Piezo Shower: Newly Invented Piezoelectric Nanowires Used to Heat Water Through Friction
The water that you unleash when you take a shower (with the "hot" knob closed) has two properties: pressure and temperature. You can change pressure, but to raise its temperature you usually need extra energy. Regularly, you don't shower with the water knob turned to the maximum, so a certain extra pressure exists in the tubing, creating friction.
Tapas Mallick Inventing Cheaper Solar Concentrators by Using Plexiglas
Tapas Mallick, at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, is developing a grid of cheap light concentrators that can be mounted on walls, rooftops or between the panes of double-gazed windows.
Shoe-Embedded Flexible Polymer That Can Power Your Small Devices
Dr. Ville Kaajakari, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Louisiana Tech University has devised a small power generator that can be embedded in the sole of a shoe, to juice any kind of low-power device.
Dealloying Process Creates More Efficient and Cheaper Platinum for Fuel Cells
Fuel cells are usually expensive because they use platinum as a catalyst. To make them more appealing to the market, researchers from the DOE's National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Houston, have created a new type of platinum catalyst, reducing the use of the pure metal down to 80 or even 70 percent, thus reducing the overall cost.
Evalon Solar: Solar Panels That Don't Make Your Rooftop Look Ugly
Intemper Espanola, a Spanish company, in a partnership with an undisclosed German company, developed a virtually "invisible" flexible solar film in a EUREKA project.
Indonesia Planning to Get Another 4,000 MW from Volcanic Geothermal Plants by 2014
Indonesia, the world's third greenhouse gas contributor, wants to diversify its clean energy production potential by using the active volcanoes in the archipelago of 17,000 islands. If finished, this would be the world's biggest geothermal energy project, adding another 4,000 MegaWatts of geothermal capacity to the existing 1,189 MW... all of this by 2014.
New Method of Making Supercapacitors on Thin Films Improves Price and Capacity
Supercapacitors are energy storage devices that can be recharged for virtually unlimited times, but the amount of energy they store is limited. Their working principle is not based on chemical reactions, but rather on transferring surface charges.
Caltech Metamaterial Refracts Light Coming From Broad Range of Angles: Suitable for Solar Cells
Caltech researchers have just discovered a metamaterial with a particular three-dimensional structure that exhibits a negative index of refraction for the light entering it. It simply bends the light in another angle than it would normally be expected, no matter what angle the incident light had.
Ames Scientists Studying Way to Enhance Hydrogen Storage Nanomaterials
Vitalij Pecharsky, a researcher from the U.S. DOE - Ames Laboratory, along with his team, studies the possibility of storing hydrogen at room temperatures, in a recyclable container - just like your car's reservoir.
Plasmonic Thin Film Solar Cells Producing 30% More Electricity Than Non-Treated Ones
Kylie Catchpole (image), from the Australian National University in Canberra, working to make thin film solar cells more efficient, discovered that nanoparticles of silver deposited on the surface of a thin-film solar cell would not reflect the incident light back, but instead it would deflect the photons so they bounce back and forth withing the cell, allowing longer wavelengths to be absorbed.
