Haibane.info

Solar power is good enough for the biosphere, so by golly it’s about time it was good enough for human industry! Of course, photosynthesis is only 6% efficient. That number includes the biological losses, the absorption ratio (if I understand the numbers from that link correctly) is 34%. According to various sources the absorption efficiency of solar panels seems to max out around 40%, with power conversion efficiency of 6%, so state of the art is roughly comparable to nature (though of course, manufacturing cost is another matter). However, a new nanomaterial-based coating seems to have been developed that boosts absorption by ~40%:

The new RPI solar cell is a normal cell covered in a special anti-reflective coating which traps sunlight from nearly every angle and part of the spectrum. The new cell is near perfect; it absorbs 96.21 percent of the sunlight shined on it, while a normal cell could only absorb 67.4 percent. That 43 percent efficiency boost, coupled with mass production, if properly implemented could place solar on the verge of competing unsubsidized with coal power, at last.

Shawn-Yu Lin, professor of physics at Rensselaer and a member of the university’s Future Chips Constellation describes the breakthrough, stating, “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. Our new antireflective coating makes this possible.”

This is pretty exciting, especially if the mass production can work out. Even if power conversion efficiency stays the same, improving absorption by 40% should boost the total power output by the same amount.

These pictures of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are awe-inspiring, but also make me a bit sad. It’s depressing to think that Big Science like this can’t be done in the US anymore. Or rather, won’t be done.

these are just a few of the amazing photos available. For captions, and many more, check out the original link.

I visited Fermilab as a kid and then actually worked on some hardware for an experiment there as a summer student in college at UW. I don’t know much about particle physics but I do know that every square foot of those massive, intricate assemblies is the product of some grad student’s or researcher’s life work. It’s humbling to think of the intellectual capital invested in this machine, built to answer what amount to such fundamental, even basic questions.

I had a similar reaction when I visited the Saturn V on the grounds of the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake, TX. That was once functioning hardware; had there been the money, it could have flown to the moon. Instead it rusts in a placid Texas field.

It occurs to me that I’ve never seen the equal of these pictures of the LHC in any science fiction, on TV or film. Nothing in the imagination of our storytellers has equaled the sheer complexity and power of the simple photos here.

XKCD pays homage to the Drake Equation, with their characteristic style:

It should be noted though that the new term Bs is redundant with L. That’s really the only parameter for which there is essentially no way to formulate any reasonable estimate. When I learned about the Drake Equation in college, we basically came to see that the Drake Equation was uttterly dominated by the assumption for L, even if fl, fi, and fc were all assumed to be 1. It’s a sobering thought that time, not space, is our greatest barrier to finding someone else Out There.