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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Thank you Hess for coming up with Hess’s law!
It saves a lot of time!
New from me at Wired, a graphene inspired photovoltaics breakthrough:
Two things hold back the mass adoption of solar energy as a source of sustainable energy. One is the need to store and transmit excess power, a problem people like Danielle Fong are working on solving by developing innovative new ways to store power. The other is the high cost of solar panels. One of the reasons solar panels are so expensive is that it’s tricky to extract electric currents from semiconductors, the materials used to convert solar radiation into electrical energy.
Up til now, this could only be done with a few materials — usually silicon. But a new breakthrough will enable manufacturers to make efficient photovoltaics using almost any semiconductor, including cheap and abundant materials like metal oxides, sulfides, and phosphides.
A typical photovoltaic cell is built with silicon and treated with chemicals. This treatment is called “doping,” and it creates the driving force needed to extract power from the cell. Photovoltaics can also be built with cheaper materials but many of these can’t be doped chemically. But a method developed by Professor Alex Zettl’s research group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley makes it possible to dope nearly any semiconductor by applying an electric field instead of chemicals. The method is described in a paper published in the journal Nano Letters.
Wired Enterprise: Nano Breakthrough Paves Way For Super Cheap Solar Panels
See also: Real-Life Steampunk Wants to Hack the Power Grid
Photo courtesy of Paul Takizawa, the Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley.
Bolded.
Special Paint Turns Any Surface Into A Battery - PSFK
Researchers at the Rice University in Texas, USA, have created a lithium-ion battery paint that can be applied to any surface. The battery-based paint was experimented on bathroom tiles, which were able to power a set of LED lights for six hours, and provided a steady 2.4 volts.
The lead author of the project, Neelam Singh, commented that her team had spent hours formulating, mixing and testing the paints. The working concept means that traditional packaging for batteries can have a “more flexible approach that allows all kinds of new design and integration possibilities for storage devices.”
Would you guys mind if I posted bits & pieces of information that I learned from the books I’m reading?
I read the cloning book before, which focused mostly on frogs, and I posted quite a bit about that. Now I’m reading a book about Nikola Tesla, essays & etc.
I think it would be cool to do, so I hope you guys don’t mind, and enjoy it.
The book I’m reading is ” The Tesla Papers “.
If you like the idea of getting free energy from the sun, but don’t want to deal with the complications of installing a solar array on your roof, Umbrosa has created a lovely backyard sun shade that does double-duty—turning those rays into electricity. As umbrellas go the Eclipse’s design is striking, but it isn’t really an umbrella at all… (via Stylish Sun Shade Is the Easiest Way To Harness Solar Power For Your Home | Impact Lab)
Picture: Colloidal quantum dots irradiated with a UV light. Different sized quantum dots emit different color light due to quantum confinement.
Quantum dots are constructed of a few hundred atoms, yet have all the quantum properties of a single atom. Some have been designed to reveal the workings of the nervous system, and others to be the detectors of breast cancer.
They’re zero dimensional, so they have less density than higher-dimensional structures. As a result, they have superior transport and optical properties, and are being researched for use in diode lasers, amplifiers, and biological sensors.
Researchers have tested them in transistors, solar cells, LEDs, and diode lasers. They have investigated them as agents for medical imaging and hope to use them as qubits ( qubit- In a classical system, a bit would have to be in one state or the other, but quantum mechanics allows the qubit to be in a superposition of both states at the same time).
In fluorescent dye applications, higher frequencies of light emitted after excitation of the dot as the crystal size grows smaller results in a color shift from red to blue in the light emitted.
An immediate optical feature of colloidal quantum dots is their coloration. Quantum dots of the same material, but with different sizes, can emit light of different colors. This is the quantum confinement effect. The larger the dot, the redder (lower energy); Conversely, smaller dots emit bluer (higher energy) light.Quantitatively speaking, the energy (and hence color) of the fluorescent light is inversely proportional to the size of the quantum dot
Quantum dots of different sizes can be assembled into a gradient multi-layer nanofilm —- Properties of such nanostructures are finding its applications in design of solar cells and energy storage devices.
In an unconfined semiconductor, an electron-hole pair is given a characteristic length, called the exciton Bohr radius. This is estimated by replacing the positively charged atomic core with the hole in the Bohr formula. If the electron and hole are constrained further, then properties of the semiconductor change. For example, the absorption and emission wavelength of light shifts towards smaller wavelengths. This effect is a form of quantum confinement, and it is a key feature in many emerging electronic structures.
Lee et al. (2002) reported using genetically engineered M13 bacteriophage viruses to create quantum dot biocomposite structures. It is known that liquid crystalline structures of wild-type viruses (Fd, M13, and TMV) are adjustable by controlling the solution concentrations, solution ionic strength, and the external magnetic field applied to the solutions.
Solar-Panel Researchers Need Your Computer
A team of researchers from universities across America are rooting through millions of molecules to hunt down a material that can create efficient and cost-effective solar cells — and they need your computer power to do it.
Currently, the cost of electricity from silicon solar cells is about ten times that of other energy sources. So to put solar on level pegging researchers are hunting down organic materials that have a conducting efficiency of 10 to 15 percent and an average lifetime of more than a decade.
Organic cells also have the ability to be molded into different shapes, they can be made semi-transparent and are much lighter than inorganic materials. They’re cheaper and easier to produce, too, and are non-hazardous.
But with literally millions of materials to choose from, identifying the handful that have the best properties — for optical and electronic purposes — is a Herculean task. That’s why the Clean Energy Project wants to borrow your PC power.
Blood Lamp: This single-use lamp requires a drop of blood to be activated — a personal sacrifice that will really make you think twice before turning on the lights.
Or I could open my window, turn off the lights and use the sun.
Antiproton ring found around Earth |
Antiprotons appear to ring the Earth, confined by the planet’s magnetic field lines. The antimatter, which may persist for minutes or hours before annihilating with normal matter, could in theory be used to fuel ultra-efficient rockets of the future.
Charged particles called cosmic rays constantly rain in from space, creating a spray of new particles - including antiparticles - when they collide with particles in the atmosphere. Many of these become trapped inside the Van Allen radiation belts, two doughnut-shaped zones around the planet where charged particles spiral around the Earth’s magnetic field lines.
Satellites had already discovered positrons - the antimatter partners of electrons - in the radiation belts. Now a spacecraft has detected antiprotons, which are nearly 2000 times as massive. continue reading
(source:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jun/05/scientists-create-antimatter-study)
At the Cern particle laboratory, physicists have managed to hold on to antimatter for up to 16 minutes to observe its behaviour
Scientists at the Cern laboratory in Geneva have found a way to ‘trap’ elusive antimatter atoms for more than 15 minutes. Photograph: Cern
In science fiction stories, antimatter pops up everywhere as a power source for spaceships or the active ingredient in diabolical bombs. In real life, though, this mysterious substance is elusive and scientists have never had much of it to play around with.
But that is to change: at the Cern particle collider in Geneva, physicists have created and trapped atoms of antihydrogen for more than a thousand seconds, it was announced late on Sunday. It might not sound like long, but it is enough time for experiments that could help answer some of the most fundamental questions in physics.
The same scientists, based at the Alpha collaboration in Cern, were the first to trap antihydrogen last year when they created and held on to 38 atoms of the stuff for 172 milliseconds in a strong magnetic field. In their latest work, published in this month’s edition of Nature Physics, they trapped 309 antihydrogen atoms for varying amounts of time up to 1,000 seconds (just over 16 minutes).
Jeffrey Hangst of the University of Aarhus in Denmark, who led the experiments, said that the purpose of the study was to compare antimatter with atoms of normal matter. “We’ve studied what’s going on with these atoms while they’re in the trap, how they’re moving, what energy or velocity they have. With 38, that was difficult, but with 300 it starts to look like something you can make averages out of. We’re getting information about how they’re behaving in the trap.”
Antimatter was first postulated by the British physicist Paul Dirac in 1930 while working on a way to reconcile the ideas of quantum mechanics with Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Particles of matter and antimatter are identical, except for an opposite electrical charge. An electron has a negative charge, whereas its antiparticle, the positron, has a positive charge, and both have an identical mass. Similarly, a proton and an antiproton are the same size and have the same mass, but have positive and negative charges respectively.
When a particle meets its antiparticle pair, the resulting annihilation turns their masses into pure energy, as determined by Albert Einstein’s equation, E=mc2. If 1kg of antimatter came into contact with 1kg of matter, the resulting explosion would be the equivalent of 43 megatons of TNT – about 3,000 times more powerful than the bomb that exploded over Hiroshima.
Creating big explosions is not on the agenda for Hangst, however. For Hangst and his team, keeping the antihydrogen in place for more than a just few seconds will allow them to study the antimatter in its most natural state.
“If you think of an atom as a little planetary system with an electron orbiting the nucleus (or, in our case, the positron orbiting the antiproton), the ground state is the one where the electron or positron is closest to the nucleus,” said Hangst. “We make our antihydrogen in excited states, the positron is at a larger distance and has more energy. That’s not the state we want to study – we want to study the ground state. It takes some fraction of a second for these atoms to get to the ground state. You hold them for a thousand seconds, you can be quite sure they’re in the state you want to study.”
The question scientists want to answer is why antimatter seems to be missing from the universe. The laws of physics do not differentiate between matter and antimatter so, at the creation of the universe during the big bang, equal amounts of both should have been made. For every particle of matter in the universe, there should be a particle of antimatter. In practice, though, we do not see them.
At the start of the universe, cosmologists think, there was probably an infinitesimally small excess of matter particles over antimatter particles. When the particles came into contact and the inevitable annihilations occurred in the earliest seconds of time, the universe was left only with matter particles swimming with copious amounts of energy.
Why this asymmetry occurred at the start of the universe is unknown. There could be some as-yet-unknown differences between matter and antimatter particles – theoretically, there should be no differences, but the ideas have not been tested so far. By shining microwave and laser light on to the atoms and looking at the differences between antihydrogen and normal hydrogen, scientists will be able to interrogate whether the two atoms are as identical as physics theories imply, or whether the theories themselves need to be tweaked.
