To go solar or not to go solar? Homeowners looking to save money on their energy bills have a number of factor to consider.

It's easy to get excited about installing solar panels on your house – particularly when you find out that state and federal rebates can cut the price almost in half.

But, as we've reported before, you might get more bang for your buck from far cheaper (and yes, far less exciting) fixes. Small things like weather stripping your doors, turning down the thermostat or upgrading your refrigerator, can put a dent in your utility bills.

Even if you've done all that, solar panels still might not pencil out. That's because of something called "tiered pricing", which is how most utilities calculate your monthly energy bills. The idea is that energy is relatively cheap as long as you stay within a certain amount. Exceed that, and you're in the next "tier," where the rate increases. At the next tier, the rate is even higher. The difference between top tier and bottom pier can be as much as 44 cents versus 8 cents per kilowatt hour.

That's why solar panels tend to make more sense for people with substantial energy needs – the big, air-conditioned houses, the heated pools, the multiple flat-screen TVs.

The higher your monthly utility bills without solar panels, the faster those panels will pay for themselves once they're installed. Plus, even if those panels don't meet the complete energy needs of your house, they may be enough to bring you down to a lower tier, where the rate is much better.

If you're interested in making your home more energy efficient, this handy and comprehensive online audit from the people at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs is a good place to start.

Lawrence Berkeley Lab's TEAM 0.5 is capable of resolving individual carbon atoms in the honeycomb crystal structure of graphene. See QUEST's video The World's Most Powerful Microscope for more information. Image source: Nano LettersThe twentieth century’s most important physicist after Albert Einstein is almost certainly Richard Feynman. Known as much for his eccentricities as for his brilliance, he spent his adolescent spare time picking locks, translated Mayan hieroglyphics as an adult, and was one of the few people brash enough to attempt viewing the U.S.’s first atomic bomb test without protective sunglasses. Feynman’s chief scientific contribution was the development of QED, a fundamental and astonishingly accurate description of electricity and magnetism. However, he was also a champion of the practical, and in 1959 gave a gave a prophetic speech at Caltech to his colleagues entitled, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” The speech described a rich world of possibilities that could arise if we only applied ourselves toward controlling matter on smaller and smaller scales.

Fifty years later, a new field of nanotechnology has exploded. At the cutting edge, researchers are successfully manufacturing everything from corporate logos to radios that are all small enough to be stacked end-to-end perhaps a million items long across the proverbial head of a pin. The advent of personal computers and smart phones has brought the power of such miniaturization into sharp focus for the general public. In a very real sense, we have all become bottom feeders. Below is a brief progress report on the state of the field.

Microscopes: The old adage “seeing is believing” was not lost on Feynman back in the late fifties. He noted that many of the most fundamental questions in biology could be readily solved if we only had the ability to see the molecules directly. Today, new inventions such as the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), the atomic force microscope (AFM), and the transmission electron microscope (TEM) have all achieved resolution at the scale where individual atoms can actually be seen and manipulated.

Miniature Motors: Perhaps the speech’s most imaginative scenario, due to Feynman’s friend (and graduate student) Albert Hibbs, was the concept of being able to “swallow the surgeon.” Feynman imagined that we might some day be able to construct robots capable of repairing or investigating the inner reaches of an ailing patient’s body. Mixing engineering and biology like this can run quickly into thorny ethical questions. Nevertheless, interesting progress has been made. Researchers in Alex Zettl’s group at UC Berkeley have recently constructed a nano motor, for example.

Information Storage: Using order-of-magnitude arguments, Feynman argued that the Encyclopedia Britannica could be squeezed into a pin’s area if the text were reduced by a factor of 25,000. He offered a $1,000 prize to the first person capable of printing one page of any book at this scale. Tom Newman, a graduate student at Stanford, first accomplished this in 1986 with an impressive reprinting of the first page of Dickens’ classic A Tale of Two Cities. Today, you can buy the book in its entirety for only 1.9 megabytes. For a high-end smart phone with 30 gigabytes of memory, you could perhaps hold 15,000 books within the palm of your hand. Not bad.

Then again, at the extreme limit, Feynman also reasoned that you ought to be able to squeeze the text of every book that has ever been written (now more than 32 million titles according the Library of Congress) within the confines of a single speck of dust. We still have a long way to go.

Is corn ethanol a poor fit for future U.S. liquid fuel needs? Biofuels have received a tremendous amount of publicity lately as an alternative to gasoline and diesel. An ethanol economy based on sugarcane has helped to boost Brazil into the limelight, raising standards of living and perhaps even contributing to the country’s recent successful bid at the 2016 Olympic games. In the U.S. prospects of corn-based ethanol have piqued the interest of agriculture and oil companies alike. Such unbridled excitement has also revealed dramatic downsides. Brazilian affluence comes at the price of biodiversity as swaths of rainforest are sacrificed to plant new crop fields. Increased American deand for corn was a measurable contributing factor to the recent world food crisis.

The timing, then, was quite appropriate for a panel discussion last week organized by the Friends of Berkeley Lab at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Titled “Hope or Hype: What’s Next For Biofuels?” the event, hosted by KTVU’s John Fowler, featured a panel with Jay Keasling, Susanna Green Tringe, and Jim Bristow, three scientists exploring the role that synthetic biology might play in fabricating a better fuel for tomorrow’s autos. The evening consisted mainly of two themes: the relative limits of both crude oil and corn-based ethanol, and an outline of research being pursued to make new ideas practical.

Fossil fuels are unsustainable, a point that saturates public rhetoric each election cycle to the point of ad nauseum. It might be slightly more surprising to learn, however, that fuel based on ethanol (the alcohol found in all common beers, wines, and liquors) may be as bad for global warming as gasoline, perhaps even be worse. When extracted from corn, considerable energy is lost on fertilizers. If that energy was generated using a coal plant, global warming is still a problem. Additionally, ethanol is an unwieldy fuel. It is corrosive, for example, and therefore must be trucked, rather than piped, from one location to another. “I like to say that ethanol is for drinking, not for driving,” Keasling joked as he explained these faults.

The push in the American science community, then, tends to be away from corn-based ethanol and toward something called cellulosic biomass (Editor's Note: see our QUEST video "Beyond Biofuels" for more information). The idea is to make fuels not from corn, but rather from corn stover—plant leftovers after the crop has already been harvested. Alternatively, almost any other organic material ranging from wheat stover to sorghum to garbage could be used if the proper techniques are developed.

There are considerable scientific challenges. Much of the material we might like to use as fuel is tough and woody. Scientists have yet to figure out a satisfactory method for breaking this down, and a great deal of gene-sequencing effort is currently underway with the aim figuring this out. There are also challenges in terms of deciding what product will be generated from these woody materials. At least one idea is to genetically engineer an organism that can transform organic matter not into ethanol, but rather into something more amenable to transport and carbon neutrality.

What should we make of these new efforts? My own feelings are mixed. I enjoy my car, and I love road trips. As Bristow said during the panel, “The reality in the U.S. is that people are going to drive cars. We need liquid fuel.” The current push in biofuels research is tremendously important. The vast majority of energy sources are simply inadequate for powering cars to the extent that the public is accustomed to. The maximum power one could ever expect to obtain from a solar-powered car, for example, is less than 10 horsepower. Even the Geo Metro gets 55 horsepower. The new Volkswagen Beetle gets over 100 horsepower. Electric cars might hold some promise, but at this point it is impossible to tell whether batteries or biofuels will ultimately make a better alternative. These two fronts are also not necessarily exclusive, as the hybrid explosion of recent years has shown.

And yet, for all the excitement, selling the American public on biofuels feels a little like feeding methadone to a heroin addict. We believe that a shift to biofuels will assuage the continued seeping of carbon into the atmosphere. But there are a lot of side effects. The controlled production of biomass requires land, and with that allocation comes a host of ecological concerns. When it comes down to it, there will never be a substitute for good old fashioned belt-tightening.

Before You Invest in Photovoltaics, make sure your house isn't haunted by phantom loads.Some Devices Suck Power While They Sleep

When writing about energy efficiency in California, I know that emphasizing heating systems doesn’t carry much punch. I might as well try to get Californians interested in who makes the best deep- dish pizza. (That’s Chicago, of course. Zachary’s isn’t bad though.) Cooling systems are accounting for more and more of a share of residential energy use as we continue to build out from the cities near the Bay in hot dry climates. But overall, when it comes to climate, the inside and the outside of Bay Area homes are pretty much the same for most of the year. But let’s not get soft on energy efficiency! There are other energy users in California homes that threaten to lift us in the future to the level of, say, what a Wisconsin home uses in the winter today.

Miscellaneous electric loads are electric loads other than heating and cooling, water heating, refrigerators, and lighting, and include consumer electronics, outdoor lights, and portable inside lighting fixtures. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency estimates that these “other” electric loads, along with televisions and office equipment, made up close to 30% of U.S. residential electricity consumption in 2006; this will rise to about 35% by 2020. Part of the reason for the growth in energy use of these devices as a percentage of total home energy use is that homes are heating and cooling more efficiently, with better HVAC equipment, tighter building envelopes, and more insulation.

Rich Brown and Greg Homan of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, measured electricity use in 13 new California homes in 2007 and came up with some interesting results. They metered plug-in devices in standby, off, or low-power mode. Since the homes were not yet occupied, they estimated the annual energy use by using typical use patterns and the energy use of the plug-in devices in active mode, or “on,” measured in other studies. Some of the homes were model homes and packed with appliances and electronics like TVs, and others had only the plug-in devices installed by the builders. Builder installed devices include things like garage door openers, structured wiring, and gas fireplaces. The homes were in four different subdivisions and span the range of typical new construction to super efficient homes with PhotoVoltaic (PV) systems installed.

The builder-installed devices use on average 800 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per year, or about $80 worth with electricity at a low $0.10 per kWh. That does not include lighting energy. That’s interesting. About half of the energy used by the builder-installed devices is used by devices that are supposed to be turned off, or are in standby mode! That’s very interesting. This is like having a 50-Watt light bulb on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, lighting nothing.

One of the model homes, the biggest energy user of the 13, used close to 2,500 kWh per year ($250) for two large televisions, a structured wiring panel that uses 20 Watts continuously to power three security cameras and an Internet router, smoke alarms, garage door openers, a washer/dryer, a very big refrigerator, and a few more devices. Add in lighting and that house is a major energy hog, even with super efficient heating and cooling systems and PV panels on the roof.

So what to do? Don’t even think of getting that PV system until you spend some time reducing your electricity load. The PV system you need to meet that load then won’t be so expensive. When it’s time to buy a new appliance, always look for the Energy Star label. Energy Star appliances use about 20% less energy than typical new appliances. Anything that uses a remote control, such as televisions and set-top boxes, or that displays the time of day all day, such as some stoves and microwave ovens, uses energy when officially off. Look for electronic devices that are really off when they say off, or that use 2 Watts or less in standby mode. For your other sleep slurping electronics, plug them into a power strip, and turn the power strip off when you aren’t using the devices. Then look into that sexy new PV system for your roof. More on that in my next blog.

(left) A cell imaged with an optical microscope. (right) The same cell imaged by allowing the cell to absorb UCNPs and then irradiating it with infrared light. Each nanocrystal is one thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair. Image courtesy of PNAS."Like a silent black mist, nanoparticles began to come into the room underneath the west door…Inside the room, the particles appeared to spin and swirl aimlessly, but I knew they would self-organize in a few moments."

Thus proceeds Michael Crichton's 2002 thriller, Prey, as the protagonists face off against a malicious swarm of flesh-hungry nano-robots that are the offspring of a most unholy marriage of biological, computer science, and engineering research efforts.

Real science capabilities lag somewhat behind, but researchers succeeded recently in demonstrating an exciting new class of nanoparticle with potential applications in biological imaging. The new crystals, more formally known as lanthanide-doped upconverting nanoparticles (UCNPs), were fabricated and studied under the direction of principle investigators Bruce Cohen and James Schuck at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Molecular Foundry, and results were published on June 18^th in a paper by Shiwei Wu and others in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Happily, while Crichton's nanoparticles coordinated an attack on a your vital organs, these particles behave more like benign light bulbs. After allowing a living cell to absorb the UCNPs, researchers shine infrared laser light on the cell, and the nanocrystals within light up like a Christmas tree in red or green arrays of dots. These, in turn, can easily be spotted using an optical microscope and used to map out particle distributions within a cell, yielding information impossible to obtain by other methods.

The method, known as single-molecule imaging, has been demonstrated using other nanoparticle types, but UCNPs are unique because of their uncommon brightness and stability, and because they are powered by infrared light. This is both good for the studied cells, because infrared light is less damaging than visible or X-ray frequencies, and good for the people measuring them, because it can probe more deeply into tissue than other types of light. In fact, one prospect for future research is the imaging of entire animals.

Reflecting on the research effort's long-term goals, Cohen commented that cross-disciplinary sharing of ideas is crucial. "In general, we'd like to bring nanoscience to the larger scientific community, especially biology, where few researchers have had much exposure to it," he said. "Our goal is to make interesting and useful new materials that will let them do all sorts of experiments that would otherwise be impossible."

A phonautograph, which made the first sound recordings (playback made possible thanks to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Last summer, QUEST told you about how scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have developed a technology to playback old audio recordings using visual scans. Along with bringing to life the wax cylinders we featured in our TV story, the Berkeley technology helped the world hear, for the first time ever, the oldest known sound recordings ever made. Now the historians who unearthed those recordings have discovered that they've been playing them all wrong.

The recordings were made by a phonautograph, invented by a Frenchman named Léon Scott more than 20 years before Edison came up with the phonograph. The technology worked by scratching sound waves onto sheets of paper covered with lampblack. Last year, historians used the Berkeley Lab's "visual stylus" to replay an 1860 recording of what they thought was a young girl singing the French song "Au Claire De La Lune". Since then, they've realized that they were actually playing the recording at double speed. Instead, it's likely the inventor himself doing the singing. You can hear both version at FirstSounds.org, or listen to an interview with the historians from NPR. It turns out learning to play old sounds isn't the only challenge — we have to know how to play them right!

Watch "How Edison Got His Groove Back" to learn more about how LBL's innovations are helping restore old sound:

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

Bad for the Lab, Good for the Country

Staff at Building Solutions, a home performance
company, install PV on a roof in Oakland. Next year, the renewable
and energy efficiency business will be even better.
Credit: Kate KenkeDr. Steven Chu, Noble-prize-winning physicist, and director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was named as President-elect Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Energy. Home Energy is a nonprofit magazine, but our offices are at Lawrence Berkeley Lab and the magazine was founded by Alan Meier, a lab scientist. People around here are saddened by the loss of Dr. Chu as director of the lab, but extremely excited about his nomination as Secretary of Energy. Dr. Chu believes in science and the important place of technology in helping us meet our energy goals and fight global warming—think cellulosic bio-fuels, nanotechnology, and yet undreamed of solutions to the present energy and environmental crisis.

Weatherization Works!

Word in energy efficiency circles is that the funding for Department of Energy (DOE’s) Weatherization Program will increase several-fold with President Obama’s proposed economic stimulus package. The Weatherization Program is managed state by state from money provided by DOE, and the funds pay to retrofit the homes of low-income families. Homes become healthier to live in, more energy efficient, and more comfortable for the occupants. For every one dollar the Weatherization Program spends, almost two dollars in energy savings results. Hundreds of thousands of homes have been retrofit so far, leaving about 99.5% of existing homes. Talk about green jobs potential! Many nonprofit and for profit organizations do weatherization work, and, basically, you retrofit the home of a low-income family the same way you retrofit a mansion. Lots more skilled people will be needed to do the work, and the jobs will provide a good income, benefits, and the possibility of future advancement. Community colleges, unions, professional training organizations, online trainers, and other players are gearing up to train the new green workforce.

How Many Btu Do You Do?

I promised in my last blog entry to explain the concept of heating-degree day and cooling-degree day. Sometimes you will hear that a home uses so many Btu or kWh per heating- or cooling-degree day, per square foot, per year. The degree days indicate the heating or cooling load on a building’s HVAC systems. A degree day is the rise or fall of one degree Fahrenheit for 24 hours. The rise or fall in temperature is measured from a baseline of 65F°. For example, if the average temperature tomorrow is 45F°, than the heating load on your heating system is 20 heating-degree days. If on a hot summer day the average temperature over a 24-hour period is 85F°, than the load on your air conditioner is 20 cooling-degree days. The number of heating-degree days for a winter in New York is around 5,000. Barrow, Alaska has about 20,000.

You can figure out how much energy you use to heat or cool your home by subtracting the baseline energy use. During a month when you are using neither your air conditioner or heater, such as in October or March (called the “shoulder” months), your gas and electric use represent your baseline. The baseline covers energy for lighting, appliances, hot water, and plug loads. Subtract out the baseline from your winter or summer energy use and you have the amount of energy to heat or cool your house. If you know the square footage of your home, and you have weather data for your area (go to www.degreeday.net to find out heating-degree days and cooling-degree days for your area), you are in a position to brag to your neighbors (or not) about your energy use.

At our house we used about 90 therms of natural gas from September 7 through December 7, 2008. There were about 480 heating-degree days (HDD) in our area during that time. Our baseline use of natural gas is about 10 therms per month, for heating water and cooking, leaving 60 therms for heating over the three-month period. Our house is about 1,200 square feet (ft²). Therefore, we used 60 therms/(480 HDD x 1,200 ft²), or about 0.0001 therms/HDD·ft². Since one therm of natural gas contains about 100,000 Btu of energy, that equals about 10 Btu/HDD·ft². That’s not bad, but not great either. How about you?

As the Series Producer for QUEST, I get to read through a lot of amazing science story ideas, but when I first read about the work that Carl Haber, Vitaliy Fadeyev and Earl Cornell were doing at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, I knew it was a story I wanted to do. OK, I admit that part of the reason is that I love music and sound, and have been interested in audio technology since I was a kid (back when we listened to records). But for me, a big part of the story's "coolness" is how this team – and Carl Haber in particular – came up with the idea. I love the idea that he was just listening to the radio one day and heard that the Library of Congress was failing in its struggle to preserve a significant portion of our nation's music and sound heritage. Haber basically thought, "well, as a designer of instrumentation for particle physics, I think I can help." And that's what he did. He felt passionate about solving a problem, and he changed the world.

I had heard of Edison-style wax cylinders, but I had never seen one, and I had no idea how much audio history (musical as well as cultural) had been recorded in the format. One of the best parts of the shoot (we shot on two different days), was our visit with Victoria Bradshaw at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Walking through the floor-to-ceiling shelving and stepping up to literally hundreds of carefully-packed wax cylinders was a revelation. Holding one in my hands (gloved hands) was an amazing feeling. And to see the wax cylinders upon which Alfred Kroeber had actually recorded Ishi speaking – hard to put into words. I couldn't help but imagine Kroeber himself, with a box of blank cylinders and a recorder strapped to a mule, fording a river on his way to meet an Indian who "spoke a language nobody can understand." Suddenly it was clear to me how important it is to save these recordings before they disintegrate.

And for a science-head, visiting Haber's lab was amazing. Far from antiseptic, the whole place was filled with hacked parts of microscopes, old record and cylinder players, computers running custom software, circuit boards, wires hanging everywhere. It was a great reminder that real science is a permanent work-in-progress. And when it's all said and done – and the Library of Congress is already using Haber's flat-record technology – we'll all be better off. Thanks to Haber's team, soon we'll have pristine, permanent copies of many of these endangered recordings. And as these collections are migrated to the web, that's great news, not just for museums and archives, but for all of us.

And one last quick thing: If you’re interested in learning more about our wax cylinder legacy, check out this UC Santa Barbara site. It has great information on the history of the format, and it offers hundreds of wax cylinders that you can listen stream right off the net!


Watch the "How Edison Got His Groove Back" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources. Also, check out our online photo set for images from this story.

Yeah Alaska! Yeah Brazil! Yeah California?

The people of Juneau saved electricity in a hurry– when electricity
went to 55 cents per kilowatt-hourIn Juneau, Alaska, an avalanche on April 16th downed transmission lines and cut off the city from it's cheap source of hydroelectric power; electricity prices jumped by 500%. Alan Meier-a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Home Energy Magazine's Senior Executive Editor, and an expert in how to cut energy use in a hurry-was called in to help. Within a few weeks the city reduced its electricity use by 30%. Remember that we reduced our electricity use in California by 15% in response to Enron and other power companies manipulating the power markets in 2001? Alaska reduced its electricity use by twice as much and did it in a hurry.

How did the Alaskan's do it? They lowered their thermostats. They bought out all the CFLs from the hardware stores and you bet they turned out the lights when they left the room-wouldn't you if electricity cost 55 cents per kilowatt hour? They took shorter showers and used cold water to wash their clothes. The city ran out of clothespins since so many people were hanging out there clothes to dry (anecdotal evidence suggests it takes two days to dry jeans).

The people of Juneau bought power strips in record numbers, so that they could really turn off power to all those devices that still use power when they are supposed to be off, like TVs and stereos, microwave ovens and cell phone chargers. And there was a lot of talk from city leaders, on the radio, and among neighbors and classmates about the best ways to save.

(Note: You generally use more energy when you wash your dishes by hand rather than washing full loads in a dishwasher-not everything they did helped.)

We may not face rolling blackouts in California this summer, but we probably will in the near future. There will be other natural disasters like Juneau's that spike the price of electricity or natural gas. How will we save energy in a hurry? And here's a bigger question: How will we keep saving energy after the crisis is over?

The Juneau transmission lines should be up and running by June 8. Will the people who were used to cheap electricity fall back into old habits when prices decrease? Brazil faced a similar crisis in 2001 when severe drought shut down hydroelectric plants all over the country. They cut their electricity use by 20%, and they haven't changed their consumptions habits very much since the drought subsided.

We are still dependent on a diminishing store of fossil fuels mostly located in politically turbulent parts of the world where even the hint of conflict raises oil prices. For Californians, Alaskans, Brazilians, and everyone else, it might be best if we permanently changed our energy use habits and considered every day an emergency that calls for conservation.

There are times when you are in the production trenches, plumbing the depths of a story, that you realize how lucky you are to work on QUEST. Assisting QUEST Producer Amy Miller on this segment was yet another occasion to experience such a sentiment, as we found out about the amazing work of Ashok Gadgil and his colleagues to help the women and families who've been displaced as a result of the genocide in Darfur.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the story, in 2005, Ashok Gadgil, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, led a team of four people to north and south Darfur to determine how families were cooking their meals. This may seem like an odd fact-finding mission but it had very real consequences for alleviating the suffering and violence the Darfuri women experience. Every other day, many women leave the relative safety of the refugee camps to travel six to seven hours to collect fuel wood for their meals. In the process, they risk rape and mutilation at the hands of the Janjaweed, a state-sponsored militia which has been lodged in a genocidal fight against Darfuri rebel groups pressing for more autonomy from the government in Khartoum. Three years later, Ashok Gadgil and Ken Chow of Engineers Without Borders are on version eight of the Berkeley Darfur stove, an elegantly simple yet effective ten pound metal stove which is four times more efficient than the traditional three-stone fire with which the Darfur refugees have traditionally cooked. Ashok and his colleagues on the Darfur Stoves Project hope to have five to six manufacturing plants operating in north, west and south Darfur, producing hundreds of thousands of stoves a year from the flat-pack kits of the stove Ken Chow has engineered.

For me, this QUEST segment highlighted how scientists with the brilliance and dedication of Ashok Gadgil can think up solutions to problems that have the potential to alleviate suffering and help the economic lot (each stove saves roughly $250 dollars in fuel wood annually for a Darfuri family) of hundreds of thousands of people existing within the margins of survival. Fortunately, there are organizations, in addition to the Darfur Stoves Project, that are also helping to get more stoves into the hands of Darfuri refugees, including The Hunger Site, Global Giving, The Child Health Site. You can visit these non-profit organizations and purchase a Berkeley Darfur stove on behalf of a family in Darfur, and also make a donation to the U.S. chapter of Engineers Without Borders to support their projects in Asia and Africa.

On a final production note, our QUEST segment about the Darfur Stoves Project was immensely helped by U.N.'s archival footage department and the U.N. Mission in Sudan, both of which gave us footage of the stark conditions in the Darfuri refugee camps. The U.N. High Commission for Refugees also accepts donations for their international humanitarian activities.

Watch the "Darfur Stoves Project" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.


Sheraz Sadiq is an Associate Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.