Other possible plans include rewarding firms for maintaining stand-by capacity to supply power to the grid in an emergency, and preventing the construction of new coal stations that do not have some way of capturing and storing their planet-heating emissions.

ECONOMIST: Britain can have clean energy or cheap energy, but not both

But in 1913 one of its scientists, Friedrich Bergius, found a way to turn coal into a high-grade liquid fuel by heating it in the presence of hydrogen and a catalyst.

FORBES: Magazine Article

This wing was also designated to experiment with solar heating, an area where Aalto was way ahead of his time.

BBC: An Alvar Aalto tour of Finland

Put another way, residential heating and air conditioning constitute 11.88 percent of the U.S. energy budget: cars only account for 8.9 percent. (see spread sheets 2.2 and 2.6) Worse, a good portion of that energy is wasted: lights get left on, air conditioners churn when you are on vacation, sleeping notebooks suck vampire power.

FORBES: Nest Labs: Can Apple Alums Make A Thermostat Hip?

The notion that New York's tech scene is really heating up has been with us for years, sort of the way Long Island City is always poised to be the next hot neighborhood.

WSJ: New York: Techie Magnet

Dr Cooper and Julien Reboud, also from the University of Glasgow, have now developed a way to carry out the entire PCR process mixing, heating and cooling, as well as analysis using a single piezoelectric source, without the need for separate heating elements or detection equipment.

ECONOMIST: Acoustic microfluidics

Hard-up clubs don't have the luxury of undersoil heating but to call some games off because surrounding roads and pavements were icy highlighted our modern cosseted way of life.

BBC: Leon Osman and Richard Dunne set good example