Science & Light

admin December 16th, 2007

THE NEW DAWN OF SOLAR
By Michael Moyer
Popular Science

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2007/green/item_59.html

Imagine a solar panel without the panel. Just a coating, thin as a layer of
paint, that takes light and converts it to electricity. From there, you can
picture roof shingles with solar cells built inside and window coatings that
seem to suck power from the air. Consider solar-powered buildings stretching
not just across sunny Southern California, but through China and India and
Kenya as well, because even in those countries, going solar will be cheaper
than burning coal. That¹s the promise of thin-film solar cells: solar power
that¹s ubiquitous because it¹s cheap. The basic technology has been around
for decades, but this year, Silicon Valley-based Nanosolar
<http://www.nanosolar.com/> created the manufacturing technology that could
make that promise a reality.

The company produces its PowerSheet solar cells with printing-press-style
machines that set down a layer of solar-absorbing nano-ink onto metal sheets
as thin as aluminum foil, so the panels can be made for about a tenth of
what current panels cost and at a rate of several hundred feet per minute.
With backing from Google¹s founders and $20 million from the U.S. Department
of Energy, Nanosolar¹s first commercial cells rolled off the presses this
year.

Cost has always been one of solar¹s biggest problems. Traditional solar
cells require silicon, and silicon is an expensive commodity (exacerbated
currently by a global silicon shortage). What¹s more, says Peter Harrop,
chairman of electronics consulting firm IDTechEx, ³it has to be put on
glass, so it¹s heavy, dangerous, expensive to ship and expensive to install
because it has to be mounted.² And up to 70 percent of the silicon gets
wasted in the manufacturing process. That means even the cheapest solar
panels cost about $3 per watt of energy they go on to produce. To compete
with coal, that figure has to shrink to just $1 per watt.

Nanosolar¹s cells use no silicon, and the company¹s manufacturing process
allows it to create cells that are as efficient as most commercial cells for
as little as 30 cents a watt. ³You¹re talking about printing rolls of the
stuff — printing it on the roofs of 18-wheeler trailers, printing it on
garages, printing it wherever you want it,² says Dan Kammen, founding
director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the
University of California at Berkeley. ³It really is quite a big deal in
terms of altering the way we think about solar and in inherently altering
the economics of solar.²

In San Jose, Nanosolar has built what will soon be the world¹s largest
solar-panel manufacturing facility. CEO Martin Roscheisen claims that once
full production starts early next year, it will create 430 megawatts¹ worth
of solar cells a year — more than the combined total of every other solar
plant in the U.S. The first 100,000 cells will be shipped to Europe, where a
consortium will be building a 1.4-megawatt power plant next year.

Right now, the biggest question for Nanosolar is not if its products can
work, but rather if it can make enough of them. California, for instance,
recently launched the Million Solar Roofs initiative, which will provide tax
breaks and rebates to encourage the installation of 100,000 solar roofs per
year, every year, for 10 consecutive years (the state currently has 30,000
solar roofs). The company is ready for the solar boom. ³Most important,²
Harrop says, ³Nanosolar is putting down factories instead of blathering to
the press and doing endless experiments. These guys are getting on with it,
and that is impressive.²

————

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admin December 11th, 2007

Rapid Human Evolution

Tue Dec 11, 9:04 AM ET

CHICAGO (AFP) - The world may feel more and more like a global village, but its residents are increasingly genetically diverse thanks to the rapidly accelerating pace of human evolution, a study said Monday.

Geneticists say the huge explosion in our numbers in the past 40,000 years, since Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa to other continents, has resulted in a much faster pace of evolution compared to the previous six million years.

The pace of change has increased 100-fold in modern times compared to our distant past, and most notably since the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago, and has led to increasing diversification between the races.

“We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals,” said John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who collaborated on the study.

The findings are based on analysis of data from an international genomics project. A team of scientists examined DNA from 270 individuals in four ethnically different populations to see how genetic variations or SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) evolved over time.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, which holds that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, the researchers’ analysis suggested that the process of natural selection has sped up.

“Rapid population growth has been coupled with vast changes in cultures and ecology, creating new opportunities for adaptation,” the authors wrote in the paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The past 10,000 years have seen rapid skeletal and dental evolution in human populations, as well as the appearance of many new genetic responses to diet and disease.”

Human migrations into new European and Asian environments created selective pressures favoring less skin pigmentation (so more sunlight could be absorbed through the skin to make Vitamin D), adaptation to cold weather and dietary changes.

One example of a genetic adaptation to human culture involves the gene that makes the milk-digesting enzyme lactase.

The gene normally stops activity about the time a person becomes a teenager, but northern Europeans developed a variation of the gene that allowed them to drink milk their whole lives — a relatively new adaptation that is directly tied to the introduction of domestic farming and use of milk as an agricultural product.

“Human races are evolving away from each other,” said Henry Harpending, an anthropology professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

“Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin. We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity.”

He said that is happening because humans dispersed from Africa to other regions 40,000 years ago and “there has not been much flow of genes between the regions since then.”

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