Solar Powered Building at Concordia University

Text and photo by Marie Powell

Buildings use a lot of energy. We only have to see a city at night to realize that. Harnessing the sun to power a skyscraper sounds like the stuff of science fiction - but in Montreal, it's becoming science fact.

Concordia University has been a leading researcher into renewable energy sources for at least 25 years. In December, 2008, it became the site of a unique 17-story building that gets its light and heat from solar power. It's called the John Molson School of Business (left), and it's the first of its kind. I saw this building first-hand in June, at a conference on the Concordia campus in downtown Montreal.

At the very top you can see the dark solar panels across the width of the building, called the solar facade. This facade provides provides both heat and electricity, and is known as a Photovoltaic/Thermal (PV/T) application.

On the Concordia website, there's a useful document explaining how the energy system works, complete with flow charts and close-up pictures of the panels (SBRN Demonstration Solar Project). According to this report, the solar panels take fresh air from outside and heat it as much as 20 degrees on sunny winter days, maximizing energy efficiency even in cold weather. That's important because, overall, buildings use about 30 percent of the secondary energy produced in Canada, such as natural gas and oil, and about half of its electricity. I wonder how much energy could be saved, if all of Canada's buildings got light and heat from solar power.

Many partners collaborated on this project, including Concordia's Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), and Conserval Engineering, a company that won a major Renewable Energy award for the PV/Thermal Solar Wall (this link shows an online video of the award.)

Here are some resources to check for more information:

"Concordia to head research into cold-climate solar power technologies" (Montreal Gazette, June 8 2006)

"Innovative Solar Technology Showcased in State-of-the-art Building," by Laura Nichol (NRCan website, March 2009)

"Le Quartier Concordia - John Molson School of Business," by Christopher Henry (Architecture Daily, July 2011)

SBRN Demonstration Solar Project (pdf document), Concordia website (www.bcee.concordia.ca)

Marie Powell is the author of Dragonflies are Amazing! (Scholastic Canada).

Book Review: Jurassic Poop by Jacob Berkowitz

Title: Jurassic Poop
Author: Jacob Berkowitz
Publisher: Kids Can Press
ISBN: 9781553378600


Book Source: library

That's right.  It's an entire book about fossil feces - more formally known as coprolites.  And what a book it is.   As the jacket blurb says, "Funny and informative, Jurassic Poop is flush with amazing facts, stories, and activities."

The puns, they write themselves - and I'm pretty sure Berkowitz uses most of them.  His tone throughout is light and funny - I'd call it tongue-in-cheek but under the circumstances that's a pretty disgusting thought - and perfectly suited to his middle-grade target audience.

There's a lot more to this book than scat jokes, however; it's full of wide-ranging and totally fascinating information.  Berkowitz covers everything you never knew about fossil doo - its formation, its discovery, and the identification of its sources.  He then goes on to discuss some of the wealth of information that can be gained by studying it.  The book also contains profiles of scat scientists and several activities - including a recipe for scent-free coprolite crafts.

Still not quite convinced?  Jurassic Poop won the 2007 American Institute of Physics Children's Book Award.  And when I hear giggling in the 9-12 nonfiction section at the bookstore, it's usually a sign this book's getting browsed.

For more information on Jacob Berkowitz and his books, you can visit his website, or watch for his posts right here on Sci/Why!

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Posted by Lindsey Carmichael.  For more of her children's book reviews, check out her blog, Ten Stories Up.

Henry Ford and the Green Car Revolution

By Judy Wearing

What does the history of invention have to do with modern technology issues?

The name Henry Ford is often associated with inventing the car. He did no such thing, though he did invent several models of car – the Model T being the best known. What Henry Ford did do was turn the car from a rich person’s toy into the main means of family transportation. This was a massive feat. To succeed, Ford had to overcome a long list of obstacles, which bear remarkable similarity to the obstacles facing the popularization of green car technology today.

Ford and his Model T had it rough…

Ford had a mission – at least one car owned by every family in America. To achieve this, he needed to invent a car that was strong enough to travel over rough roads. There were no garages and few mechanics around, so Ford also had to build a car that did not break down. He envisioned a car that was “so strong and so well made that no one ought ever to have to buy another one.”

The problem of price

And, so that every family in America could afford to buy this car, he worked for years and years to perfect the manufacturing process to bring the price down. The Model T in 1909 cost $950; in 1927 it cost $290. His investors did not like this strategy; they wanted to maximize profits. In response, Ford paid off all loans and went it alone.

The list goes on

The technology was expensive – Ford searched far and wide for materials to meet his standards cost-effectively.  Not only were garages and good roads scarce, but so were gas stations, car dealerships, and sales people. Ford had to create businesses to support the sale and maintenance of his cars.

Transporting the materials to build the cars – and getting them to his customers – relied on ships and railroad lines. These industries relied on income from passengers who would no longer need their services if they all had cars to get around. They were reluctant to help him; Ford had to develop his own rail and shipping companies to get around that one!

There was also some public resistance to the changes. Imagine the chaos on the roads, as horse-drawn buggies and generations of people used to travelling by horse were suddenly mixed with loud, fast machines.

The outcome

With ingenuity, Henry Ford overcame all these challenges. In 18 years, 15 million Model Ts were sold; transportation was changed forever.

What would Ford do now?

With the challenges facing society today, it sometimes seems impossible that green transportation can become commonplace enough to bring about the needed reduction in the pollution causing climate change.

The story of Henry Ford suggests that it is not impossible at all, though it will require determination and creativity. As Ford said, “If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, either way you’re right.”

Lesson plan: What Would Henry Ford Do Now?

Source: Wearing, J. (2009) Edison’s Concrete Piano: Flying tanks, Six-Nippled Sheep, Walk-on-Water Shoes and 12 other Flops from Great Inventors, ECW Press, Toronto.

Clam Gardens

The practical skills to handle small boats have real-life applications for modern work in the sciences. One field that puts canoes and kayaks to serious use is... intertidal biology! This summer, as a volunteer assistant, I joined a biology project. A friend in Straitwatch passed on an appeal from a biologist for volunteers to stay at an isolated campsite on Quadra Island, and take samples from beaches. Paddling skills were needed, so I brought my little kayak. I joined three other volunteers and Amy Groesbach for five days on the shores of Waiatt Bay, a sheltered inlet with several small islands that make up Octopus Islands Marine Park. Amy Groesbach took these photos. To see lots of pictures of how she and her mentors investigate traditional First Nations clam gardens, go to her Flickr page and check out her photo galleries for those labelled "Clam Garden 2011 - Trip 1" through Trip 4. And here's Amy holding one of the squares she made out of 1-inch PVC tubing, so we could dig holes exactly 25 cm across. We had to dig them 30 cm deep, which is exactly the length from my elbow to my knuckles. In a few beaches, there were experiments placed where Amy buried hand-made mesh bags holding living clams, and retreived them later. I learned how to make a sampling device. A kitchen scrubber called a Tuffy was attached to a ten-inch piece of rebar with a cable tie. Easy as pie. After the rebar was pounded into a clam garden, the Tuffy would collect clam spat. Intertidal biologists have been inventing devices to collect clam spat. Someone tried using kitchen scrubbers, and found the Tuffy brand was particularly effective. The fun part is pounding the rebar into the garden, when the pounding has to be done underwater. Smack! Smack! into the water. "Science! Doing it all for science!" Spit out muddy sea water. "I'm still having fun!" The first time we catalogued clams, both living clams and the shells of dead clams, our group gathered under the tarp over our kitchen area. Seated on five-gallon pails, we hunched over our shells. A rain squall fell around us, and we got chilled and stiff before we were done and dinner could be made. The second time was a sunny afternoon, so after lunch on a rocky slope below a midden across the bay from camp, we set up the calipers and notebooks. Each of us moved into the shade or sunshine at will. Our postures were not hunched this time, but varied from leaning on one elbow like a diner at a Roman feast to laying back against rocky slopes perfectly designed to support our backs and heads. Looking out across the bay was wonderful. I'd always thought that doing science involved wearing lab coats, not bathing suits or my shortie wetsuit. This place was much nicer than a basement lab somewhere. If you look over a clam garden at high tide, from a boat or from the shore, you probably wouldn't see anything to tell you that this is a place shaped by human gardeners. When the tide is a little lower than full, you might guess at the shallows near shore, usually in a small bay or between two rocky points. But when the tide is low, approaching a zero tide, the clam garden is revealed.

From shore it looks like a flat beach, mostly free of rocks bigger than your head. Most of the beach is sediments mixed with small stones and bits of broken clam shell. The shell hash was added deliberately, to send chemical messages to floating clam spat that here was some good clam habitat to settle down and grow! At the edge of the garden is a rocky ledge. Most of these ledges are maybe ankle-high. But if you look past the edge of the ledge, you can see that the sea bottom drops down suddenly. You're standing at the top of a wall made of rocks piled on rocks, four or five thousand years ago or more.

To learn more about traditional clam gardens, check out the book Clam Garden by Judith Williams. You can read more about it at the publisher's website.

Dinosaur Huntress?

Posted by HELAINE BECKER

Sometimes life has a funny way of throwing odd coincidences at you. Carl Jung called them "synchronicities," and attributed them to the cosmic consciousness and Universal Oversoul (As a science writer, I tend to attribute them to the Law of Really Big Numbers, a feature of modern life that I examined in my book Are You Psychic?).

In May, I experienced one of these wonderful synchronicities. My adventure began at my local public library when a book on the "New Non-fiction" shelf leapt out at me. It's called Curiosity: A Love Story. With a title like that, and cover art showing cutely creepy prehistoric animals eating each other, there was no way this book was not coming home with me.

The author, Joan Thomas, is a Winnipegger. Her first novel, Reading by Lightning, won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book and Amazon Canada's First Novel Award. It was also chosen by the Globe and Mail as one of its Top 100 Books in the year it was published.

Curiosity tells the story of Mary Anning, a Victorian woman you know of thanks to a famous tongue twister: "She sells sea shells by the sea shore."

Mary Anning did indeed sell sea shells, but she also sold fossils. She combed the cliffs and beaches of Lyme Regis on England's south coast for the "snakestones" and other curiosities that turned up regularly there, the result of the the limestone cliffs routinely crumbling from the force of wind and water. Her curiosities were sold to scientists who were trying, for the first time, to piece together where these unexplained objects came from, and how life forms not found on Earth today could have been buried in cliffs and stone in a world that was believed to have remained unchanged since the Flood.

Mary Anning combing for Fossils

The novel tells the story of  the first paleontologists tentative steps toward knowledge from Mary's point of view. She was "just"  a peasant girl, with no education, but she had a keen mind and a far better understanding of the finds than of the men who purchased them from her.

Her story is riveting, and Thomas' skill as a writer transported me to those wet, windswept beaches that were Anning's haunts and home.

How strangely delightful, then, to unexpectedly find myself a mere two days later combing a windswept, rainy beach for fossils - without leaving Canada!

I'd finished reading Curiosity on Sunday. On Monday, I flew to Moncton, New Brunswick, to begin my tour for the Hackmatack Awards Authors in the Schools program. I'd be spending the next few days in rural Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, speaking to students about books and writing.

The historic lighthouse at Parrsboro,
one of the towns where I presented. It's
just down the coast from Joggins.

My host, Chantelle Taylor, is the Youth Services Librarian for the Cumberland County Library System. She arranged my visits, made sure I was fed and watered, and drove me back and forth across the county from school to school. On our second day together, we had some free time. I had just finished reading at the twee little library in River Hebert, when Chantelle announced we could pop over to Joggins to see the sights.

I don't know about you, but I'd never heard of Joggins. Chantelle told me it was a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and known for its signicant fossil finds, including the oldest reptile ever found.

I was surprised, to say the least. I consider myself to be somewhat knowledgeable about stuff like this. I'd dreamt of going to Drumheller for years, after all, and had just booked my air ticket to see the dinosaur bones there. Those were famous.

But Joggins???

Knock me over with a feather.

The cliffs at Joggins, on what seems to me to
be an uncharacteristically sunny day.
PhotoTravelgrove.com

Joggins is indeed a spectacular, and important, site. Cliffs rise straight up from the water's edge. And just like the cliffs in Lyme Regis, they are chock full (or should I say "chalk" full?) of fossils.

The oh-so significant oldest reptile fossil.

In fact, the fossils at Joggins are some of the oldest and best-preserved fossils anywhere dating from the Carboniferious Period. 

Even more significantly, the same scientists who studied Mary Anning's fossil curiosities practically wet themselves in excitement over the fossils from Joggins. Charles Darwin himself developed key ideas in his evolutionary theory after examining them.

A lovely, new museum sits atop the cliffs at Joggins. Attractive, well-designed and clearly labelled displays introduce the visitor to the Joggins world - both its prehistory and its modern history. (Carboniferous  = coal, and Joggins was until fairly recently, an active mining community. The museum was actually built on top of the old mine.)



After touring the museum, the main event: Chantelle and I headed out into the cold, driving rain and down the path to the beach to hunt for fossils.

I felt exactly like Mary Anning: cold, and wet, and blinded by rain, as I scanned the loose rocks of the beach for evidence of something marvelous.

Synchronicity indeed.

I knew that my single foray onto the beach would be unlikely to yield a fossil of the caliber of some of Mary Anning's finds. But I was determined to find something, anything, that could be called a fossil.

Here's the photo of what I found. I think that squiggly section on the right hand side is a "millipede" track. At least, it looks an awful lot like the ones showcased in the museum.

Can you see the fossily squiggle sitting a the 2:00 position in the rock?



I took this photo because the plaque describes
why Joggins is so important. But it also
has as it's headline the title of one of
my books, What's the Big Idea? :)









A Pictorial History of Science

It's summer (well, everywhere but the west coast, where it's still spring) and sometimes a gal just wants to look at pictures instead of reading a lot. I like to prowl second-hand bookstores and a few years ago I picked up the gem, History of Biology by Albert Delauney. It's an older book — from 1966, about the same vintage as me, come to think of it — so it's got a dated look (also like me), but I found the illustrations really captivating. It's interesting to think about how we interpret the phenomena around us, how we make sense of things we don't quite understand. So, for my post, I give you this little visual tour of our understanding of the world through the ages:



An interpretation of how life began. It all began on the "tree of life," of course! Notice how the leaves that fall into the water turn into fish while the ones that fall on land turn into birds?




This sporty fellow is measuring all sorts of "things" (what, exactly, I'm not quite sure) while he exercises. Nice little cap, eh? And what do you think the cords to his toes are measuring?




I think this is my favourite — The Roussel Transfuser. An early attempt at blood transfusion from 1876.




An Italian anatomical drawing of the skeleton from the 15th century.



And another beauty — the animals kingdom from Gesner's Historica animalium. As the caption says, "It is a little difficult to reconcile it with reality and there is no attempt to arrange the animals in any order." That is one nasty lobster!