Electric Concrete Melts Snow on Impact

Winter snowstorms brings concrete ingenuity, if you will. "This gift from the heavens is the brainchild of Chris Tuan, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln," stated a January 26 article on the subject. It’s mostly just regular concrete, but Tuan and his colleagues added steel shavings and a carbon byproduct of coal mining to the mixture in order to make it conduct electricity. Then, using about 13 watts of energy per square foot, they were able to heat the concrete to a relatively cold — but warm enough to melt snow — temperature of about 40 degrees F.