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Self-Assembling Photovoltaic Tech From MIT
telomerewhythere writes "Michael Strano and his team at MIT have made a self-assembling and indefinitely repairable photovoltaic cell based on the principle found in chloroplasts inside plant cells. 'The system Strano's team produced is made up of seven different compounds, including the carbon nanotubes, the phospholipids, and the proteins that make up the reaction centers, which under the right conditions spontaneously assemble themselves into a light-harvesting structure that produces an electric current. Strano says he believes this sets a record for the complexity of a self-assembling system. When a surfactant is added to the mix, the seven components all come apart and form a soupy solution. Then, when the researchers removed the surfactant, the compounds spontaneously assembled once again into a perfectly formed, rejuvenated photocell.'"
Mmmmhmmm... Nanolathe, here we come!
Now all we need is to mimic Chlorophyll F and start capturing everything from beginning IR (720nm) on down. I'd love to see a solar cell that can respond to all of the wavelengths currently covered by terrestrial and marine plant life.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Wonder how many plants in how many rainforests will be destroyed to mine the nanomaterials needed to create artificial plant like solar photovoltaics.
When I skimmed the summary I thought it was gray goo time already. On closer reading, however, it appears that the molecules still need to be given a push to reassemble. The article doesn't answer the question of how much energy is needed to remove the surfactant.
Is this some kind of ATP hijack?
I'm reading the Diamond Age right now. Can't wait to pirate me some nanos for my daughter.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Nothing to report. STAY TUNED for breaking news about no breaking news !!
Now that is freaking cool technology.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Incredibly cool! I hope we can work towards growing solar panels soon!
That said until I see it on a website to be purchased I'm going to stick with regular solar cells.
So much of this extremely cool tech just never seems to reach the shopping cart so to speak.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Porn Lately when you see ATP and start wondering what the last letter means...
And now they will have patented the hell out of the technology so no-one touches it without having to pay. Of course, this is the way universities make money. Ugh. I still hate the "patent courses" we got in our engineering education. .. And the teams of helpful university people in the patent office, just chomping at the bit to harvest yet another patent. ... or maybe I am just being too negative.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
I feel asleep and then when I woke up it was the future.
If it enabled solar energy to meet the world's energy needs, there's be no need for the IPCC, and they'd have to disband. Do you think they'll give up all thet money and power willingly? It isn't only corporations that are money-grabbing weasels you know!
I actually read TFA! Very interesting. That is all. *sips coffee*
... we spill enough of this stuff into the ocean?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
is at http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/self-healing-solar.html
The best growing "solar panels", freely available! :)
Or maybe some vegatables in a garden?
to replace the solar power that I can't currently afford to use...
So much of this extremely cool tech just never seems to reach the shopping cart so to speak.
About 70 years ago, atomic fission was quite cool. It didn't quite make it to the shopping cart (so to speak), but it stuck.
Since MIT does everything, I'm waiting til the day they make a regenerating penis...
Eureka!
Quick infrastructure hit? Fly over the sun farm with a crop duster full of Lemon Fresh Joy.
Fantastic work, though.
More MIT hype and self-congratulation.
Genetic analysis is not my area (I prefer structure to sequence) but I understood from a book called "Deep Time" on cladistics that it is really only informative to compare THREE species at a time, not two.
So, saying "chimps are similar to humans" is less meaningful than "chimps are more similar to humans than lemurs". All life forms on earth share some points of similarity.
Hmmm. Maybe that wasn't relevant to the question of : "Is X more evolved than Y?" but I guess I was thinking of the last common ancestor as being the third party in the comparison. That is : "Is X more evolved compared to LCA(X,Y) than Y?".
I saw an episode of SG1 where they were trying to create replicating materials, and ended up with these replicators, I imagine it is along the same lines?
Call me when I can pick it up at Home Depot.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
if we cover the planet with solar panels, that wouldn't be good right? So there should be a limit of healthy solar energy use before messing with planet's heat balance.
Any Ideas what that should be?
The real story here is buried at the end of TFA:
The individual reactions of these new molecular structures in converting sunlight are about 40 percent efficient, or about double the efficiency of today's best commercial solar cells.
The real headine is:
Scientists Double Efficiency of Solar Cells
Nerds!!!
Every time I read a new material or new technology or gadget using nano-technology and nanotubes and such, I always wonder whether the inventors have thought of how they would dispose of the stuff so it doesn't harm the environment when it is EOL'ed. This, IMO, is a much neglected part of any news story which extols the virtues of nano-technology enabled foobar invention.
Actually, no. If you look at the color of the solar panel, you'll find its wavelength gap that it doesn't pick up light from
Actually, no. if you would look at the reflectance of a solar panel with a spectrophotometer, you'll discover that, although (for example) silicon panels do look blue, even in the blue the reflectance is very low-- about 8% or so until you get below about 250 nm, where there's just not that many photons in sunlight. It just "looks" blue, because the reflectivity in the blue, low as it is, is more than the reflectivity elsewhere in the visible spectrum.
, as that's what is being essentially reflected back to you.
You can't see the "wavelength gap where it doesn't pick up light"-- that's in the infrared, below the ability of your eyes to see. If you could see in that wavelength, though, the semiconductor would be transparent.
Most solar panels work best under green and red light, and deeper violets, IR has typically had too low of an energy potential to have any worthwhile use.
I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. Silicon cells roll off for wavelengths below about 1000 nm, which is very definitely in the infrared. (FWIW, silicon has a bandgap of about 1.1 eV-- you do the math.). High efficiency triple junction cells go considerably further into the infrared. The cell is most efficient for light very close to the bandgap-- that is, silicon cells have peak conversion efficiency around 950 nm or so.
Typical blues get pretty much ignored, which makes no sense because blue has the higher energy potential.
Blue does have higher energy per photon, but the spectrum has far fewer photons there. It doesn't get "ignored"-- in fact, most cells are quite good at converting the blue photons (they start rolling off in the near UV). However, it's not optimum to make a solar cell have peak response in the blue; there just aren't enough photons there. For a single junction cell, optimum bandgap is about 1.5 eV. For a multijunction cell, though, you do want the top cell to have good blue response.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Hmm.
Axe versus ironwood tree.
Axe versus punk tree.
Axe versus young poplar grove with 10,000 sub finger diameter ramets.
Axe versus grass.
Perhaps a different tool?
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
a way to get a circle in out of reality.
A circle can be expressed as something at which the probability of an something else radiating from a central origin .... whatever dependant upon if you class a circle in-situ.
That may or may not screw your mind. I could elaborate on whatever, and limits are probably! required, certainly induction.
The central origin, doesn't mean that the radiant thing is singular, nor circular. The model is also dependant upon how you desire interference to be taken into account.
I also didn't put dimensions or what the radiation is etc... it's just a pointer of how it could be expressed.
But as I said in another post, models based on set theory[the theory of mathematics, less category theory I think it's called] are bound to fail. After-all it's still a theory, surely they should try to make it reality before basing reality on it!
I think some physicist said about someone's super-symmetry theory, 'anyone who knows anything about set theory......', when dismissing it.
I'm not sure if he was complaining about the guys model, or emphasising the 'theory' bit in set theory. I expect the former.
A fool and his knowledge are easily parted. (parted by being replaced with a liberal amount of brain washing!)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.