Energy partnerships certainly do make strange bed fellows/.
MOSCOW, May 28 — Energy cooperation between China and Russia, featuring mutually beneficial cooperation in oil, natural gas, electricity, coal as well as nuclear and renewable energy, has been ever growing and has reached a new high.
As a result of deforestation, only 6.2 million square kilometers remain of the original 16 million square kilometers of forest that formerly covered Earth. Apart from adveserly impacting people’s livelihoods, rampant deforestation around the world is threatening a wide range of tree species, including the Brazil nut and the plants that produce cacao and açaí palm; animal species, including critically-endangered monkeys in the remote forests of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, and contributing to climate change instead of mitigating it (15% of all greenhouse gas emissions are the result of deforestation).
While the world’s forest cover is being unabashedly destroyed by industrial agriculture, cattle ranching, illegal logging and infrastructure projects, Thailand has found a unique way to repair its deforested land: by using a farming technique called seed bombing or aerial reforestation, where trees and other crops are planted by being thrown or dropped from an airplane or flying drone.
The tree seed bombing in Thailand is one of the greatest examples of ‘Conscious Entrepreneurs’ or ‘Spiritual Entrepreneurs’ out there right.
A family of compounds known as perovskites, which can be made into thin films with many promising electronic and optical properties, has been a hot research topic in recent years. But although these materials could potentially be highly useful in applications such as solar cells, some limitations still hamper their efficiency and consistency.
Now, a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere say they have made significant inroads toward understanding a process for improving perovskites’ performance, by modifying the material using intense light. The new findings are being reported in the journal Nature Communications, in a paper by Samuel Stranks, a researcher at MIT; Vladimir Bulovic, the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technology and associate dean for innovation; and eight colleagues at other institutions in the U.S. and the U.K. The work is part of a major research effort on perovskite materials being led by Stranks, within MIT’s Organic and Nanostructured Electronics Laboratory.
Tiny defects in perovskite’s crystalline structure can hamper the conversion of light into electricity in a solar cell, but “what we’re finding is that there are some defects that can be healed under light,” says Stranks, who is a Marie Curie Fellow jointly at MIT and Cambridge University in the U.K. The tiny defects, called traps, can cause electrons to recombine with atoms before the electrons can reach a place in the crystal where their motion can be harnessed.
Nice new method in producing Q-Dots which seems to be more cost effective, efficient and reliable.
Large-scale technique to produce quantum dots.
A method to produce significant amounts of semiconducting nanoparticles for light-emitting displays, sensors, solar panels and biomedical applications has gained momentum with a demonstration by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Using the power of nano to solar power our homes at night.
MIT researchers have built a new experimental solar cell which could greatly enhance power efficiency. The “Shockley-Queisser’ limit is the estimated maximum efficiency of a solar cell, which is commonly about 32%; that means almost 70% of energy is wasted in the form of heat.
One way to reduce energy loss is by stacking cells. However if sunlight could be turned into heat and then be re-emitted as light, the solar cells could utilize more energy. Solar cells work best with visible light which occurs midway of the radiation spectrum. As a result the radiations with shorter and greater wavelengths usually go to waste.
The researchers at MIT have developed a structure of carbon nano-tubes that will function between the sun and solar cell. These carbon nano-tubes are very good absorbents of light (all types of radiation) and convert it to heat; heat is easier to store unlike light.
Got to luv this.
Is this brand new type of battery the key to clean energy and off-grid electricity?
Lithium-ion batteries are having a moment. After becoming the de facto battery in laptops and cell phones over the years, they’re now starting to power electric cars (like those made by Tesla) and plug into the power grid.
But lithium-ion batteries aren’t the only battery type in town. Some brand new battery varieties could actually be more promising than lithium-ion when it comes to storing energy generated by solar panels or used to power remote villages in Africa, India, and Asia.
