Researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have demonstrated they can produce white light by first making a yellow-green LED, and then combining it with other colored LEDs.
A very neat experiment that anyone with some skills can do in the garage or kitchen is creating a solar cell out of blackberry juice and titanium dioxide (and several other components).
A team of researchers from the MIT, led by Professor Angela Belcher, used a modified virus as a biological scaffold for assembling the nanoscale components needed to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The bacterial virus is called "M13", and it's said to be harmless.
An Australian team of scientists from the University of New South Wales seems to have discovered the recipe for making nuclear fusion possible without the high-temperature hassle and without the fear that it would produce harmful nuclear residues.
Solar cells get efficient as time goes, but there are methods to improve the performance of current ones, made with older technologies. Wake Forest Center for Nanotechnology has just received a patent for a new solar cell technology that can double the energy production of current silicon flat cells at highly reduced costs.
The Office of Naval Research is funding a project called "SOLO-TREC" (Sounding Oceanographic Lagrangian Observer -- Thermal RECharging), that uses the temperature difference in layers of the ocean to generate electricity and propel a ship theoretically indefinitely.
While SiOnyx, a MA-based startup, uses lasers to create black silicon and improve the efficiency and price of solar cells, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) discovered a simple chemical treatment that could replace the otherwise expensive antireflective solar cell coatings currently used in the industry.
eHydrogen Solutions, a company specialized in the development of on-demand hydrogen power stations, issued a press release announcing that they launched the "H2-Reactor Development Project". The H2-Reactor uses water as the hydrogen source, is self-contained and has an alloy of aluminum or magnesium as the reactive material (to get the hydrogen out of the oxygen bond).
Solar panels have become very popular these days, but the cost of making them has also reached a fairly high level. So far this thing happened because of the expensive materials used, but today researchers have managed to develop some new power-conducting plastics, able to slash the cost of making solar panels. In order to do that, they replaced tin oxide with conductive plastics.
The MIT researchers could easily change the balance towards Li-air batteries in the near future just by changing the actual electrode materials. In the paper published in the journal Electrochemical and Solid-State Letters, the researchers showed that by changing the carbon electrodes with gold or platinum electrodes as a catalyst, the efficiency of the battery will increase.
