Month: April 2007

Solar Goodness

- Adam Clare

picture-1.png Solar power is always seeing new advancements. It can be something fun like building your own solar powered iPod charger or finding that solar dyes can be used for creating electricity. This month Georgia Tech has developed a solar panel that uses nano-towers to create a more efficient solar cell.

The difference is in the design. Traditional solar panels are often flat and bulky. The new design features an array of nano-towers – like microscopic blades of grass – that add surface area and trap more sunlight.

Plants are Quantum Powered

- Adam Clare

I don’t really understand all of this quantum power stuff – it just seems so neat! Apparently plants use some quantum level process for photosynthesis which is what plants need to do in order to live. I have no idea how this will impact anything, but it’s just such a groovy discovery.

In a paper entitled, Evidence for wavelike energy transfer through quantum coherence in photosynthetic systems, he and his collaborators report the detection of “quantum beating” signals, coherent electronic oscillations in both donor and acceptor molecules, generated by light-induced energy excitations, like the ripples formed when stones are tossed into a pond.

Google Earth Exposes Darfur

- Adam Clare

Google Earth is now showing people unpleasant information about Darfur. The things that are happening in Darfur are in no way good – in fact, they are the opposite of good (bad). What is good about Google doing this is that it is bringing a lot of attention to people who need our help in the troubled region.

Find out more at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

From the first link:

The Internet search company Google is venturing into political territory. Together with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the popular online mapping service Google Earth inaugurated Tuesday a project to call attention to atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan.

So it goes

- Adam Clare

Kurt Vonnegut has died.

Vonnegut‘s works are antiwar and they question the very ideas that modern western society holds dear – which is why I adore this dead man. Quite frankly I think everyone should give Bokonism a try. It’s with great pleasure and some sadness that I put this post on this site. In his death, I think we should celebrate his work.
Ting-a-ling!

Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science fiction writer with “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. “You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves,” an English colonel says in the book. “We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God — I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’ ”

Power Your Own Electronics

- Adam Clare

The power of walking proves itself to be a great way to get energy yet again!

This most recent addition to the foot powered future uses nanogenerators to convert kinetic energy into cell phone energy.

Researchers have demonstrated a prototype nanometer-scale generator that produces continuous direct-current electricity by harvesting mechanical energy from such environmental sources as ultrasonic waves, mechanical vibration or blood flow.

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