organic photovoltaics) harvesting energy from interior lighting or sunlight for various small devices and sensors that gather information from the environment.
said the soft-spoken inventor. emperature from the sun does not go beyond this level in terms of heating
what every other state is going to have to look at as they start reaching higher and higher levels of solar activity,
He wanted to find a project in which the sun did more than just power a device.
With enough sun, a large lens and an ample supply of sand, he figured he might be able to produce glassware.
He knew the sun would move and the focal point would shift during the process, so he ordered a single 4. 5-foot-wide lens
and solar panels at the other, can pivot from straight overhead down to a 45-degree angle to chase the sun. directed by a CAD design from a connected laptop,
the printer uses the concentrated beam of sunlight to slowly trace an object into the sandbox layer by layer.
The sun melts the sand, which cools into glass. When the electronics began overheating, Kayser cut open a soup can,
The sun melted only the sand, and, after more than four hours, he printed a glass bowl,
Kayser digs the object out of the sandbox TRACKING Kayser attached a cylindrical sun tracker to the frame perpendicular to the lens.
When the sun is directly in line with the lens, it shines straight through an opening in the top of the cylinder.
As the sun shifts, the light comes in at an angle, creating shadows within the cylinder.
they also benefit from the sun tracking, which ensures that they always get direct light.
and the primarily provider would be your solar system and your storage device.####For now, though, it s only a minor threat to utilities that levy high demand charges,
I think you ll see up to 50 percent of solar systems will have energy storage, ##says Rive.####The economics and scale that Tesla has achieved in the automotive market now make stationary energy storage more cost effective and reliable than it has ever been in the past,##JB Straubel,
such as this#solar-powered one that flew cross-country using the power of the sun. But,
##But the maximum radio frequency intensity of the transmission##is only one-fourth that of sunlight,##according to former NASA wireless power transmission engineer Richard Dickinson.
It may think that the search term##pink##relates to the pop star rather than the color
while in sun-blasted Arizona the state s big utility tried to short-circuit a solar boom.
when the sun isn t shining. In Arizona, that credit is calculated at retail rates and APS argued that penalized homeowners who don t go solar as the utility will be forced to raise their rates to pay for the transmission system
and we can build every product under the sun for those people. And we re going to try and do it.##
So she opts for a small home solar system to cover basic needs like mobile charging.
Due to a combination of new found purchasing power, declining solar system costs, increasing kerosene costs, and advances in solar services business models,
Using solar wind, and other forms of passive energy, our future water networks will be operate with far more efficiency and convenience than anything imaginable today.
It will generate between 1-3 Gallons Water/day depending on the humidity conditions and sun conditions.
#New LED light technology sheds light on the future of food LED growing lights, delivering sunlight whatever the weather.
the Luna Wash is like a miniature dirt-destroying Death Star that uses static electricity and steam to coax your clothes clean.
Powering the Entire Solar system At first blush, most will imagine a space-based solar array powering our energy hungry businesses on earth,
the amount of sunlight that hits it varies greatly as the geosynchronous satellite and Earth spin.
which is capable of concentrating the sun rays into a stream 2000x more powerful. The process of trapping sunlight also produces water that can be used to produce potable water and other modern day amenities such as air conditioning.
Scientists are predicting that the HCPVT could provide sustainable energy and fresh water to communities all around the world.
which is attached to a tracking system that determines the best angle based on the position of the sun. Such system can be applied profitably in sunny regions where sustainable energy,
With the high concentration of the sun rays and a low cost design the team believe they charge $250 per square meter which is three times lower than normal systems.
The burgeoning revolution has not been confined to the Lone star State. Apparently, when it comes to higher-education reform,
At night you are not collecting energy from the sun and it takes a lot of power to broadcast internet signals.
the turbine helium-inflated housing is durable enough for deployment in either the blazing sun or freezing snow.
even if your previous system involved a sun dial and carrier pigeons. The things even have a cool name:
when the wind stops blowing and the sun goes down. The end goal for Tesla is that cheap batteries could help Tesla deliver its $35, 000 third generation electric car.
As the only organisms capable of converting sunlight into food, plants are the powerhouses that produce all of the sustenance On earth.
Like the leaves of a plant, the material requires only exposure to sunlight and a small amount of water to produce oxygen."
non-ionizing solar radiation. They convert it by luminescence and operate on the principle of collecting radiation over a large area.
small organic molecules to absorb specific nonvisible wavelengths of sunlight.""We can tune these materials to pick up just the ultraviolet and the near infrared wavelengths that then'glow'at another wavelength in the infrared,
or brightening, how this affects the amount of sunlight reaching the planet's surface and what that means for climate change.
2. The likely effect of all that extra solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface would be faster global warming.
which help to reflect the Sun's rays back into space and so cool the planet.
tends to absorb sunlight rather than scattering it back into space. This means that it warms the troposphere in much the same way as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
which measured incoming solar radiation rather than visibility, concluded that the skies have brightened over most land areas,
#Solar magnetism twists braids of superheated gas Geoff Brumfiel hears from researcher Jonathan Cirtain why the Sun s atmosphere is hotter than its surface.
The Sun's atmosphere is just jam-packed full of magnetic field, says Cirtain. As the lines of those fields cross and twirl, the theory went,
a camera capable of taking pictures of the Sun's corona in fine detail. The imager was placed on board a research rocket at the White sands Missile Range in New mexico
which time it took a series of pictures of the Sun (see video). A team member started analysing the data on the drive back from the missile range,
The group now hopes to put the Hi-C on a next-generation spacecraft that will monitor the Sun for longer periods of time e
when it helped with the initial design of K-STAR, believes that the K-DEMO project is feasible,
Exposed to the sun, a solar cell employing such nanowires can turn nearly 14 percent of the incoming light into electricity#a new record that opens up more possibilities for cheap and effective solar power.
and phosphorus that absorbs much of the light from the sun (a property known as its band gap).
At the same time the novel cells could be built into so-called multijunction solar cells#compound devices that incorporate several different types of semiconductor material in layers like a sandwich to absorb as much of the energy in sunlight as possible.
Such multijunction cells have converted more than 43 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity#currently
but they can be made cheaper by combining them with low-cost lenses to concentrate the sunlight onto smaller versions of the cells.
#Nearby star is almost as old as the Universe Astronomers have discovered a Methuselah of stars#a denizen of the Solar system's neighbourhood that is at least 13.2 billion years old and formed shortly after the Big bang."
"We believe this star is known the oldest in the Universe with a well determined age,
The venerable star, dubbed HD 140283, lies at a comparatively short distance of 190 light years from the Solar system
and has been studied by astronomers for more than a century. Researchers have known long that the object consists almost entirely of hydrogen
before successive generations of stars had a chance to forge heavier elements. But no one knew exactly how old it was.
and more accurate determination of the star s distance from the Solar system, using 11 sets of observations recorded between 2003 and 2011 using the Hubble space telescope s Fine Guidance Sensors,
which measure the position of target stars relative to reference stars. The astronomers also measured the brightness of the star as it appears in the sky,
and were then able to calculate its intrinsic luminosity. The team then exploited the fact that HD 140283 is in a phase of its life cycle in
In this phase, the star's slowly dimming luminosity is a highly sensitive indicator of its age,
His team calculates that the star is 13.9 billion years old, give or take 700 million years.
The star's age is therefore at least 13.2 billion years #which was estimated the age of another known Methuselah2#and possibly older.
The very first generation of stars coalesced from primordial gas, which did not contain appreciable amounts of elements heavier than helium,
but non-zero abundance of heavy elements#shows that the star must have formed after the first stellar generation.
Conditions for making the second generation of stars, then, "must have been in place very early, says Bromm.
The very first stars are thought usually to have coalesced a few hundred million years after the Big bang,
But before the second generation of stars could form, that gas had to cool down. The early age of the second-generation star HD 140283 hints that the cooling time,
however, and Baker and his team now attributes its creation to an interplanetary shock wave#a travelling outburst of solar-wind particles from the Sun#that has been detected by other craft.
#Moon-size exoplanet circling sun-like star smallest yet A newfound world called Kepler 37 b could easily blend in to the long and growing list of known extrasolar planets,
But the new addition to the catalogue of 800-plus exoplanets stands out in at least one major respect#it is far smaller than any planet yet discovered outside of our solar system.
"What makes this very interesting is this is a planet smaller than anything we see in our own inner solar system,
The researchers used NASA s Kepler space telescope to identify the three planets orbiting Kepler 37, a star some 200 light-years away that is somewhat smaller than the sun. The spacecraft monitors more than 150,000 stars in the Milky way
or dips in brightness, that might be caused by a planet passing in front of its star, from the probe s perspective.
or passed in front of its star, more than 50 times, Barclay and his colleague drew out a subtle but recurrent pattern.
Every 13 days or so the star dimmed by a tiny fraction#just 0. 002 percent#as the tiny planet passed across the star s face.
Orbiting its star at one tenth the distance between Earth and the sun, tiny Kepler 37 b must be extremely hot."
The larger worlds in the planetary system orbit somewhat farther out but would still suffer scorching heat from the star.
All three planets keep closer to the star Kepler 37 than any planet orbits the sun."It just shows that Kepler has just an extraordinary ability to see a wide diversity of planetary architectures,
"Our solar system just contains nothing whatsoever inside Mercury s orbit. But it turns out that the average planetary system has a lot going on in the inner region.
Whereas giant Jupiter-size planets often exert a gravitational tug on their host stars that is detectable with Earth-based telescope spectrographs,
instead to quantify the probability of a false positive#for instance, a pair of undetected binary stars whose regular eclipses mimic a planetary signal.
binary stars and other astronomical objects, the researchers calculated the probability that the signal collected from Kepler represents a true planet."
"In this case, with the innermost planet we are confident that it is a true planet orbiting the target star with a confidence of 99.95 percent,
#Computer program roots out ancestors of modern tongues In Fiji, a star is a kalokalo. For the Pazeh people of Taiwan, it is mintol,
The sudden ballooning also amplified quantum fluctuations into clumps of matter that went on to seed the first stars,
"It is a bright star now in the literature, suggesting that it is not crazy to map every neuron in the brain of an animal.
which uses sunlight for the same purpose. Chemosynthesis also fuels life at other deep-sea locations such as hydrothermal vents
the crust"would be the first major ecosystem On earth to run on chemical energy rather than sunlight,
because pentaquarks might be formed inside collapsing stars, their discovery might tell us more about what stars are composed of
and how they evolve. The new data might also lead to the discovery of other pentaquarks with different masses."
But the software will be of even more benefit on future missions to the outer solar system and eventually planetary systems outside our solar system.
That means renewable energy sources like wind or sunlight which are often patchy are not reliable enough.
which make fuel from sunlight just like plants says Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow UK.
#Supernova find backs dark energy and universe expansion Astronomers have had long a dark secret: one of the cornerstones of the Nobel prizewinning discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating had never been tested directly.
which a white dwarf star somehow reaches a critical mass of about 1. 4 solar masses and explodes.
when Steve Fossey of University college London and his students stumbled upon a type IA supernova in M82 or the Cigar galaxy.
They found the classic signature of a thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf. The process begins with the compression of the white dwarf leading to the formation of nickel-56
which decays to cobalt-56 which in turn decays to a stable isotope of iron producing characteristic gamma rays.
In the favoured model called the single degenerate system a white dwarf reaches its critical mass by stealing material from an ordinary companion star.
In an alternative double degenerate model two white dwarfs orbiting each other cause the explosion either by merging or by one poaching matter from the other.
In a single degenerate system the shock wave from the white dwarf explosion should smash into the surrounding gas from the companion star generating radio waves.
so concluded SN 2014j probably began as two white dwarfs. Robert Kirshner of Harvard university who studies type IA supernovae is convinced not yet.
The next step is to look at the stars and galaxies that raised the infrared flag in the WISE survey
what because it's cataloguing the mid-infrared of our stars and galaxies he says.
#Cool planet hints at potential for life in double stars It's a cool planet in a tight spot.
Although this planet probably cannot support life as we know it the discovery greatly expands the places we can look for potentially habitable worlds outside our solar system.
In a binary star system the two partners are locked in an orbital embrace. Astronomers have found a handful of planets that orbit both partners in close binary pairs.
But no one was convinced that a planet could orbit just one star at a sufficient distance to host life.
Most stars are part of binary systems and a significant fraction of these are close binary systems so if you want to maximise the places you can look for habitable planets you're going to want to look at these close binaries as well says Scott Gaudi at Ohio State university (OSU) in Columbus. Gaudi
and his team used a technique called gravitational microlensing to study a binary system with two red dwarfs small stars that are dimmer than the sun. The distance between the stars is about 10 to 15 times that of Earth
and the sun. The team found a planet about twice the mass of Earth orbiting just one of the two stars at about the same distance as we are to our home star.
if a star has a tight stellar companion and the further it is from the star the more difficult it would be for planets to form.
But this discovery argues that yes indeed at least in this system of two red dwarfs you can form planets at these sorts of longer distances says Gaudi.
Jean-Philipe Beaulieu at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics in France called the newfound planet an important discovery.
This shows more than ever that our solar system is not the paradigm in our galaxy says Beaulieu.
But the same planet orbiting a sun-like star in a binary system would be in the habitable zone where conditions could support liquid water
As one star passes in front of another as seen from Earth light from the background star is bent gravitationally
The planet isn't blocking the background star's light. It's just that the mathematics of focusing is disrupted by the planet's gravity he says.
There's absolutely no doubt that what we've detected is a rocky planet in a binary star system adds Gould.
In which case he adds it is a direct remnant of one of the most violent events in our solar system's history.
But it did not yet have an ozone layer to shield the surface from the sun's harshest ultraviolet rays.
while letting enough sunlight through to allow them to photosynthesise. Complex life evolved long before the crater formed
Asteroid and comet impacts are ubiquitous in the solar system so Pontefract thinks impacts could have helped kick-start life on rocky planets
The planet orbits a star that is about 560 light years away from us. It has a radius slightly more than double that of Earth's a size that led astronomers to assume it was a shrunken version of gassy planet Neptune
or by activity from the host star and they say a massive rocky world is the best explanation for the data.
Neighbouring planet Kepler-10b was already famous among planet hunters for being confirmed the first rocky world outside our solar system.
But it is very close to its star completing a full orbit in just 20 hours.
The more we find planets outside the solar system the more we are surprised by the diversity of these new worlds says Dumusque e
It also accounts for complex phenomena such as cooling gas star formation supernova explosions and supermassive black holes pulling in material that gets too Close to run the simulation the team used several supercomputers in Europe and the US each
For instance small galaxies in the simulation produced stars too early so they appeared older than we observe them to be today.
#Sun's fractal surprise could help fusion On earth THE sun has thrown us a fractal surprise.
An unexpected pattern has been glimpsed in the solar wind the turbulent plasma of charged particles that streams from the sun. It offers clues for handling plasmas that roil inside nuclear fusion reactors On earth.
and electrons the solar wind streams from the sun and pervades the solar system. Its flow is turbulent containing eddies and moving at different speeds in different directions.
It was thought that this turbulence was similar to that in a fluid behaving like mixing ocean currents
Now Sandra Chapman of the University of Warwick UK and her colleagues have examined the solar wind's behaviour using NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft.
One flies just within Earth's orbit around the sun the other just outside it allowing the pair to obtain unique measurements of solar wind behaviour.
when the movement of the wind's particles is perpendicular to the sun's magnetic field they resemble a fluid with sections that are smooth interrupted by bursts of violence.
These create energy in the same way as the sun by fusing a superheated plasma of hydrogen nuclei to form helium.
Enter the solar wind. Though less dense and cooler than the hydrogen of a fusion reactor the wind is a plasma
The great thing about solar wind turbulence is that the satellites sit right inside so it can be observed in exquisite detail says Steve Cowley of the Culham Centre for Fusion energy UK.
#Supernova found aligned with galactic magnifying glass A perfectly arranged exploding star and distant galaxy have created together a cosmic magnifying glass that could improve our understanding of the universe's expansion and dark matter.
Sometimes when a white dwarf star dies it explodes as a type 1a supernova. All supernovae in this class reach a very specific colour and peak brightness creating
whether and by how much the light from the supernova is being messed with by other things like nearby galaxies or the expansion of the universe.
For example the gravity from a massive object like a galaxy can magnify light from another object like a supernova bending its light waves
Now a team led by Robert Quimby at the University of Tokyo Japan has confirmed the first case of this lensing effect in a type 1a supernova:
The supernova PS1-10afx was discovered in 2010 using the Pan starrs telescope in Hawaii. Because it was so much brighter than normal it sparked controversy over
whether it was a new type of supernova or was being magnified by a gravitational lens.
and after the supernova and none of these showed obvious signs of a foreground object says Quimby.
Now his team has found a galaxy full of dim old stars that was hard to see against the bright background of the galaxy holding the supernova.
They calculate that it is the right size to make a normal type 1a supernova look about 30 times brighter about the same as the apparent brightness of PS1-10afx.
and hailed by some as the discovery of the century may have been caused by ashes from an exploding star.
Fresh discoveries have put two moons in our solar system neck and neck in the race.
Both moons are now among the hottest prospects in the solar system for finding alien life
when the sun becomes a red giant in 6 billion years. A lot of things can happen in 6 billion years
Some future extraterrestrials visiting our solar system will be able to look at the naked rocky core of
and take whatever the solar wind gives it it can actually fight back. Earth is surrounded always by a bubble of magnetism called the magnetosphere
which protects us from the bulk of the solar wind a stream of high-energy particles constantly flowing from the sun
. But sometimes the sun's magnetic field lines can directly link up with Earth's in a process called magnetic reconnection which opens up cracks in the magnetosphere.
Gas in Earth's upper atmosphere is ionised by ultraviolet light from the sun and the resulting plasma becomes trapped by magnetic fields in a doughnut-shaped ring around the planet.
Theory had suggested that an extra-strong electric field from the sun can rip plasma away from the plasmasphere during reconnection triggering a plume.
and saw a tendril of increased electron density curling away from the north pole indicating that a plume of plasma was veering off towards the sun. At the same time three of NASA's THEMIS spacecraft
and the sun's says Walsh. It gets to that boundary and helps protect us keeps these solar storms from slamming into us.
here's what it will Do it's the Mount everest of the solar system conquered only by an elite group.
This is much more serious than selecting a few people who are going to become pop stars it's more like The Apprentice.
We do however know that high speed impacts are a ubiquitous process as we see impact craters on every solid surface in the solar system says Mark Price at the University of Kent UK.
As impacts between icy bodies occur throughout the solar system then complex organic molecules are also very probably widespread.
Sprint-A will also peer at Jupiter's moon Io the most volcanically active body in the solar system to see how the tiny moon influences Jupiter's mighty auroras.
Extreme UV from the sun gets bent at the boundary where a planet's atmosphere meets space
But we also know that the sun pumps out a constant stream of charged particles called the solar wind
Earth is protected from the solar wind by a relatively strong global magnetic field which repels charged particles from the sun explains Nick Schneider of the Laboratory for Atmospheric
and Space Physics in Boulder Colorado who has worked on Sprint-A. Still the solar wind would have been much stronger
when the sun was young and more active. Because Venus is closer to the sun the solar wind might have stripped gaseous water from its early atmosphere leaving a thick haze of mostly carbon dioxide that turned the planet's surface into a hellish desert.
And while Mars is farther away it has no global magnetic field. It is thought the solar wind thinned the Red planet's atmosphere over time making it cold and dry.
It turns out that most atmospheres have lost a lot of gas over their lifetimes. On Mars it may be as much as 99 per cent.
What drives the escaping is a big question says Schneider. Solar stripping is a leading hypothesis
Sprint-A will help from afar by looking for the extreme UV radiation generated as the solar wind slams into the upper atmospheres of both Mars
By observing this phenomenon we will investigate how the solar wind affects the upper atmosphere of planets and how the planetary atmosphere escapes into outer space.
Until recently a planet's habitability was defined largely by its distance from its star which hints at
But it is clear from our solar system that a lot of other factors come into play says Schneider d
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