Although you can fish for salmon in the Great Lakes, us Midwesterners consider them a delicacy. Restaurants fly them in daily from the Eastern Seaboard and Norway. Rarely ever do we eat a Lake Michigan salmon—especially at a fair price. I grew up hearing the legends of my grandfather catching salmon in the northern reaches [...]

The 2011 Solar Decathlon officially ended on October 2nd when director Richard King sent a warm thank you to everyone involved . But the Solar Decathlon happens every two years, and King ended his thank you like a starter cuing off a race. “I can’t wait to do this again!” he wrote with refreshing sincerity and energy. But [...]

A good plant can really tie a room together. A fern here, a cactus there, plants are the living fixtures of the day-to-day. But what if we used plants above and beyond decoration and minor air freshening? In this year’s Solar Decathlon, Purdue’s INhome—the competition’s second place winner—uses the biology of plants to make part of [...]

We build houses, but it’s the living in a house that makes it a home. Every home — even your home — has a history that represents who lived there and how they lived. The same goes for the houses in Solar Decathlon. While they’re lauded for their innovation, they also use their region’s rich [...]