N.C. State University scored a $9 million federal grant to develop a plug-and-play technology that will allow consumers to buy solar panels that plug directly into wall outlets without requiring electricians, permits and inspections.

Such solar panels would significantly bring down the price of solar photovoltaic energy, which sucks up significant costs in hardware, labor and code compliance, said Alex Huang, director of N.C. State's NSF FREEDM Systems Center. The FREEDM Center researches alternative energy applications and will conduct the research on the 5-year grant announced Friday by the U.S. Department of Energy.

"We're very excited," Huang said. "The idea is to reduce the cost."

N.C. State University food safety expert Benjamin Chapman has put together a series of  videos on how to cook a safe Thanksgiving feast. Here are the links by topic: 

Even though we haven't celebrated Halloween yet, enough Scotty McCreery fans are apparently in the Christmas spirit to push his holiday CD into the Billboard Top 5 in its first week of sales.

"Christmas with Scotty McCreery," released last week, debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 album chart. The CD, which features the Garner "American Idol" winner singing holiday classics and a couple of new songs, sold 41,000 copies in its first week.

The chart was topped by another country singer, Jason Aldean, whose "Night Train" debuted with 409,000 copies sold. Mumford & Sons' "Babel" ranked second, and Brandy's "Two Eleven" debuted in third.

Scotty McCreery — the "American Idol" winner and avid baseball fan — will get to combine his two loves next month in Durham.

He'll be throwing out the first pitch and performing at the Gildan Triple-A National Championship Game, to be held at Durham Bulls Athletic Park on Sept. 18. McCreery will sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the game's seventh-inning stretch.

McCreery also got to mix baseball and singing last fall, when he performed the national anthem before Game 1 of the World Series.

UNC-Chapel Hill fans tried to take a page out of their rival Wolfpack fans' notebook this week by using a message board to draw attention to what they view as suspect academics at N.C. State University.
What they have focused on are two courses offered to athletes at NCSU, identified as USC 103 and USC 104. They found data from a course ranking website showing that no one received anything less than an A in the fall 2011 semester, and one of the instructors is also an academic coordinator for football players.
So are these classes 'gimmes' for athletes? Not according to Carrie Leger, the director of NCSU's Academic Support Program for Student Athletes.
What they amount to, she said, are the same university orientation classes that many incoming N.C. State students take -- USC 101 and USC 102 -- that are each worth one credit hour. The typical course at most universities is worth three credit hours.
USC 103 and USC 104 are designed for freshman student athletes, she said, because their academic experience is complicated by the hours they spend practicing and competing, and because of NCAA requirements they have to fulfill to remain eligible to play.
"Having a course specifically for student athletes is and has been a best practice," Leger said. "I'm 15 years into the profession, and it has been an effective good practice in all those years."
She said many colleges have similar classes, and some allow up to three credit hours for them. The orientation classes do count toward a student's grade point average.
Not everyone takes USC 102 or USC 104, she said. Just those who still haven't picked a major, or anticipate changing to another major.
She said academic counselors teach the classes, just as academic counselors in NCSU's First Year College teach the orientation classes for nonathletes.
She released average grades for both sets of classes that show similar academic performance:
From the period beginning with the fall 2008 semester and ending with the spring 2011 semester, nonathletes averaged a 3.53 and a 3.44 for USC 101 and USC 102, respectively, while athletes averaged a 3.64 and 3.38 for USC 103 and USC 104, respectively.
 

Amory Lovins, a Harvard and Oxford-educated physicist regarded by some as a prophet of energy efficiency, will speak tomorrow about energy-saving frontiers at N.C. State University in Raleigh.

Lovins was one of the first to advocate for incentivizing industries and utilities to use less energy by paying them for achieving savings. The idea was dismissed at first but has since been adopted by many states, including North Carolina in its 2007 energy law requiring power companies to increase their reliance on renewable resources and energy efficiency.

Lovins is the co-founder, with his wife, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and the winner of numerous awards and prizes, including the 1993 MacArthur Fellow, commonly known as the "genius grant." The author of 31 books and more than 450 papers, he was listed as one of the most influential figures in business in the centennial issue of The Wall Street Journal and named as one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine.
 

State Sen. Ellie Kinnaird reports on local Occupy Wall Street-related matters in her latest newsletter to constituents.

The Orange County Democrat says  the Chapel Hill Friends Meeting provided Thanksgiving dinner for the Occupy Chapel Hill group.  "The homeless have, of course, found Occupy, so presumably some of them enjoyed it too," she says.

"At N.C. State, the CEO of Wells Fargo (John Stumpf), newly arrived in North Carolina having bought our historic Wachovia Bank, had his speech interrupted by various students and Occupiers," Kinnaird continues. 

"I wrote him a letter suggesting the protesters have a valid message and that he could take an important step by reducing his $18.9 million compensation to no more than 100 times his lowest paid worker.  Japan’s ratio is 12:1 and after the U.S., the highest is Venezuela’s at 50:1; the U.S.’s ratio is a startling 475:1.  He could also set a policy to only award bonuses for stellar performance (as opposed to driving the economic bus into the ditch and ruining the lives of families)."

N.C. State University has received one of its largest corporate grants to finance a private research project for Silicon Valley computing giant Intel.

Intel's $1.5 million contract with N.C. State pays for 13 professors, researchers and graduate students -- including an electrical and computer engineering professor from Duke University -- to improve on 3D computer chip technology.

The goal of the project is stack computer chips in a bid to boost the energy efficiency of a computer's processors by up to 25 percent. Achieving that efficiency goal would generate that much more computing power at server farms and other facilities that depend on gargantuan amounts of electricity to operate.

"We're re-architecting the computer, changing the way a computer works, to exploit the third dimension," said N.C. State electrical and computer engineering professor Paul Franzon, the lead researcher on the project.

N.C. State University's engineering job fair is expected to attract more than 265 employers and thousands of job seekers next week in Raleigh.

The biannual event is one of the nation's largest career fairs for engineering students, drawing applicants from far beyond local universities. Last year nearly 5,000 job seekers thronged to the fair.

This year's event will be held at the McKimmon Center, 1101 Gorman St.

For more info call 919-515-3263 or visit http://students.engr.ncsu.edu/careerfair/.

A group of Raleigh developers and a Washington real estate firm have been selected to build a 125-room hotel on Hillsborough Street across from the N.C. State University Bell Tower.

N.C. State officials announced the selection of Bell View Partners and The Bernstein Companies on Tuesday.

The university’s endowment fund has spent the last several years buying up property across from the tower in an effort to make the site more attractive to developers.

The project is the latest in a flurry of redevelopment activity along Hillsborough, which was given a $10 million makeover by the city last year.

Earlier this month The Brewery, a popular live music venue, was demolished to make way for a drugstore, a parking deck and apartments.

N.C. State began soliciting redevelopment proposals for the 1.3-acre of property it owns in the spring.

The hotel would include ground floor retail and a restaurant.

The project would occupy the stretch of Hillsborough between Enterprise Street and Maiden Lane, replacing both Sadlack’s Heroes and a retail center that is currently home to Schoolkids Records.