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Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered and demonstrated a new method for overcoming two major hurdles facing solar energy. By developing a new antireflective coating that boosts the amount of sunlight captured by solar panels and allows those panels to absorb the entire solar spectrum from nearly any angle, the research team has moved academia and industry closer to realizing high-efficiency, cost-effective solar power.

“To get maximum efficiency when converting solar power into electricity, you want a solar panel that can absorb nearly every single photon of light, regardless of the sun’s position in the sky,” said Shawn-Yu Lin, professor of physics at Rensselaer and a member of the university’s Future Chips Constellation, who led the research project.  “Our new antireflective coating makes this possible.”

An untreated silicon solar cell only absorbs 67.4 percent of sunlight shone upon it — meaning that nearly one-third of that sunlight is reflected away and thus unharvestable. From an economic and efficiency perspective, this unharvested light is wasted potential and a major barrier hampering the proliferation and widespread adoption of solar power. 

After a silicon surface was treated with Lin’s new nanoengineered reflective coating, however, the material absorbed 96.21 percent of sunlight shone upon it — meaning that only 3.79 percent of the sunlight was reflected and unharvested. This huge gain in absorption was consistent across the entire spectrum of sunlight, from UV to visible light and infrared, and moves solar power a significant step forward toward economic viability. 

Lin’s new coating also successfully tackles the tricky challenge of angles. 

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This one is a tad technical but the opportunities are amazing - IT

In future, polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA for short) – better known as acrylic glass – could be made from natural raw materials such as sugars, alcohols or fatty acids. Compared with the previous chemical production process, a biotechnological process is far more environmentally friendly.

PMMA is manufactured by polymerising methyl methacrylate (MMA). In a bacterial strain, scientists at the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) have found an enzyme which could be used for the biotechnological production of a precursor of MMA.

Dr Thore Rohwerder has been nominated as one of three candidates for the European Evonik research award for his discovery. The competition is overseen by Dr Arend Oetker, president of the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft (Association of Donors to German Science). The aim of the award is to encourage young researchers to risk taking the step from the laboratory into business. The topic of the 2008 Evonik research award is “White Biotechnology” (industrial biotechnology). The Science-to-Business Award worth EUR 100,000 was given to Dr. Paul Dalby from the University College London on November 12th in Berlin. Dalby’s method for combining enzymes and customizing them for new tasks convinced the international jury.

The newly enzyme discovered by Dr. Thore Rohwerder und Dr. Roland H. Müller, called 2-hydroxyisobutyryl-CoA mutase, makes it possible to turn a linear C4 carbon structure into a branched one. Compounds of this type are precursors of MMA. Parent compounds may of course include intermediate products from the petrochemical industry. The revolutionary aspect, however, is that this enzyme, integrated into metabolically appropriate microorganisms, can also transform sugars and other natural compounds into the products desired. Until now, the only way to produce this precursor – 2-hydroxyisobutyrate (2-HIBA) – was a purely chemical process based on petrochemical raw materials.

The chemicals industry worldwide is searching for suitable biological processes, so that in future, renewable raw materials can also be used as a basis for MMA synthesis. The mutase presented here provides the solution: an enzyme which shifts a functional group from one position to another within a molecule. While in a post-doc position at the UFZ’s Department of Environmental Microbiology, Dr Thore Rohwerder and his mentor Dr Roland H. Müller discovered the enzyme in a newly isolated bacterial strain they found while searching for bacteria to break down the pollutant MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether).

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THE federal government is giving General Motors, Ford and Chrysler $25 billion in low-interest loans, and the companies are asking for up to $25 billion more. These same companies have spent millions of dollars lobbying against federal fuel-economy standards and are suing to overturn the emissions standards imposed by California and other states. In exchange for the loans, Congress should first insist that the automakers stop fighting these standards. But it should also make sure that better outcomes will result from these billions than just fuel-efficient cars.

The Obama administration should ask the companies, as a condition of financial assistance, to begin shifting from being just automakers to becoming innovative “transportmakers.” As Barack Obama’s new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, recently said: “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste. It’s an opportunity to do important things you would otherwise avoid.”

As transportmakers, the companies could produce vehicles for high-speed train and bus systems that would improve our travel options, reduce global warming, conserve energy, minimize accidents and generally improve the way we live.

This better way forward has been kicking around Washington for more than 35 years. In a prescient 1972 article in The Atlantic, Stewart Udall, an interior secretary under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, warned of America’s excessive dependence on cars and called for this approach.

At a time when almost no politicians and industry leaders were paying attention to this problem, Mr. Udall made a bleak but accurate prediction. He wrote that “the oil needs of the other industrialized countries are growing faster than ours” and that this “surge of demand will soon begin to send shock waves through the American economy and transportation system.”

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There is a type of rock with a voracious appetite for carbon dioxide

ONE way of helping to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is to pump the gas into underground caverns or old oil fields. But there is also a rock that is happy to gobble it up, and according to the latest research its appetite for the greenhouse gas is not only massive but could also be increased by a little human intervention.

The rock is peridotite, which is one of the main rocks in the upper mantle, an area that provides a girth below the Earth’s crust. The rock occurs some 20km or more down, although in areas where plate tectonics have forced up some of the mantle, peridotite reaches the surface. This happens in part of the Omani desert which Peter Kelemen and Juerg Matter, both from Columbia University, New York, have studied for years.

Geologists have long known that when peridotite is exposed to the air it can react quickly with carbon dioxide to form carbonates like limestone or marble. Some people have looked at the idea of grinding up peridotite and using it to soak up emissions from power stations, but the process turns out to be expensive, partly because of the costs of transporting all the rock. The transportation would also create emissions. InProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Messrs Kelemen and Matter suggest an alternative: pumping the gas from places where it is produced and into underground strata of peridotite.

The team has shown that the Omani peridotite absorbs tens of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, far more than anyone had thought. By drilling and fracturing the rock they believe they can start a process to increase the absorption rate by 100,000 times or more. They estimate this would allow the Omani outcrop, which extends down some 5km, alone to absorb some 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, which is a substantial part of the annual 30 billion or so tonnes of the gas that humans send into the atmosphere, mostly by burning fossil fuels.

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White space promises to put WiFi on steroids

HOW much would you pay for unlimited access to WiFi hotspots that stretched for miles instead of a few hundred feet, provided unbroken connections even deep inside buildings, and offered broadband speeds ten times faster than today’s wimpy connections found in coffee shops, hotel lobbies, airport lounges and homes?

How about nothing, or next to nothing? That could be on the cards within a couple of years, thanks to a decision taken this past week by America’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

After four years of deliberations—and staunch opposition from television broadcasters, makers and users of wireless microphones, and mobile-phone companies—the federal regulators voted unanimously on November 4th to allow a new generation of wireless gizmos to access the internet using the empty airwaves (“white spaces”) between television’s channels 2 to 51.

The FCC could have auctioned off those frequencies—it raised $19.6 billion in March 2007 by auctioning blocks of frequencies above 700 megahertz that will be vacated when television switches from analog to digital broadcasting—but to its credit it opted to make them freely available.

The decision is a huge win for public-interest groups and tech firms like Google, Microsoft and Intel, who believe the white-space transmission could bring broadband to poorly served parts of the country.

They see it as America’s last chance to build a “third pipe” capable of providing much-needed competition to today’s broadband duopoly controlled by the phone and cable companies. As a bonus, white space could also provide improved communications for fire-fighters, police forces, ambulance crews and other emergency responders.

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