Comfy Carving Download PDF

The Apex book takes the misery out of skiing

One winter morning in 2008, Scott Lippman was driving to Taos Ski Valley in New Mexico. He should have been giddy—a storm had dropped fresh powder overnight. But he wasn’t. “On every run, I knew I’d have to stop halfway down and unbuckle my boots, because I couldn’t feel my toes,” says Lippman, 48, an inventory liquidator who lives in Santa Fe and often skis with his wife and 16-year-old twin daughters. He’d recently dropped $500 for footbed heaters and custom insoles and hired a professional fitter to stretch and grind his plastic shells into submission. None of it made the boots tolerable. After the trip, he considered quitting the sport for good. But first he did some Googling. Continue reading →

Is Renewable Energy Ready for Takeoff? Download PDF

SustainX and its temperature-stabilizing foam are bringing competitively priced storage for renewable energy closer.

The first thing Dax Kepshire shows a visitor to SustainX is foam. When he flips a switch on a 10-foot-tall assemblage of pneumatic tubes and mesh screens, the machine starts spewing a creamy white goo that resembles soft- serve ice cream into a 300-gallon plastic tub. In a few minutes the foam is 3 feet deep, and Kepshire plunges his hand in. “It’s completely nontoxic,” he says, and derived from an industrial foaming agent found in shampoo and carwash soap. The seven-year-old company is betting the substance can solve the biggest challenge for renewable energy: how to store it. Continue reading →