick of sweat dripping down my back. But my terror was unfounded: The bees were entirely docile.
Finally, out of the then mostly empty box, I fished out the queen chamber. A few bees, her attendants, clung to the sides. At the bottom was a stopper plug made of candy. The idea is that the workers will eventually chew through the sugary plug and release the queen. But I wanted to see her. So, against proper bee protocol, I popped the candy inward with the end of my hive tool -- and out she emerged. Her ass was enormous; she looked like some kind of exotic beetle. I held her on the top of the new hive, and she strutted across. Was it just me, or did she actually have the gallant air of royalty? Then she was gone, down into her chambers where she would lay all the eggs to keep the hive going.
Most of us carry around a pack of defining moments. Beginning that colony on a gentle spring day is one of my fondest. I received one sting: on my wedding finger.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Six years later, I've made room for a honey extractor in our living room. And each year during prime honey-extracting season -- late summer -- I invite friends over for a sticky party. In preparation, the night before we place a "bee escape" under the super, the box where the honey is stored. The escape allows the bees trapped in the box to flee through narrow tunnels, but prevents them from returning to the box once they've left.
After 12 hours, the entire box of honey is bee-free, and we take it to the kitchen. The super looks like a bottomless dresser drawer, except inside, instead of socks, 10 frames are crammed side by side, lined up like library books. Inside each one, a Bible-size chunk of sealed honeycomb hangs suspended in the rectangular frame. We spin the extractor and centrifugal force splatters the honey on the stainless steel sides, where it drips down and collects at the bottom. Most "real" beekeepers use an extractor with a motor, heaters and filters. But our guests simply steady the hand-spun extractor (which has a tendency to keel over), and crank it as hard as they can. Then they open the valve at the bottom and let the honey dribble out into quart-size Mason jars.
At these gatherings, everyone gets covered in honey, and we eat as much in one sitting as we can bear. The harvest is different every year, and the flavor of the honey can even vary from frame to frame. If a frame appears darker in color, we'll spin and bottle it separately. One year the honey tasted like licorice -- was it from the wild fennel filling so many abandoned lots? Another frame held eucalyptus honey, which had a medicinal taste to it. A different time, the honey was so sweet, it hurt. But no matter how it tastes, the experience always makes everyone involved feel richer for it -- charmed, elated, sated.
Afterward, when I return the honey super to the hive, the bees are always more apt to sting, and they seem, well, upset. That's why beekeepers call it robbing the hive. But bees don't organize a block watch or call the police; they simply get back to doing what they do, which is to salvage any remaining honey and wax and clean up the now mostly empty frames. I take, they give.
But this spring will be different. My honeybees won't pollinate my fruit trees. There'll be no sticky party this summer. My home will seem empty without their comings and goings. I'll even miss their stings.
In Slovenia, you're supposed to tell a hive when the beekeeper dies, but what are you supposed to do when it's the bees that have left you? Should I console myself and whisper into the hive, "It's spring. I'm expecting you." Lean into its warmth and whine, breathe in the scent of that insect cathedral? Maybe. But the box is as cold as winter now, and there's nothing inside to receive the news.
One on lead in urban gardens. I wonder if that affects the honey.
For Urban Gardeners, Lead Is a Concern
By KATE MURPHY
FRANK MEUSCHKE’S garden, which surrounds the house he rents in Brooklyn, is a bountiful source of tomatoes, snap peas, green beans, peppers, lettuce and multiple varieties of flowers. It is also, as he recently discovered to his dismay, a rich repository of lead. He had his soil tested last month, and the analysis showed more than 90 times the amount of lead expected to occur naturally.
Mr. Meuschke, an artist who specializes in landscape paintings, is well aware of the dangers of lead paint. “You know not to eat while you paint,” he said. And he had suspected that paint scraped off houses in his neighborhood might have left lead residue in the soil over the years. “But I really didn’t expect there to be that much,” he said.
Harmful even at very low doses, lead is surprisingly prevalent and persistent in urban and suburban soil. Dust from lead-tainted soil is toxic to inhale, and food grown in it is hazardous to eat.
Health officials, soil scientists and environmental engineers worry that the increasing popularity of gardening, particularly the urban kind, will put more people at risk for lead poisoning if they don’t protect themselves.
Thanks in part to the influence of the local-food movement and to economic considerations, more households in the United States plan, like the Obamas, to grow their own fruits, vegetables, herbs and berries this year — seven million more households, according to the National Gardening Association, a 19 percent increase over last year.
While the increased physical activity and access to fresh produce promised by this trend are certainly healthy developments, widespread lead contamination means that many people are going to have to do more than wear gloves and sunscreen to garden safely. The presence of lead in soil doesn’t mean gardening is out of the question, but it may require a change in plot design and choice of crops, and soil amendments.
“You won’t know if you’re at risk unless you test your soil,” said Murray McBride, a professor of soil chemistry at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., which because of concerns about lead in community gardens began a free soil-testing program last month in cooperation with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.
County extension services as well as local public health departments often offer free soil testing or can recommend schools or companies that do it for a fee. Individuals generally mail dirt in sealed plastic bags for analysis. Mr. Meuschke paid $12 to have his soil tested by the Environmental Sciences Analytic Center at Brooklyn College; some private companies charge as much as $50.
The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Housing and Urban Development advise (but do not require) remediation if lead levels in soil exceed 400 parts per million in children’s play areas and 1,200 p.p.m. elsewhere. But some states and cities have set much lower limits. For example, 100 p.p.m. is considered hazardous in Minneapolis. In the Netherlands, 40 p.p.m. is unacceptable. Unpolluted soil averages 10 p.p.m. Mr. Meuschke’s soil had lead levels of 939 p.p.m.
Since 2003, hazardous amounts of lead have been documented in backyard and community gardens in New York as well as in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Washington. Lead-laden soil has been found not only in inner city neighborhoods but also suburban areas.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor,” said David Johnson, a professor of environmental chemistry at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, where he has found lead concentrations as high as 65,000 p.p.m. in the yards of upscale homes. “Lead knows no socioeconomic boundaries.”
Excessive lead in soil is the legacy not only of lead paint but also of leaded gasoline, lead plumbing and lead arsenate pesticides. Although these products were outlawed decades ago, their remnants linger in the environment. Lead batteries and automotive parts, particularly wheel balancing weights, are still widely used and are sources of soil contamination.
Soil is likely to contain high levels of lead if it is near any structure built before 1978, when lead-based paint was taken off the market, or if a building of that vintage was ever demolished on the site. Pesticides containing lead were often used on fruit trees, so land close to old orchards is also of concern. And beware of soil around heavily trafficked roadways; it, too, is probably laced with lead. But environmental engineers and soil experts said any place is potentially tainted.
“It’s kind of a dirty secret nobody really knows about because we’re all distracted worrying about lead in toys from China,” said Gabriel Filippelli, a professor of earth science at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis who has published several papers on lead accumulation in soil. His and other research indicates lead levels in people’s blood correspond directly to the amount of lead in the soil where they live.
“We have been unable to identify the threshold of lead exposure at which there is no risk to health,” said Mary Jean Brown, chief of lead poisoning prevention in the Healthy Housing Branch of the federal Centers for Disease Control. “But we know the risk increases with increased exposure.”
Fetuses and small children, because of their rapidly developing nervous systems, are more sensitive to and suffer the most harm from lead exposure. Adverse effects include damage to the brain and nervous system, lower I.Q., behavior problems and slow growth. Adults may suffer cognitive decline, hypertension, nerve disorders, muscle pain and reproductive problems.
If soil is found to have high levels of lead, experts advise covering it with sod. Those who want to grow flowers or edible crops can either replace the contaminated soil or alkalinize it by adding lime or organic matter such as compost. Soil with a pH level above 7 binds with lead, making it less likely to be absorbed by plants and the human body if the dirt is inadvertently inhaled or ingested.
The White House is mixing lime and compost into the soil for its kitchen garden, which according to a National Parks Service analysis has 93 p.p.m. of lead — an amount above background levels but not considered hazardous to children or adults by the E.P.A.’s standards.
Dr. Filippelli recommends planting kitchen gardens with fruiting crops like tomatoes, squash, eggplant, corn and beans because they don’t readily accumulate lead. Lead-leaching crops, he said, include herbs, leafy greens and root vegetables such as potatoes, radishes and carrots. Dirt also clings to these crops, making it hard to wash off and thereby increasing the risk of ingesting lead.
But some experts advise planting greens, specifically Indian mustard and spinach, for a couple of seasons as phytoremediation, or plant-based mitigation, before growing crops intended for food. By growing spinach for three months, researchers at the University of Southern Maine lowered the lead count in one garden by 200 p.p.m. Of course, the lead-leaching crop cannot be eaten or composted and must be disposed of as toxic waste.
A safer approach, particularly in areas where lead levels exceed 400 p.p.m., is to build raised or contained beds lined with landscape fabric and filled with uncontaminated soil. Luckily for Mr. Meuschke, many of his edible crops are in containers or pots filled with dirt bought at nurseries.
But lead dust blowing in the wind or rain splashing off lead-painted structures can sully food grown even in raised beds or containers. Situating gardens away from buildings is therefore a good idea, as is washing produce thoroughly with water containing 1 percent vinegar or 0.5 percent soap.
“It isn’t that you shouldn’t garden if you find lead in the soil, you just have to manage the space,” said Edie Stone, executive director of GreenThumb, a division of the New York City Parks and Recreation Department that supports urban gardening. “You can’t assume what you buy at the grocery store is any safer.” Peanuts anyone?
An editorial on journalistic use of the word "torture"
A post on the deficit model of autism
An article on the totally unsurprising amount of heteronormativity (did I spell that right?) in Disney movies, which elevates heterosexual love to absurd degrees.
To truly appreciate how glass can be used structurally, make your way to 233 South Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago. More precisely, make your way 1,353 feet above South Wacker, to the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower.
Once there, take a few steps over to the west wall, where the facade has been cut away. Then take one more step, over the edge.
You’ll find yourself on a floor of glass, suspended over the sidewalk a quarter-mile below. If you can’t bear looking straight down past your feet, shift your gaze out or up — the walls are glass, too, as is the ceiling. You’ve stepped into a transparent box, one of four that jut four and a half feet from the tower, hanging from cantilevered steel beams above your head. The glass walls are connected to the beams, and to the glass floor, with stainless-steel bolts. But what’s really saving you from oblivion is the glass itself.
The boxes, which opened last week as part of an extensive renovation of the tower’s observation deck, are among the most recent, and more outlandish, projects that use glass as load-bearing elements. But all glass structures have at least a bit of daring about them, as if they are giving a defiant answer to the question: You can’t do that with glass, can you?
You can. Engineers, architects and fabricators, aided by materials scientists and software designers, are building soaring facades, arching canopies and delicate cubes, footbridges and staircases, almost entirely of glass. They’re laminating glass with polymers to make beams and other components stronger and safer — each of the Sears Tower sheets is a five-layer sandwich — and analyzing every square inch of a design to make sure the stresses are within precise limits. And they are experimenting with new materials and methods that could someday lead to glass structures that are unmarked by metal or other materials.
“Ultimately what we’re all striving for is an all-glass structure,” said James O’Callaghan of Eckersley O’Callaghan Structural Design, who has designed what are perhaps the world’s best-known glass projects, the staircases that are a prominent feature of some Apple Stores.
Through it all, they’ve realized one thing. “Glass is just another material,” said John Kooymans of the engineering firm Halcrow Yolles, which designed the Sears Tower boxes.
It’s a material that has been around for millennia. Although glass can be made in countless ways to have any number of specific uses — to conduct light as fibers, say, or serve as a backing for electronic circuitry, as in a laptop screen — structural projects almost exclusively use soda-lime glass, made, as it has always been, largely from sodium carbonate, limestone and silica.
“For years, the basic composition of soda-lime glass has not changed much,” said Harrie J. Stevens, director of the Center for Glass Research at Alfred University. It’s the same glass, more or less, that is used for the windows in your home and the jar of jam in your fridge — and that old elixir bottle you bought at an antique store.
It’s basic stuff, but far from simple. “Of course, glass is an unusual material,” said James Carpenter of James Carpenter Design Associates, who has designed glass facades and other structures and was a consultant for the glassmaker Corning in the 1970s. “Since we don’t really know what it is.”
Although there has long been debate as to whether glass is a solid or liquid, it is now usually described as an amorphous solid (there is no evidence that it flows, extremely slowly, over time as a liquid). The noncrystalline structure is achieved by relatively rapid cooling below what is referred to as the glass transition temperature, around 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit for the soda-lime variety.
Cooled further and cut, pristine glass is very strong. But like a new car that plummets in value the moment it is driven off the lot, glass starts to lose its strength the instant it’s made. Tiny cracks begin to form through contact with other surfaces, or even with water vapor and carbon dioxide.
“If you take the freshly made surface and blow on it with your breath, you’ve reduced the strength of glass by a factor of two,” said Suresh Gulati, a mechanical engineer and self-described “strength man” who retired in 2000 after 33 years at Corning but still works for the company as a consultant.
Even one gas molecule can break a silicon-oxygen bond in glass, generating a defect, said Carlo G. Pantano, a professor of materials science at Pennsylvania State University. While glass is very strong in compression, tensile stresses will make these tiny fissures start to grow, bond by bond. “That’s what makes glass break,” Dr. Pantano said. “And if it doesn’t break, it weakens it.”
Protective coatings are one way to avoid new cracks, although they can affect transparency, which is the main reason for using glass in the first place. Changing the glass recipe can also make it harder for cracks to form and propagate. “There is some evidence that you can modify the composition to make it innately stronger,” Dr. Stevens said, although that risks altering other properties or making the glass too costly. (And glass projects are not cheap to start with; the glass in the Sears Tower project cost more than $40,000 per box.)
The manufacturing process can be modified, too, to keep the surfaces of the glass as pristine as possible. In one technique, used for laptop glass, molten glass is pumped into a V-shaped trough, spills over on both sides and flows down the outside of the V, joining together at the bottom into a sheet that continues to move downward as it cools. This way, each side of the sheet is a “melt surface,” exposed only to the air and not touched by any part of the equipment.
For structural purposes, glass is often strengthened the old-fashioned way — by tempering. This puts the surface under compression, so that even more tensile force is needed for cracks to grow.
For flat glass, heat tempering is most often used. William LaCourse, a professor at Alfred, said the process took advantage of one property of glass — that when it cools slowly it becomes denser. By rapidly cooling the exterior of a sheet (usually with air), the surface stays less dense. “Inside it’s still hot, and tries to cool to a more dense structure,” Dr. LaCourse said. “This pulls the surface into compression.”
In chemical tempering, sodium ions in the surface are replaced with potassium ions, which are about 30 percent larger. It’s like taking a suitcase full of summer-weight clothes and replacing the top layer with winter-weight items; the suitcase will bulge at the seams when you try to close it. Glass cannot bulge at the seams, so the surface becomes compressed.
Tempered glass may take longer to crack, but it can still break. Because surface compression must be balanced by interior tension, when tempered glass does break it forms many more smaller pieces than untempered glass, as more fracture lines release more energy. “The more it is strengthened the more pieces it will fly into,” Dr. Gulati said. An extreme example of this is a Prince Rupert’s drop, a small glass ball with a long tail formed by dropping molten glass into water. You can pound on the ball end with a hammer and it will not break, but snip off the tail and the ball will explode into tiny pieces as the tensile forces are released.
In structural applications, breaking into smaller pieces is often preferred, because these have less chance of causing injury. But tempering alone is usually not enough.
A primary concern when building with glass is what happens if and when a component breaks — what engineers call “post-failure behavior.” Unlike steel or other materials, glass does not deform or otherwise give advance warning of failure. If breakage occurs, maintaining the integrity of the structure is paramount so that people on or below it are safe.
That’s where lamination comes in. In a typical project, glass sheets (one-half-inch thick in the Sears Tower project) are bonded with thin polymer interlayers. The interlayers add strength and, should one of the glass layers break, keep the structure together, and the pieces from falling.
But lamination makes fabricating glass for structural uses very difficult. Since cutting into tempered glass causes it to break, each sheet must be polished and drilled for the connecting fittings before it is tempered. Tolerances are extremely small, to avoid potentially destructive stresses in the assembled structure.
“It’s doable,” said Lou Cerny of MTH Industries, who managed the installation at the Sears Tower, where the tolerances were one-sixteenth of an inch. “There’s just not a lot of people who want to get involved in it.”
No wonder, then, that those who build with glass look forward to a day when their structures will be unencumbered by metal or other materials.
“My goal has always been to reduce the amount of fittings in glass,” said Mr. O’Callaghan, whose Apple staircases use stainless steel and, occasionally, titanium to join the glass components.
Already, some engineers are using different glass shapes to reduce the dependence on metal. Rob Nijsse, a professor at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and a structural engineer with the firm ABT Belgium, has used large sheets of corrugated glass, mounted vertically, for window walls in a concert hall in Porto, Portugal, and a museum being built in Antwerp, Belgium. The shape helps stiffen the glass against wind loads.
Other designers think about using different kinds of glass. “There are so many amazing types of glass available,” Mr. Carpenter said. “There’s an enormous potential to transfer some of their characteristics into architectural uses.”
Using a glass that does not expand much when heated, for example, would enable components to be welded together, forming, in effect, a continuous piece of glass. Conventional soda-lime glass expands too much, so welding introduces stresses that can lead to failure.
Researchers at Delft have experimented with welding glass components. But low-expansion glass is much costlier than soda-lime glass.
Other engineers are starting to use adhesives to join glass directly to glass. Lucio Blandini, an engineer with Werner Sobek Engineering and Design in Stuttgart, Germany, used adhesives to create a thin glass dome, 28 feet across, for his doctoral thesis in a clearing in Stuttgart. “I think adhesives are the most promising connection device,” Dr. Blandini said. “It allows glass to keep its aesthetic qualities.” His firm is using adhesives in parts of structures being built at the University of Chicago and in Dubai.
But the long-term strength and reliability of adhesives has not been proved, so most people who work in glass think an all-glued structure is a long way off.
“We have way too many lawyers in this country,” said Mr. Cerny, the installer at the Sears Tower. “It’ll be awhile before we see that.”
On the increase in homeless people that occurs every summer
Summer Brings a Wave of Homeless Families
By JULIE BOSMAN
As the school year sailed to a close last month, Arielle Figueras crossed the stage in her cap and gown and proudly accepted her fifth-grade diploma.
The next day, she was homeless.
Arielle, a petite 11-year-old, and her parents, brother and sister packed their belongings and arrived at the intake center for homeless families in the South Bronx. Though they had been fighting with their landlord for months and their gas and electricity had long been shut off, they refused to leave their apartment while school was in session.
“She was graduating, so we had to wait,” Arielle’s mother, Marilyn Maldonado, said. “We just didn’t want to disrupt their routines. We couldn’t do that to them.”
Many New Yorkers view summer as a time for vacations, camp and lazy days at the beach. But city officials have been preparing for quite a different summer ritual: the swelling of the population of homeless families.
They call it the summer surge, and say that this year could be the worst yet.
Because the homeless population this spring was up more than 20 percent over last spring, possibly because of higher unemployment, officials are girding for an all-time high in the number of families in shelters at once, expecting close to 10,000. Already, the number has reached 9,420.
Other cities are noticing a similar trend. In Toledo, Ohio, one overcrowded shelter has been turning away dozens of people each night. In Charlotte, N.C., a shelter that is typically open only in winter has stayed open for the summer to meet demand, which is 20 percent higher than last summer. Across town, a Salvation Army shelter is so full, it has set up mats on the floors.
The reasons are varied but simple. Landlords who are reluctant to evict during winter are less hesitant when it is warmer. Parents like the Maldonados, who have endured poor housing conditions to spare their children agitation and humiliation at school, finally pack up and leave. And relatives who have taken in families in cramped apartments lose patience when children are suddenly underfoot all day long.
“When school’s open, families tend to stay where they are,” said Deronda Metz, the director of social services for the Salvation Army in Charlotte. “And when school’s out, they’re told it’s time to go.”
In New York, the number of homeless families applying for shelter in the summer has been 28 percent higher than the rest of the year the last three years. Their first stop is the intake center, a 24-hour, sprawling 66,000-square-foot brick building in the Bronx. They must walk through metal detectors, must submit to questioning from social workers and, after hours of waiting for their names to be called, are bused to a temporary hotel room or apartment.
Workers have begun to make room for the hundreds of extra families that are expected at the center this summer. On the second floor, all of the cubicles in one room were dismantled, replaced by rows of plastic chairs to make a waiting room for up to 114 people. Rows of boxy light gray metal lockers — each large enough to hold several suitcases — were installed. Employees at the intake center are being limited to one week of vacation during July and August.
Just a few hours after the public schools let out for summer, families began trickling into the center, their faces tight with stress. One woman walked briskly inside with her young son, who wore a bright blue backpack and held an armful of books. Another woman, who would not give her name, waited outside with her daughter, who had just finished second grade. “My sister said we couldn’t stay with her anymore,” she said, fanning herself for some relief from the humidity. “I said once she’s done with school, we’d get out.”
Arielle’s father, Douglas Maldonado, said that their landlord had stopped making repairs and had altered the building’s electric billing to make the Maldonados pay for other apartments’ power, up to $8,000 a month. But they held onto their apartment just long enough for Arielle’s graduation and for their son, Sabino Figueras, to graduate from eighth grade the week before.
The Bloomberg administration has run into trouble before with its handling of the summer influx of homeless families. In 2002, there was a public relations debacle when officials allowed hundreds of parents and children to wait in the intake office each day, more than three times the number that city fire codes allowed. Other families were placed in an empty men’s jail in the Bronx that was later discovered to have been contaminated with lead paint.
This summer, the administration will use a combination of existing homeless shelters that are not quite full and vacant apartment buildings that have been fixed up for homeless families, said Robert V. Hess, the commissioner of homeless services.
“We have a variety of options, so that we can be as nimble as possible,” Mr. Hess said. “We keep some reserve.”
One essential part of the city’s plan is to place families in hotels temporarily, some of which are used for both homeless people and paying customers.
Mr. Maldonado’s family spent its first few nights in a hotel on 145th Street in the Bronx. One of the mattresses in the room, Mr. Maldonado said, was filthy and stained with urine.
On June 28, Tarshima Dixon, a mother of four, went to the intake center with her 14-year-old son, Jason. Two more sons, Craig Dixon, 13, and Nahjee Johnson, 8, waited outside with their grandmother and cheerfully bounced a basketball on the sidewalk as Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” played from their minivan’s stereo.
The family was evicted in April, and Ms. Dixon’s mother did not have room for all of them. So Ms. Dixon, along with Craig, Nahjee and another son, Gregory, 16, moved into a shelter in Brooklyn soon after. Jason had been living with his father in Camden, N.J., but Ms. Dixon wanted him back with his brothers. They had to come to the intake center to let the city know there would be one more homeless person needing a bed.
“He just finished school this week,” said Ms. Dixon, who added that she was determined that the whole family would move into an apartment by August. “I wasn’t going to bring him here until he was done.”
On energy efficient incandescent bulbs.
Incandescent Bulbs Return to the Cutting Edge
By LEORA BROYDO VESTEL
SANTA ROSA, Calif. — When Congress passed a new energy law two years ago, obituaries were written for the incandescent light bulb. The law set tough efficiency standards, due to take effect in 2012, that no traditional incandescent bulb on the market could meet, and a century-old technology that helped create the modern world seemed to be doomed.
But as it turns out, the obituaries were premature.
Researchers across the country have been racing to breathe new life into Thomas Edison’s light bulb, a pursuit that accelerated with the new legislation. Amid that footrace, one company is already marketing limited quantities of incandescent bulbs that meet the 2012 standard, and researchers are promising a wave of innovative products in the next few years.
Indeed, the incandescent bulb is turning into a case study of the way government mandates can spur innovation.
“There’s a massive misperception that incandescents are going away quickly,” said Chris Calwell, a researcher with Ecos Consulting who studies the bulb market. “There have been more incandescent innovations in the last three years than in the last two decades.”
The first bulbs to emerge from this push, Philips Lighting’s Halogena Energy Savers, are expensive compared with older incandescents. They sell for $5 apiece and more, compared with as little as 25 cents for standard bulbs.
But they are also 30 percent more efficient than older bulbs. Philips says that a 70-watt Halogena Energy Saver gives off the same amount of light as a traditional 100-watt bulb and lasts about three times as long, eventually paying for itself.
The line, for now sold exclusively at Home Depot and on Amazon.com, is not as efficient as compact fluorescent light bulbs, which can use 75 percent less energy than old-style bulbs. But the Energy Saver line is finding favor with consumers who dislike the light from fluorescent bulbs or are bothered by such factors as their slow start-up time and mercury content.
“We’re experiencing double-digit growth and we’re continuing to expand our assortment,” said Jorge Fernandez, the executive who decides what bulbs to stock at Home Depot. “Most of the people that buy that bulb have either bought a C.F.L. and didn’t like it, or have identified an area that C.F.L.’s don’t work in.”
For lighting researchers involved in trying to save the incandescent bulb, the goal is to come up with one that matches the energy savings of fluorescent bulbs while keeping the qualities that many consumers seem to like in incandescents, like the color of the light and the ease of using them with dimmers.
“Due to the 2007 federal energy bill that phases out inefficient incandescent light bulbs beginning in 2012, we are finally seeing a race” to develop more efficient ones, said Noah Horowitz, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Some of the leading work is under way at a company called Deposition Sciences here in Santa Rosa. Its technology is a key component of the new Philips bulb line.
Normally, only a small portion of the energy used by an incandescent bulb is converted into light, while the rest is emitted as heat. Deposition Sciences applies special reflective coatings to gas-filled capsules that surround the bulb’s filament. The coatings act as a sort of heat mirror that bounces heat back to the filament, where it is transformed to light.
While the first commercial product achieves only a 30 percent efficiency gain, the company says it has achieved 50 percent in the laboratory. No lighting manufacturer has agreed yet to bring the latest technology to market, but Deposition Sciences hopes to persuade one.
“We built a better mouse trap,” said Bob Gray, coating program manager at Deposition Sciences. “Now, we’re trying to get people to beat a path to our door.”
With the new efficiency standards, experts predict more companies will develop specialized reflective coatings for incandescents. The big three lighting companies — General Electric, Osram Sylvania and Philips — are all working on the technology, as is Auer Lighting of Germany and Toshiba of Japan.
And a wave of innovation appears to be coming. David Cunningham, an inventor in Los Angeles with a track record of putting lighting innovations on the market, has used more than $5 million of his own money to develop a reflective coating and fixture design that he believes could make incandescents 100 percent more efficient.
“There’s enormous interest,” Mr. Cunningham said. “All the major lighting companies want an exclusive as soon as we demonstrate feasibility.”
Both Mr. Cunningham and Deposition Sciences have been looking into the work of Chunlei Guo, an associate professor of optics at the University of Rochester, who announced in May that he had used lasers to pit the surface of a tungsten filament. “Our measurements show that the treated filament becomes twice as bright with the same power consumption,” Mr. Guo said.
And a physics professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Shawn-Yu Lin, is also seeing improved incandescent performance by using a high-tech, iridium-coated filament that recycles wasted heat. “The technology can get up to six to seven times more efficient,” Mr. Lin said.
Despite a decade of campaigns by the government and utilities to persuade people to switch to energy-saving compact fluorescents, incandescent bulbs still occupy an estimated 90 percent of household sockets in the United States. Aside from the aesthetic and practical objections to fluorescents, old-style incandescents have the advantage of being remarkably cheap.
But the cheapest such bulbs are likely to disappear from store shelves between 2012 and 2014, driven off the market by the government’s new standard. Compact fluorescents, which can cost as little as $1 apiece, may become the bargain option, with consumers having to spend two or three times as much to get the latest energy-efficient incandescents.
A third technology, bulbs using light-emitting diodes, promises remarkable gains in efficiency but is still expensive. Prices can exceed $100 for a single LED bulb, and results from a government testing program indicate such bulbs still have performance problems.
That suggests that LEDs — though widely used in specialized applications like electronic products and, increasingly, street lights — may not displace incumbent technologies in the home any time soon.
Given how costly the new bulbs are, big lighting companies are moving gradually. Osram will introduce a new line of incandescents in September that are 25 percent more efficient. The bulbs will feature a redesigned capsule with higher-quality gas inside and will sell for a starting price of about $3. That is less than the Philips product already on the market, but they will have shorter life spans. G.E. also plans to introduce a line of household incandescents that will comply with the new standards.
Mr. Calwell predicts “a lot more flavors” of incandescent bulbs coming out in the future. “It’s hard to be an industry leader in the crowded C.F.L field,” he said. “But a company could truly differentiate itself with a better incandescent.”
Another article on bees in the city
Buzz kill
Preparing my back-porch beehive is my favorite rite of spring, but this year my flock mysteriously went missing. I'll miss more than just the honey.
By Novella Carpenter
Mar. 13, 2007 |
Bee! I'm expecting you!
Was saying yesterday
To someone you know
That you were due.
The frogs got home last week,
Are settled, and at work;
Birds, mostly back,
The clover warm and thick.
You'll get my letter by
The seventeenth; reply
Or better, be with me,
Yours, Fly.
-- Emily Dickinson
Spring arrived here in Oakland, Calif., and I didn't even notice until the police busted a marijuana-filled warehouse across the street. I was in my garden -- raised vegetable beds in an abandoned lot in the bad part of town -- picking grass and clover for my rabbits, when I heard pounding on the warehouse's metal roll door. Ten black-and-white squad cars screeched up, some emblazoned with the words "Canine Unit." I watched awhile -- the door came up cautiously, the police inched closer -- until, out of the corner of my eye, I was distracted by the most beautiful peach blossoms. Decorating the parking strip between my garden and the just-raided drug warehouse, the blooms were frilly and deep pink, and would have made a good tattoo.
Then I noticed other trees. A weeping Santa Rosa plum, branches like dreadlocks woven with white buds. A three-way grafted apple, each of its girlish pink-and-white blooms promising fruit, a different variety on every branch. Even the eucalyptus across the street, shading the police, was adorned by thousands of filamenty flowers.
All those blooms, but no honeybees.
Like commercial and backyard beekeepers in 22 states around the nation, I recently opened up my beehive for spring inspection, only to discover that my hairy herd had gone missing. For years, the beehive has presided over the deck off my apartment, and the bees bobbed in and out, loaded down with pollen baskets and nectar collected in my garden and in the weedy debris of nearby abandoned lots. But now, nothing.
They left behind no forwarding address nor clues to their whereabouts, and there were no corpses cluttering the hive for my amateur forensic inspection. My flock had simply wandered elsewhere, and likely perished. Bee researchers and and scientists at the Department of Agriculture have christened this unexpected bee holocaust Colony Collapse Disorder and hypothesize that the die-off could be a result of either a fungus, a nicotine-based pesticide, or a virus. (They're working on it.) But in the meantime, CCD could very well spell commercial disaster: for almond farmers whose trees won't be pollinated, for consumers who may face a shortage of apples and peaches and cherries because there are no bees to turn flower into fruit. While my livelihood may not depend on it, as the mistress of one hive on one porch in Oakland, the loss still came with an intense pang of grief, like a death in the family.
When a beekeeper dies, the bees must be informed. I learned this tradition a few years ago, while visiting Slovenia's Apicultural Museum. One of the exhibits was a short film. My mother and I watched as a grandfather trained a lederhosen-wearing boy to be a beekeeper. Shot entirely in golden late afternoon light, it was a bittersweet story, and near the end of the film the grandpa died. A final scene showed the boy hunkered near the hive, his lips moving in a whisper. I knew the boy would have felt the heat of the hive, generated by so many thousands of bees, and that it would have smelled like wax and propolis -- a rich ambrosial aroma. The bees whining through the box would have sounded like a wail. How consoling that act would be in the face of death.
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Back then I hadn't yet experienced the loss of a hive -- I was too engrossed in the joyful part. Like installing new packages of bees -- one of life's greatest pleasures. The last one I got, the one that has now died, arrived at the Oakland post office three years ago.
When I pedaled up to retrieve my flock, a few lonely, feral honeybees hovered around the post office. It was April in Northern California, arguably the loveliest month of the year. The postmistress seemed unnerved by their arrival, but admitted she wouldn't mind some honey, if I got the chance. This was Oakland, not Mayberry -- but I nodded and promised anyway. My bike had a basket attached to the front and the humming package fit perfectly inside. As I rode down Telegraph Avenue, I laughed out loud at the bees that trailed us through the traffic and stoplights.
My first colony was a birthday gift, from my beau, Billy, while we were living in Seattle. He loaded me into the car and took me to a small beekeeping shop in the middle of the woods. He promised me a beehive with all the fixings: a smoker, a veil and cap, long, thick gloves, a hive tool, boxes to add as the colony grew, a starter book ("First Lessons in Beekeeping") and a small wire box filled with 3,000 bees and one queen suspended in her own chamber.
I don't have children, but that day I experienced a glimmer of what it must feel like to return from the hospital with a newborn. As we pulled our Dodge Dart away from the forest of Christmas trees, I wondered if I could handle such responsibility. What if I dropped the box? What if they grew up and decided to swarm, or to abandon me? But also, to be honest, I was thinking about getting stung. A lot.
Even if you've been stung before (when I was 12 I stumbled through a yellow-jacket nest and received more than 25 stings), as a beginning beekeeper you worry about your first sting. We're choosing to get stung. It feels a bit transgressive. It certainly seemed so to my next-door neighbor.
"You should move to the country," Trudy said when she saw my buzzing shoe box. She was out on her lawn, trimming the grass with a pair of scissors. Next to her lawn was our raised parking strip garden, a chaotic jumble of tall stalks of fava beans, lettuces and Swiss chard. Most city ordinances allow beekeeping if there is adequate distance from the hive to any neighboring structures. Since we planned to house the hive on our upstairs deck, we were within that legal boundary. And so I marched upstairs to our deck clutching the bee package, hoping I looked like I knew what I was doing.
I put on as much clothing as possible. Triple shirts; a mechanic's jumpsuit; several pairs of socks, hiked up and tucked into my pants; heavy-duty fabric beekeeping gloves (regretting I hadn't bought the more expensive leather ones), and finally, my veil. Swaddled as I was, I could barely put down my arms.
The sun was going down, that lovely April day. I set up the hive to face due east so it would get early morning sun. Installing the bees later in the day avoids confusing them, for they like to spend at least a night in their hive before venturing out. I pried the lid off the bee package and, as instructed, tilted the opening toward the fresh hive body, with its orderly rows of frames just waiting to be filled with honey.
The bees fell out like a liquid, spilling into the box without incident. The bearish man who'd sold them to me had demonstrated how to tap the box out -- like a ketchup bottle -- which I did to get the last of the stragglers. Because of my fear and the sheer volume of my clothing, I had a slick of sweat dripping down my back. But my terror was unfounded: The bees were entirely docile.
Finally, out of the then mostly empty box, I fished out the queen chamber. A few bees, her attendants, clung to the sides. At the bottom was a stopper plug made of candy. The idea is that the workers will eventually chew through the sugary plug and release the queen. But I wanted to see her. So, against proper bee protocol, I popped the candy inward with the end of my hive tool -- and out she emerged. Her ass was enormous; she looked like some kind of exotic beetle. I held her on the top of the new hive, and she strutted across. Was it just me, or did she actually have the gallant air of royalty? Then she was gone, down into her chambers where she would lay all the eggs to keep the hive going.
Most of us carry around a pack of defining moments. Beginning that colony on a gentle spring day is one of my fondest. I received one sting: on my wedding finger.
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Six years later, I've made room for a honey extractor in our living room. And each year during prime honey-extracting season -- late summer -- I invite friends over for a sticky party. In preparation, the night before we place a "bee escape" under the super, the box where the honey is stored. The escape allows the bees trapped in the box to flee through narrow tunnels, but prevents them from returning to the box once they've left.
After 12 hours, the entire box of honey is bee-free, and we take it to the kitchen. The super looks like a bottomless dresser drawer, except inside, instead of socks, 10 frames are crammed side by side, lined up like library books. Inside each one, a Bible-size chunk of sealed honeycomb hangs suspended in the rectangular frame. We spin the extractor and centrifugal force splatters the honey on the stainless steel sides, where it drips down and collects at the bottom. Most "real" beekeepers use an extractor with a motor, heaters and filters. But our guests simply steady the hand-spun extractor (which has a tendency to keel over), and crank it as hard as they can. Then they open the valve at the bottom and let the honey dribble out into quart-size Mason jars.
At these gatherings, everyone gets covered in honey, and we eat as much in one sitting as we can bear. The harvest is different every year, and the flavor of the honey can even vary from frame to frame. If a frame appears darker in color, we'll spin and bottle it separately. One year the honey tasted like licorice -- was it from the wild fennel filling so many abandoned lots? Another frame held eucalyptus honey, which had a medicinal taste to it. A different time, the honey was so sweet, it hurt. But no matter how it tastes, the experience always makes everyone involved feel richer for it -- charmed, elated, sated.
Afterward, when I return the honey super to the hive, the bees are always more apt to sting, and they seem, well, upset. That's why beekeepers call it robbing the hive. But bees don't organize a block watch or call the police; they simply get back to doing what they do, which is to salvage any remaining honey and wax and clean up the now mostly empty frames. I take, they give.
But this spring will be different. My honeybees won't pollinate my fruit trees. There'll be no sticky party this summer. My home will seem empty without their comings and goings. I'll even miss their stings.
In Slovenia, you're supposed to tell a hive when the beekeeper dies, but what are you supposed to do when it's the bees that have left you? Should I console myself and whisper into the hive, "It's spring. I'm expecting you." Lean into its warmth and whine, breathe in the scent of that insect cathedral? Maybe. But the box is as cold as winter now, and there's nothing inside to receive the news.
One on lead in urban gardens. I wonder if that affects the honey.
For Urban Gardeners, Lead Is a Concern
By KATE MURPHY
FRANK MEUSCHKE’S garden, which surrounds the house he rents in Brooklyn, is a bountiful source of tomatoes, snap peas, green beans, peppers, lettuce and multiple varieties of flowers. It is also, as he recently discovered to his dismay, a rich repository of lead. He had his soil tested last month, and the analysis showed more than 90 times the amount of lead expected to occur naturally.
Mr. Meuschke, an artist who specializes in landscape paintings, is well aware of the dangers of lead paint. “You know not to eat while you paint,” he said. And he had suspected that paint scraped off houses in his neighborhood might have left lead residue in the soil over the years. “But I really didn’t expect there to be that much,” he said.
Harmful even at very low doses, lead is surprisingly prevalent and persistent in urban and suburban soil. Dust from lead-tainted soil is toxic to inhale, and food grown in it is hazardous to eat.
Health officials, soil scientists and environmental engineers worry that the increasing popularity of gardening, particularly the urban kind, will put more people at risk for lead poisoning if they don’t protect themselves.
Thanks in part to the influence of the local-food movement and to economic considerations, more households in the United States plan, like the Obamas, to grow their own fruits, vegetables, herbs and berries this year — seven million more households, according to the National Gardening Association, a 19 percent increase over last year.
While the increased physical activity and access to fresh produce promised by this trend are certainly healthy developments, widespread lead contamination means that many people are going to have to do more than wear gloves and sunscreen to garden safely. The presence of lead in soil doesn’t mean gardening is out of the question, but it may require a change in plot design and choice of crops, and soil amendments.
“You won’t know if you’re at risk unless you test your soil,” said Murray McBride, a professor of soil chemistry at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., which because of concerns about lead in community gardens began a free soil-testing program last month in cooperation with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.
County extension services as well as local public health departments often offer free soil testing or can recommend schools or companies that do it for a fee. Individuals generally mail dirt in sealed plastic bags for analysis. Mr. Meuschke paid $12 to have his soil tested by the Environmental Sciences Analytic Center at Brooklyn College; some private companies charge as much as $50.
The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Housing and Urban Development advise (but do not require) remediation if lead levels in soil exceed 400 parts per million in children’s play areas and 1,200 p.p.m. elsewhere. But some states and cities have set much lower limits. For example, 100 p.p.m. is considered hazardous in Minneapolis. In the Netherlands, 40 p.p.m. is unacceptable. Unpolluted soil averages 10 p.p.m. Mr. Meuschke’s soil had lead levels of 939 p.p.m.
Since 2003, hazardous amounts of lead have been documented in backyard and community gardens in New York as well as in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Washington. Lead-laden soil has been found not only in inner city neighborhoods but also suburban areas.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor,” said David Johnson, a professor of environmental chemistry at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, where he has found lead concentrations as high as 65,000 p.p.m. in the yards of upscale homes. “Lead knows no socioeconomic boundaries.”
Excessive lead in soil is the legacy not only of lead paint but also of leaded gasoline, lead plumbing and lead arsenate pesticides. Although these products were outlawed decades ago, their remnants linger in the environment. Lead batteries and automotive parts, particularly wheel balancing weights, are still widely used and are sources of soil contamination.
Soil is likely to contain high levels of lead if it is near any structure built before 1978, when lead-based paint was taken off the market, or if a building of that vintage was ever demolished on the site. Pesticides containing lead were often used on fruit trees, so land close to old orchards is also of concern. And beware of soil around heavily trafficked roadways; it, too, is probably laced with lead. But environmental engineers and soil experts said any place is potentially tainted.
“It’s kind of a dirty secret nobody really knows about because we’re all distracted worrying about lead in toys from China,” said Gabriel Filippelli, a professor of earth science at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis who has published several papers on lead accumulation in soil. His and other research indicates lead levels in people’s blood correspond directly to the amount of lead in the soil where they live.
“We have been unable to identify the threshold of lead exposure at which there is no risk to health,” said Mary Jean Brown, chief of lead poisoning prevention in the Healthy Housing Branch of the federal Centers for Disease Control. “But we know the risk increases with increased exposure.”
Fetuses and small children, because of their rapidly developing nervous systems, are more sensitive to and suffer the most harm from lead exposure. Adverse effects include damage to the brain and nervous system, lower I.Q., behavior problems and slow growth. Adults may suffer cognitive decline, hypertension, nerve disorders, muscle pain and reproductive problems.
If soil is found to have high levels of lead, experts advise covering it with sod. Those who want to grow flowers or edible crops can either replace the contaminated soil or alkalinize it by adding lime or organic matter such as compost. Soil with a pH level above 7 binds with lead, making it less likely to be absorbed by plants and the human body if the dirt is inadvertently inhaled or ingested.
The White House is mixing lime and compost into the soil for its kitchen garden, which according to a National Parks Service analysis has 93 p.p.m. of lead — an amount above background levels but not considered hazardous to children or adults by the E.P.A.’s standards.
Dr. Filippelli recommends planting kitchen gardens with fruiting crops like tomatoes, squash, eggplant, corn and beans because they don’t readily accumulate lead. Lead-leaching crops, he said, include herbs, leafy greens and root vegetables such as potatoes, radishes and carrots. Dirt also clings to these crops, making it hard to wash off and thereby increasing the risk of ingesting lead.
But some experts advise planting greens, specifically Indian mustard and spinach, for a couple of seasons as phytoremediation, or plant-based mitigation, before growing crops intended for food. By growing spinach for three months, researchers at the University of Southern Maine lowered the lead count in one garden by 200 p.p.m. Of course, the lead-leaching crop cannot be eaten or composted and must be disposed of as toxic waste.
A safer approach, particularly in areas where lead levels exceed 400 p.p.m., is to build raised or contained beds lined with landscape fabric and filled with uncontaminated soil. Luckily for Mr. Meuschke, many of his edible crops are in containers or pots filled with dirt bought at nurseries.
But lead dust blowing in the wind or rain splashing off lead-painted structures can sully food grown even in raised beds or containers. Situating gardens away from buildings is therefore a good idea, as is washing produce thoroughly with water containing 1 percent vinegar or 0.5 percent soap.
“It isn’t that you shouldn’t garden if you find lead in the soil, you just have to manage the space,” said Edie Stone, executive director of GreenThumb, a division of the New York City Parks and Recreation Department that supports urban gardening. “You can’t assume what you buy at the grocery store is any safer.” Peanuts anyone?
An editorial on journalistic use of the word "torture"
A post on the deficit model of autism
An article on the totally unsurprising amount of heteronormativity (did I spell that right?) in Disney movies, which elevates heterosexual love to absurd degrees.
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Date: 2009-07-24 04:18 am (UTC)(I've been griping about the Disney thing for years. Actually, I think it's Hollywood in general that has this "magical" view of romances. I consider it damaging even to heterosexuals.)