Just when Solar was swept under the carpet yet again, we make another step forward in improving Solar Cell technology.
These smart doods at OSA have found that cells that are better at emitting photons seem to generate more voltage!
Nice!
ScienceCategory Archives
Superhydrophobic glass – The future of perfect glass
With all the attention being placed upon the mobile device market it’s a wonder why inventions like this aren’t happening more often.
Researchers at MIT have developed a glass that is superhydrophobic, anti-glare and self cleaning!
All we need now is for Gorilla and these guys to team up and our mobile devices will be almost indestructible!
See how crap the iPad is!
Honestly, it can’t take a little bit of EM radiation???
New Horizons almost there!
Well it’s getting close. We’ve only got a billion or so kilometers to go and the New Horizons probe will have reached it’s first destination, the dwarf planet Pulto.
The trip (as detailed in the image below) started way back in 2006, passed Jupiter in 2007 then entered its hibernation mode until 2014.
The New Horizons Timeline
I was lucky enough to get both my daughters names on the probe but unfortunately my son wasn’t born at the time so he missed out :P
This is what the probe would see as it looks back upon the star we call Sol.
The view from the New Horizons probe
Very exciting indeed!
Global Warming now just Weather Extremes
Ok, shitty title, but a report from the WSJ appears to have a multitude of scientists with evidence to suggest that Global Warming is as likely as the Y2K bug, all hype and no substance.
According to the article, “The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.”
I believe (and obviously have no evidence to support it) that Global Warming was something that just got away from the initial people concerned and became an awesome political tool to use in order to effect changes.
Perth has just gone through a very VERY hot heat wave, but nothing unusual for Summer!
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see who’s right. From the article, “The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle.”
FTL Neutrinos could be explained by relativity
Recently the scientific world was sent into a frenzy with the possibility that an experiment had actual proof that the speed of some particles did in fact exceed the speed of light.
My own recent post linked to the source of the information.
As I said in the post, as long as it could be corroborated then this would be one of the most life changing discoveries of this century.
Well it would seem that there is a theory as to how these neutrinos were able to reach the OPERA detector 60 nanoseconds ahead of schedule. There could be something that was not taken into consideration during the experimental testing explained here.
Again, this is just a theory that could explain the results, not definitive proof that the experiment was incorrect.
Let’s see where this goes shall we?
Project: Colonise the Galaxy
Stephen Hawking said, (paraphrasing) “If the human race is to have a future, it is not on the planet Earth”. He was referring to the fact that our planet is unable to sustain the human race for that much longer without suffering a devastating series of environmental events which would cause the balance of life on Earth to be tipped on its head.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/09/29/163231/a-third-of-sun-like-stars-may-have-warm-earth-analogs details a claim that suggest there are millions of “Earth-like” planets orbiting “sun-like” stars within our own galaxy.
Can’t wait to put my name down on the list of colonists :)
Electrolysis without electricity
Well I didn’t think I’d see the day that something of this calibre reached fruition but fortunately I have.
One of my pet projects in the past was electrolysis to produce hydrogen gas as a means to power a combustion engine to generate electrical energy though the output was always less than the input.
Now we can use the ultimate renewable energy source, the star which we orbit!
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/artificial-leaf-0930.html
Can’t wait to get my hands on one of these babies!
FTL Neutrinos
Not trying to get excited or anything but there are signs that my thoughts on the speed of light being yet another limit we will eventually break are on the horizon.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484
Very interesting news, as long as it can be corroborated by others! Well, performing your tests 15,000 times and getting the same results is kinda a good sign that you’re on the right track :)