Solar Power
Inhabitat’s Week In Green: solar panels, solar planes, solar trains
The Week in Green is a new item from our friends at Inhabitat , recapping the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us. It was an interesting week in green tech, as Inhabitat explored the past and future of solar technology. We dug up the world’s first modern solar panel (still working after 60 years!) and wrapped our brains around MIT’s plan to create super-efficient photovoltaic panels by folding them up like origami .
Inhabitat’s Week In Green: 3D printed veins, solar cell towers, and the Ingocar
At Inhabitat we’ve seen 3D printers that create entire buildings out of stone and complete meals out of simple ingredients, but this week we watched in awe as scientists used a 3D printer to create the world’s first “printed” human vein . And if advances in biotech get your blood flowing, you’ll be excited to hear that this week a team of researchers successfully tested a new type of nanobot that travels through the bloodstream to turn off tumor cells. Contact lenses are also getting a much needed upgrade as scientists unveiled a new type capable of fighting glaucoma and other diseases by dispensing a powerful dose of medication
Subretinal implant successfully tested on humans, makes blind narrowly see
How many scientists does it take to properly install a lightbulb?
Caption contest: solar suits, or the future of punishment for eco-abusers?
We get the impression that these guys are really just putting the pressure on “evil corporations” to stop grounding mountains in the everlasting search for coal, but it’s not really the environmental activism that caught our attention here. Rather, it’s the fact that we’re 84.3 percent certain we saw these exact same characters in a Daft Punk video back in college
Novothink rolls out Solar Surge iPhone / iPod touch charging case
It’s not November ’09 as originally promised, but Novothink has now announced that its Solar Surge charging cases for the iPhone and iPod touch are finally available. Those will run $79.95 for the iPhone 3G/3GS version and $69.95 for the iPod touch version (second gen only, it seems), which are each available only in black or white at the moment (additional colors are “coming soon), and should add between four and eight hours of talk time, or up to 20 hours of additional audio playback.
Caltech gurus whip up highly efficient, low cost flexible solar cell
Solar cells are cute and all , but let’s be real — these things are far too inefficient for mainstream use. Scientists at the California Institute of Technology are working hard to remedy that very issue, and they’ve recently concocted a “new type of flexible solar cell that enhances the absorption of sunlight and efficiently converts its photons into electrons.” The solution relies on arrays of long, thin silicon wires embedded onto a polymer substrate, which uses just a fraction of the expensive semiconductor materials required by conventional solar cells. According to professor Harry Atwater, these cells have “surpassed the conventional light-trapping limit for absorbing materials” for the first time, and we’re told that the arrays can convert between 90 and 100 percent of the photons they absorb into electrons, and yes, that does mean that they have a near-perfect internal quantum efficiency.
