The U.S. Department of Energy is pursuing an aggressive goal to cut the cost of solar water-heating systems in half. Replacing metal and glass components with less expensive plastic ones is a key strategy for that goal. This is a short (2-page) fact sheet about new technologies for solar water heaters.

As 3D volumetric images of the human body become an increasingly crucial source of information for the diagnosis and treatment of a broad variety of medical conditions, advanced techniques that allow clinicians to efficiently and clearly visualize volumetric images become increasingly important. Interaction has proven to be a key concept in analysis of medical images because static images of 3D data are prone to artifacts and misunderstanding of depth. Furthermore, fading out clinically irrelevant aspects of the image while preserving contextual anatomical landmarks helps medical doctors to focus on important parts of the images without becoming disoriented. Our goal was to develop a tool that unifies interactive manipulation and context preserving visualization of medical images with a special focus on diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data. At each image voxel, DTI provides a 3 x 3 tensor whose entries represent the 3D statistical properties of water diffusion locally. Water motion that is preferential to specific spatial directions suggests structural organization of the underlying biological tissue; in particular, in the human brain, the naturally occuring diffusion of water in the axon portion of neurons is predominantly anisotropic along the longitudinal direction of the elongated, fiber-like axons [MMM+02]. This property has made DTI …

Just imagine living in Florida and your fantasies might turn to swaying palms, fresh orange juice and lots of air-conditioning. For most people, a summer spent in Florida's heat and humidity would be unbearable without it. So air-conditioning is a necessity. But it's also a big energy drain, accounting for about 35% of all electricity used in a typical Florida house. As the largest single source of energy consumption in Florida, a home's air-conditioning load represents the biggest energy challenge. The Florida Solar Energy Center (FSEC) designed a project to answer this challenge. Two homes were built with the same floor plan on near-by lots. The difference was that one (the ''control home'') conformed to local residential building practices, and the other (the ''Zero Energy home'') was designed with energy efficiency in mind and solar technology systems on the roof. The homes were then monitored carefully for energy use. The project's designers were looking to answer two important questions: Could a home in a climate such as central Florida's be engineered and built so efficiently that a relatively small PV system would serve the majority of its cooling needs--and even some of its daytime electrical needs? And, would that home …

BRAC Commission Material – BRAC Staff Support Handbook 2006. 177 page document dated April 2006