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Researchers Create New Cheap, Shatterproof, Plastic Light Bulbs
hattig writes "US researchers say they have developed a new type of lighting that could replace fluorescent bulbs. The new light source is called field-induced polymer electroluminescent (Fipel) technology. It is made from three layers of white-emitting polymer that contain a small volume of nanomaterials that glow when electric current is passed through them. The developer is promising cheap, hard-to-break, mercury-free, highly efficient bulbs from 2013."
A vison of the future is coming to me... I see... Angry old people...Muttering in the aisles at wal-mart...calling their congressman...bitching at dennys...about... what?...I can almost hear it... yes! They're complaining about the phasing out of of the CFL lightbulbs in favor of these new ones...
Everything is cyclical, I guess...
Capitalist: Noun
1) Some other guy that is making money, while I sit whining in my mother's basement.
Capitalism is the only reason *anything* is cheap. Capitalism is when then the market (read you & I) control the price, not a central groverening authority. A monopoly is what you are thinking of. As long as there is competition in the marketplace the prices wil alway be as low as they can be.
Nowhere does it says they're unbreakable. Even the summary says "hard-to-break". It just says shatterproof, which is very different from not being able to break it at all.
I wonder what the lifespan of these bulbs is going to be ...
The Light Bulb Conspiracy
The developer is promising cheap, hard-to-break, mercury-free, highly efficient bulbs
Historically the three problems with EL have been color balance (or total lack thereof), lifespan (maybe a year at full power), and surface brightness (like forget "lamps" you'll need to cover the entire ceiling with illuminated panels to get modest room illumination).
What the developer is promising has been off the shelf for at least 3 decades... What I listed is the really hard part.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
CFL's suck, they are only more efficient than an Incandescent lamp, which is a fairly easy mark to hit. LED's, though more pleasant to use, are marginally more efficient than CFL's, but not as efficient as a standard T8 florescent lamp (100 Lumens per Watt). Polymer based Electro Luminescence is not new; I am very interested in this efficiency they are talking about (which is painfully missing in the article, 5x more than what????)
I've heard a lot of concerns lobbed at capitalism from fellow nerds on here, but never that it didn't make things cheap. At the cost of human rights, the environment, natural resource depletion, sure... but cheap.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
In fact I'm still using kerosene lamps 'cause I didn't put no trust in that 'lectric light bulb. Now I can jump right past the incandescent era, the cfl era and even the led bulb and have my new house made of glowing plastic embedded with nano particles.
All kidding aside this opens up the possibilities of building this into products in new and innovative ways...
It doesn't even mean that... shatter proof means it wont end up in a zillion razor sharp shards for you to step on. It could still be easy to break. Jello is shatter proof...
you and I are the market now? Narrow definition.
The market that controls the prices also includes the supply chain, and too often in capitalism, there's enough bottleneck-control (i.e. a monopoly) at some point in the supply chain, that the customer/consumer has very little to say in the price.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
This is no longer needed. Some countries are phasing out even CFLs in favor of LEDs, for example China by 2016 won't allow sale of units over 15w. LEDs are already "shatter proof" and they don't carry any gases inside ("solid state").
China will ban imports and sales of certain incandescent light bulbs starting October 2012 to encourage the use of alternative lighting sources such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), with a 5-year plan of phasing-out incandescent light bulbs over 100 watts starting October 1, 2012, and gradually extend the ban to those over 15 watts on October 1, 2016. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/05/us-china-light-bulbs-idUSTRE7A40MV20111105
I have a couple of 10w (4x 2.5w pcs) LED flood lamps, they are too strong for direct lightning but pointing them up allows the light to reflect and diffuse back down nicely. They come up instantly and there is no flickering. Unfortunately they get a little too hot at the base because of the AC/DC transformer, thankfully i'm not enclosing them but overheating could be a problem for others. Perhaps we should adopt some form of DC power distribution inside the house to keep away this conversion from the lamps (and so many devices use DC anyway).
Have you seen white LED street lamps? I have, and they work perfectly. They are also instant (instead of minutes) and the light lets you see many more colors at night. They are about 80w to 100w, instead of the usual 250w, and happen to last 10x more.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
What would the incentive to make such a device in a non-capitalistic economy?
I don't think you realize how much cheap stuff we have today in America?
If you look at prices today and that of 60 years ago and adjust of inflation we will see that a lot of the stuff of the past was more expensive then it is today. Heck we have a lot of things that would be excessively expensive back in the day. Our $200 cellphones would have cost millions of dollars for the same power. And they were paying a hefty price for the normal phones which we would be able to get for under $10.00.
It isn't that businesses are making things more expensive it is that we as a culture are demanding more things.
Back in the old days for your monthly bills
Mortgage, Car, Power, Telephone.
Today
Mortgage, Car, Power, Telephone, Internet, Cell Phone, Cable TV, Netflix...
Expected homes of the 1950 would be small 1000sq/ft homes. Once Car for the family, one Telephone and they will only call rarely,
For power they would power lights, heat, the refrigerator, washer and dryer, and a TV. All ran on AC power, and most when not in use were turned off.
If we were to live like we did during the 1950's we would have huge amounts of income stored up more then ever, because we would be living extremely modestly.
It isn't that things got more expensive they actually gotten cheaper, we just got more things.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It seems to me a light source that is inherently flat would be ideal for a display backlight. It probably won't make them much thinner than they already are, but it could make them less complex to produce and possibly more repairable (by replacing aged backlights).
Also, being able to attach these directly to walls and ceilings rather than mounting brackets or cutting holes for lamps would allow a wider placement of light sources than is currently practical. I'd probably have (at least) one on every wall plus some on the ceiling, to make sure that I could get an ideal spread of light sources for whatever work I might be doing.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Um, no, actually you have explained why having many competitors is a good thing. A duopoly or oligopoly is a limited form of competition where bargaining power is collected with the very few sellers. In cases like this, especially where there is a valuable resource being limited, government regulation is very much appropriate.
Capitalism, overall, is a very good thing and is responsible for our standard of living. It does not mean that it should be unchecked despite what our libertarian friends might think.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I'm very pro-capitalism in general, I was just repeating the usual criticisms levied against it around here.
Also, your logic is faulty. There are choices besides just communism and capitalism. In fact, the examples of the soviet union are probably a better example of socialism than communism, which IMHO is a theoretical system only.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
A "normal" A19 soft white bulb is about 14.5 Lumens per Watt.
A typical CFL is around 55 Lumens per Watt
A good LED bulb is around 90 Lumens per Watt (and they're getting better)
Fipel bulbs are "Highly Efficient".
Anyone have an idea what that is in Lumens per Watt?
Heck we have a lot of things that would be excessively expensive back in the day.
A simple everyday example is food.
Most food has been reduced to near the cost of the transportation necessary to deliver it to your area. Evidence for this is the large fluctuations in food prices in lock step with fuel price fluctuations. Further evidence of this is that all food conglomerates are now also shipping conglomerates, and this is so because thats where the value creation actually happens with regards to food. The food is worth very little where it is grown and where it is processed because of the extreme efficiencies that we have achieved. It only attains value through shipping. Shipping is where the value creation happens with regards to most foods.
Yes there are "brand names" that carry a premium, but much like Apple they are essentially niche irrelevant.
More on topic, this is the historic price of light in terms of median US labor:
year - hours of work needed to purchase 1000 lumen hours of light
1800 - 5.387
1850 - 2.998
1900 - 0.2204
1950 - 0.00188
1992 - 0.00012
here is the citation for those numbers
"His name was James Damore."
Their house purchasing power has gone up: http://www.nahb.org/assets/docs/publication/fft2001_8142002101506AM.pdf
Even adjusting for inflation we see that we are better off than historically. http://www.davemanuel.com/median-household-income.php I'm just not sure what data you are using to back up your argument.
We don't have any more disposable income (adjusting for inflation) than in the past, but we have more luxeries and larger homes.
You're forgetting something - while your thesis that food costs are directly associated with fuel costs is correct, the reason that this is true is because fossil fuels comprise a large portion of the energy budget of food production.
From a CNN article:
Doing away with food imports could be seen as understandable if international transport played a dominant role in the food chain's greenhouse gas emissions.
But in the UK 's case -- where much of the research into the "food miles" concept has taken place -- that doesn't seem to be the case. A sturdy 85 percent of UK food transport-related emissions actually derive from domestic road deliveries according to the DFID. Road freight traffic in the UK grew by 67 percent between 1980 and 2001, with the average journey length also increasing by 40 percent.
By comparison, international freight contributes 11 percent of UK food transport-related emissions -- that's less than one-tenth of one percent of the UK 's overall emissions, the DFID says.
Transportation as a whole contributes 2.5 percent of the food chain's emissions, says FCRN. Food refrigeration, on the other hand, accounts for as much as 18 percent (and notably 3.5 percent of the UK 's entire greenhouse gas emissions).
The whole transport issue initially came to the fore after the "food miles" concept was coined in Europe to illustrate how fossil fuel-intensive the global food distribution network had become.
But the relative blame that the transport sector should be taking for this is debatable.
In the U.S., up to 20 percent of the country's fossil fuel consumption goes into the food chain, according to the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), which points out that fossil fuel use by the food systems in the developed world "often rivals that of automobiles".
To feed an average family of four in the developed world uses up the equivalent of 930 gallons of gasoline a year -- just shy of the 1,070 gallons that same family would use up each year to power their cars.
The average developed world diet uses 1,600 liters of fossil fuels each year, according to the U.S. based Organic Consumers Association (OCA). Only 256 of those liters come from transporting the food, says OCA.
By contrast, a whopping 496 liters goes into the chemical fertilizers used during the food growing stage, representing well over one third of the food chain's entire fossil fuel consumption.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
...the plastic uses iridium. That's expensive stuff, even if used in incredibly small quantities:
http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/iridium/
Currently over $1,000 an ounce.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
Imagine, the sort of panel lighting you see all the time in sci fi. If they can approximate black body spectrum of an incandescent, this would be amazing. I'd line the bottoms of shelves, and install panels on the ceilings and walls, under the edges of steps, under cupboards, even inside cupboards and closets and have light exactly where I need it. It seems that if this works, you can have light panels you can actually cut to size, which would allow for really creative, ultra-modern lighting installations. I would also install panels on the back of my televisions and monitors to provide ambient backlighting to increase the apparent contrast while watching movies.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
He's actually correct. The problem is that we don't have meaningful competition in many sectors of our economy, we have industries tied up in regulatory capture (patents, copyrights, etc. overreaching, no-bid contracts, regulatory rules that benefit incumbents, etc.).
The other issue is that "true" capitalism requires complete, perfect information and zero transport costs for the consumer. I can choose from any supplier with no cost of switching, and I know the full differences between all of them. Given that that is impossible, it's impossible to have proper invisible hand capitalism here in the real world.
What we need to strive for is making sure the regulations are in place to protect the consumer against information "warfare" from the producers while simultaneously preventing corporations from abusing those regulations for their own benefit. Given the money that flows through government and corporations right now, I'm not holding out high hopes of that changing meaningfully any time soon...
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Imagine, the sort of panel lighting you see all the time in sci fi.
It's been available since the 1960s. Electroluminescent sheets have been around for over 40 years. They're on the expensive side and light output per unit area is low, but they work fine. Some versions last for decades. (Some don't, which is a big problem for permanent installation.) They make good night lights and somewhat dim display backlights.
Here's a A3 sized white electroluminescent sheet. About 12" x 17", costs $125.
So this is not a new thing. If the new version is a lot brighter or a lot cheaper, it might be useful. For now, it's another "nanotechnology" materials science article about an interesting lab phenomenon.
See a good doctor. Lasik is not for everyone and as they say, your millage may vary.
I finally decided to see a doctor about it and ended up with intraocular lenses, because I was developing cataracts. Shitty eyes, near-sighted, astigmatism, far-sighted (from age) and then cataracts.
I have worn glasses for more than 40 years so I decided the knife was worth it, if I could regain some vision even if I had to still use glasses; now I can see far without trouble but still have to get the reading glasses on small print, but I CAN SEE
See a doctor, it is worth it. You can't imagine how beautiful it is to wake up, open your eyes and see!
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey