A building that generates heat from people and machines
Nature, says the second law of thermodynamics, never gives you anything for nothing. Now some engineers in Boston have come close to defying that unbreakable rule. They have produced a building that heats itself without a furnace or conventional fuel and remains warm even during such blustery periods as the recent cold spell, when Boston temperatures plunged to 0°F. The building performs this scientific magic by a cunning engineering stratagem: it recaptures the waste heat of its own machinery, everything from computers to coffeemakers, as...