>Breakthrough 3-Dimensional Solar Cell Technology

>I’m investigating DYI home solar panels and this looks interesting:

Solar3D, Inc. is developing a breakthrough 3-dimensional solar cell technology to maximize the conversion of sunlight into electricity. Up to 30% of

incident sunlight is currently reflected off the surface of conventional solar cells, and more is lost inside the solar cell materials. Inspired by light management techniques used in fiber optic devices, our innovative solar cell technology utilizes a

3-dimensional design to trap sunlight inside micro-photovoltaic structures where photons bounce around until they are converted into electrons. This next generation solar cell will be dramatically more efficient, resulting in a lower cost per watt that will make solar power affordable for the world.

via Solar3D – Breakthrough 3-Dimensional Solar Cell Technology.

February 23, 2011 – Solar3D, Inc. (OTCBB: SLTD), the developer of a breakthrough 3-dimensional solar cell technology to maximize the conversion of sunlight into electricity, today announced that its design will take advantage of low cost semiconductor processes to enable mass production.  … Jim Nelson, CEO of Solar3D, commented, “In the solar industry, it is not enough to have high efficiency, you must also be low cost. We started our company with the mantra of ‘Breakthrough Product, Common Manufacturing,’ and I am pleased to report that we are right on track.”  … “In the end, we intend to achieve what every solar innovator hopes for: More Power, in a Smaller Space, for Less Money.”

If I want to do it from scratch all the way, I need to figure out how to grow silicon crystals that are used in solar cells. There are many methods each with tradeoffs.

Here is an interesting video on manufacturing of Silicon computer chips.

Here is how solar cells are manufactured:

Let’s see… I need some sand… some argon gas… a very high temperature heat source … a crucible … Hmmm. It is cheaper to just buy the cells.

>Cellphones Track Your Every Move, and You May Not Even Know

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A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game.

But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not.

Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.

 

The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.

Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones. Unlike many online services and Web sites that must send “cookies” to a user’s computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, cellphone companies simply have to sit back and hit “record.”

“We are all walking around with little tags, and our tag has a phone number associated with it, who we called and what we do with the phone,” said Sarah E. Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University’s architecture school. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.”

Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted.

“At any given instant, a cell company has to know where you are; it is constantly registering with the tower with the strongest signal,” said Matthew Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who has testified before Congress on the issue.

Mr. Spitz’s information, Mr. Blaze pointed out, was not based on those frequent updates, but on how often Mr. Spitz checked his e-mail. …

Mr. Spitz, a privacy advocate, decided to be extremely open with his personal information. Late last month, he released all the location information in a publicly accessible Google Document, and worked with Zeit Online, a sister publication of a prominent German newspaper, Die Zeit, to map those coordinates over time.

“This is really the most compelling visualization in a public forum I have ever seen,” said Mr. Blaze, adding that it “shows how strong a picture even a fairly low-resolution location can give.”

In an interview from Berlin, Mr. Spitz explained his reasons: “It was an important point to show this is not some kind of a game. I thought about it, if it is a good idea to publish all the data — I also could say, O.K., I will only publish it for five, 10 days maybe. But then I said no, I really want to publish the whole six months.”

In the United States, telecommunication companies do not have to report precisely what material they collect, said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who specializes in privacy. He added that based on court cases he could say that “they store more of it and it is becoming more precise.”

“Phones have become a necessary part of modern life,” he said, objecting to the idea that “you have to hand over your personal privacy to be part of the 21st century.”

In the United States, there are law enforcement and safety reasons for cellphone companies being encouraged to keep track of its customers. Both the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration have used cellphone records to identify suspects and make arrests.

If the information is valuable to law enforcement, it could be lucrative for marketers. The major American cellphone providers declined to explain what exactly they collect and what they use it for. …

via Cellphones Track Your Every Move, and You May Not Even Know – NYTimes.com.

>Japan workers pulled out of reactor, as radiation soars

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Reports from Japan say radioactivity in water at reactor 2 at the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant is 10 million times the usual level.

Workers trying to cool the reactor core to avoid a meltdown have been evacuated, Reuters news agency says.

Earlier, Japan’s nuclear agency that levels of radioactive iodine in the sea near the plant have risen to 1,850 times the usual level.

The UN’s nuclear agency has warned the crisis could go on for months.

It is believed the radiation at Fukushima is coming from one of the reactors, but a specific leak has not been identified.

Leaking water at reactor 2 has been measured at 1,000 millisieverts/hour – 10 million times higher than when the plant is operating normally.

The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), has been criticised for a lack of transparency and failing to provide information more promptly.

The nation’s nuclear agency said the operator of the Fukushima plant had made a number of mistakes, including worker clothing. …

via BBC News – Japan workers pulled out of reactor, as radiation soars.

Yes, worker clothing. For example, the stripes should be yellow to signify radiation and not blue. The ankle tape doesn’t match the suit stripes, and the shoe colors are all over the place, blue, white, black. … but the important thing is to get the cooling restored, stop the meltdowns  and contain the leaks!

Sorry, this is really no joking matter. Things could get much worse than they are. Yes, radiation from Japan has been detected in China now, but the thing that I’m concerned about is the plutonium in No. 3 reactor. I was told by a nuclear physicist  that Japan will be nothing like Chernobyl because there won’t be an explosion. He said there won’t be an explosion because Chernobyl was secretly using bomb material.

Well, it seems the same is true of the reactors in Japan…

The battle to regain control of Japan‘s stricken nuclear power plant suffered a setback Friday when regulators discovered a reactor core could be leaking radiation. Work was halted amid fears of serious radioactive contamination emanating from the troubled Fukushima Dai-Ichi complex.

“It’s very possible that there has been some kind of leak at the No. 3 reactor,” said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

Authorities are particularly worried because the No. 3 reactor uses plutonium – more toxic than the pure uranium used in the others. “We must remain vigilant,” Prime Minister Naoto Kan said, calling the situation “grave.”

via nydailynews

Don’t worry, although some say plutonium is the most toxic substance on earth and that a small amount of plutonium widely dispersed could kill every person on earth…

The Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOX) reactor which burns with plutonium/uranium is more deadly than those burning on uranium enriched fuel, according to nuclear experts. The Half-life of Plutonium-239 in MOX is 24,000 years and just a few milligrams of P-239 escaping in a smoke plume will contaminate soil for tens of thousands of years. … – link

… the danger may be overestimated:

Isotopes and compounds of plutonium are dangerous due to their radioactivity. … The alpha radiation plutonium emits does not penetrate the skin but can irradiate internal organs when plutonium is inhaled or ingested. … Plutonium is more dangerous when inhaled than when ingested. The risk of lung cancer increases once the total dose equivalent of inhaled radiation exceeds 400 mSv….  studies generally do not show especially high plutonium toxicity or plutonium-induced cancer results. “There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during the 1940’s; according to the hot-particle theory, each of them has a 99.5% chance of being dead from lung cancer by now, but there has not been a single lung cancer among them. … Plutonium has a metallic taste. – wiki

Inhalation of about 20 milligrams of plutonium dust of optimal size would be necessary to cause death within roughly a month from pulmonary fibrosis or pulmonary edema – llnl.gov

One web site says Japan’s reactors had at least 446 kilograms of plutonium, and it just has to collect in the right place to cause an explosion.

OVER the next few weeks, two ships carrying a secret cargo of dangerous, nuclear weapons-usable plutonium fuel will leave ports in Britain and France and sail around the globe to Japan. On board will be fuel containing more plutonium than in the entire Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons programmes…. The two British flagged vessels… will leave… Britain and … France carrying the first commercial shipment to Japan of mixed-oxide (MOX) reactor fuel, made from plutonium and uranium. An estimated 446 kilograms of plutonium is contained in the 40 nuclear fuel elements – enough fissile material to construct 60 nuclear bombs.  … The first plant to use MOX is scheduled to be Fukushima 1, plant. The date has been set to August 22nd, 2010.

Yes, if MOX was used, things could get much worse for Japan. Don’t inhale an aspirin sized amount of plutonium or you will expire within a month.  That 446 Kg of Plutonium would only, however, be able to horribly kill about 22.3 million people based on 20 mg being the lethal dose.

The actual deaths would be way less than that due to dispersion, probably under 1 million due to increased cancer. That’s just spit-balling.

One site says Chernobyl resulted in 985,000 deaths world wide during the 18 years from the disaster up to 2004 (that’s 55,555 extra deaths per year) and the nuclear plant disasters at Japan, since they use MOX, could end up being like like Chernobyl on steroids.

The “steroids” scenario would be terrible, but would it make a dent in our population problem?

The human population is growing by 81.1  million people per year and the rate of growth is increasing day by day. Ten times the radiation of Chernobyl would cause only 555,550 extra cancer deaths per year. To stop our viral reproduction, we would need a disaster that was 1,460 times worse than Chernobyl.

Personally, I’m for birth control. Stop breeding, then the Illuminati won’t have to cause earthquakes and plant computer viruses that trigger plutonium releases in Japan. Okay, I’m pretty sure I’m kidding here… pretty sure… Stuxnet reached Japan but there is no evidence I’ve seen that it infected any of the failed reactors as some claim:

… this computer virus “Stuxnet” effectively disabled the fail-safe defense system of the Japanese nuclear reactors and was synchronized to take place at the time of the 9.0 (newest calculations: 9.1) quake. … We can also divulge that the 9.0 – 9.1 earthquake and tsunami that hit the nation of Japan was a meteorological terrorist attack launched against Japan by the out-of-control New World Order (NWO) elite who have decided that at least 25% of the world’s population must be eliminated before the final financial meltdown collapses the world economy. – link

Believe this stuff at your own risk. I’m still not detecting any higher radiation levels.

>Nerve-Electronic Hybrid Could Meld Mind and Machine

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Nerve-cell tendrils readily thread their way through tiny semiconductor tubes, researchers find, forming a crisscrossed network like vines twining toward the sun. The discovery that offshoots from nascent mouse nerve cells explore the specially designed tubes could lead to tricks for studying nervous system diseases or testing the effects of potential drugs. Such a system may even bring researchers closer to brain-computer interfaces that seamlessly integrate artificial limbs or other prosthetic devices.

“This is quite innovative and interesting,” says nanomaterials expert Nicholas Kotov of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “There is a great need for interfaces between electronic and neuronal tissues.”

To lay the groundwork for a nerve-electronic hybrid, graduate student Minrui Yu of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his colleagues created tubes of layered silicon and germanium, materials that could insulate electric signals sent by a nerve cell. The tubes were various sizes and shapes and big enough for a nerve cell’s extensions to crawl through but too small for the cell’s main body to get inside.

When the team seeded areas outside the tubes with mouse nerve cells, the cells went exploring, sending their threadlike projections into the tubes and even following the curves of helical tunnels, the researchers report in an upcoming ACS Nano. …

via Nerve-Electronic Hybrid Could Meld Mind and Machine | Wired Science | Wired.com.

I’ve been wondering tonight how neurosurgeons connect nerves when they re-attach limbs. Do they just get the nerves close to each other and let nature take it’s course?

>Million-year-old tools found in India

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Archaeologists have discovered India’s oldest stone-age tools, up to 1.5 million years old, at a prehistoric site near Chennai. The discovery may change existing ideas about the earliest arrival of human ancestors from Africa into India.

A team of Indian and French archaeologists has used two dating methods to show that the stone hand-axes and cleavers from Attirampakkam are at least 1.07 million years old, and could date as far back as 1.5 million years.

In nearly 12 years of excavation, archaeologists Shanti Pappu and Kumar Akhilesh from the Sharma Centre for Heritage Education, Chennai, have found 3,528 artefacts that are similar to the prehistoric tools discovered in western Asia and Africa.

Their findings will appear tomorrow in the US journal Science. The tools fall in a class of artefacts called Acheulian that scientists believe were invented by the Homo erectus —ancestors of modern humans — in Africa about 1.6 million years ago.

“This means that soon after early humans invented the Acheulian tools, they crossed formidable geographical barriers to get to southern Asia,” said Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, who is an expert in Asian prehistoric archaeology but was not associated with the Chennai study.

“The suggestion that this occurred 1.5 million years ago is simply staggering,” he said.

Petraglia himself had earlier been involved in excavating the Hunsgi valley in Karnataka, which has yielded 1.27 million-year-old stone tools, regarded as India’s oldest until now. Although earlier excavations had revealed Acheulian tools at a few sites on the Indian subcontinent, including a two million-year-old site in Pakistan, the dates assigned to the artefacts so far have remained under debate. …

via Million-year-old tools found in India | Discovery Online.

>Outrageous Military Experiment: Modifying humans to see infrared

>This is taken from an article titled The 7 Most Outrageous Military Experiments.  I would not say that these are really the 7 most outrageous, but the one below is interesting and I hadn’t heard of it before:

 

The U.S. Navy wanted to boost sailors’ night vision so they could spot infrared signal lights during World War II. However, infrared wavelengths are normally beyond the sensitivity of human eyes. Scientists knew vitamin A contained part of a specialized light-sensitive molecule in the eye’s receptors, and wondered if an alternate form of vitamin A could promote different light sensitivity in the eye. They fed volunteers supplements made from the livers of walleyed pikes, and the volunteers’ vision began changing over several months to extend into the infrared region. Such early success went down the drain after other researchers developed an electronic snooperscope to see infrared, and the human study was abandoned. Other nations also played with vitamin A during World War II – Japan fed its pilots a preparation that boosted vitamin A absorption, and saw their night vision improve by 100 percent in some cases.

via The 7 Most Outrageous Military Experiments | 7CoolList.

Here is a PDF article from July 1939 on wall eyed pike liver oil’s special properties.

>Taylor outlives obituary writer

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Dame Elizabeth Taylor’s fascinating story took another twist on Wednesday, when the New York Times posted their obituary, revealing the writer had died almost six years ago.

The screen icon, known for both her classic films in the 60s and 70s and her colourful private life, died at her LA home yesterday, aged 79.

Her obituary in the New York Times was a moving and respectful one. However, eagle eyed readers were stunned to discover that the writer of the article, Mel Gussow, died in 2005. Two other writers were credited for additional reporting.

Penning obituaries before the subject has died is not an unusual thing and is in fact protocol, according to New York Times obituary editor Bill McDonald.

He said, “We write many of our obituaries in advance – hundreds, in fact – and occasionally the subject outlives the writer. In most cases we’ll then have the obituary redone. But on occasion we feel the original piece is worth preserving, and publishing – with updating, of course – because of the quality of the writing and the reporting and the authoritativeness of the writer.”

Indeed, the writer of Taylor’s obituary wrote her first draft in 1999.

A producer on CNN added, “We stay ready for the inevitable. Just like newspapers, we curate obituary material for use on all shows upon the death of a prominent figure. Sometimes, there are years of planning that go into it.”

via Taylor outlives obituary writer – Yahoo! Movies UK.

>Human wiring, h

>Full face transplant for US man

>

A 25-year-old man horrifically injured by an accident involving an electric power line has received a full face transplant in the US. It took a team of more than 30 doctors over 15 hours to give Dallas Wiens his new face.

Surgeons who carried out the operation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston have hailed it a success. It follows nearly a year to the day after the world’s first full face transplant in Spain.

Mr Wiens, from Texas, was injured in November 2008 when his head touched a high voltage electrical wire. The burns erased all of his facial features.

The surgery has replaced the nose, lips, skin and muscles as well as the nerves that power them and provide sensation. But, unfortunately, the surgeons were unable to give him new eyes to restore his vision.

His surgeons said: “Dallas is doing great. He’s meeting all the milestones that he’s expected at the present time. …

via BBC News – Full face transplant for US man.

On March 2011, a surgical team, led by MUDr.Bohdan Pomahač in Boston hospital has performed full face transplant to a man whom blind, without lips, nose or eyebrows. The patient’s sight couldn’t be recovered, but he has been able to talk on the phone … The first full face transplant performed in the US was done on a construction worker. This operation was paid for with the help of the US defense department. They hope to learn from this procedure and use what they learn help solders suffering from facial injuries.

via Wikipedia

Dallas Wiens, 25, lost all of his features — except for a small portion of his chin — when a cherry-picker he was working on maneuvered into a live wire.

In a statement released this morning, the Brigham said that a team of more than 30 surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, and residents worked for more than 15 hours to replace Wiens’ facial area, “including the nose, lips, facial skin, muscles of facial animation and the nerves that power them and provide sensation.” The transplant extended from the mid-scalp to his neck.

“There were no complications. He’s doing great, and he’s right on the mark with expected progress,” said Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a plastic surgeon who led the transplant team.

At a news conference this morning, Pomahac said, “When I saw Dallas for the first time I was worried there may not be much we can do. The injury was so extensive.” Wiens had no nose and lips and had been left blind. Pomahac was concerned Wiens would not have enough nerves left to attach to the nerves and muscles in the donor face, but that turned out not to be the case. …

via Dallaswiens.com

Good luck to you Dallas. Press conference video here. No word yet on when Dallas will appear in public with his new face. I hope our technology will allow whole eye replacement in his lifetime. The difficulty is that the eye is an extension of the brain and the optic nerve is very complicated.

The optic nerve, which sends visual signals from the eye to the brain, consists of about one million fibers. Because transplanting a whole eye would require that the optic nerve be cut and then reattached, scientists do not expect that this type of procedure will be possible. Researchers are focusing on how to regenerate damaged optic nerves and how to replace damaged retinal cells with healthy transplants. However, this work is in its early stages and it may be many years before there are any findings that could be used to restore vision in humans.”  – link

The optic nerve is a bundle of nerve fibers, about the diameter of pencil, which passes through the back of the eyeball and connects to the nerve fiber layer of the retina. – link

Scientists are getting closer towards being able to repair damaged optic nerves. According to scientists at the Harvard Medical School, they have been able to regenerate the optic nerves of rats. They were not able to give the rats their sight back. … Unfortunately, they could not get the nerve fibres from the retina to hook up to the nerves from the brain properly (so rats were still blind). Dr. Benowitz said it is a mapping problem. We have to retain the proper organisation of fibre projections to the brain. He believes further studies will overcome this problem.

via Cure For Blindness? Optic Nerves Regenerated.

Has a working eye transplant already been done in Russia?

A Russian eye surgeon has made medical history by attempting the first “combined eye transplantation” in the world, taking a retina and cornea from a corpse to “assemble” a left eye in a woman who has been blind for 20 years. Following the controversial operation, Tamara Gorbacheva, 37, a former translator from Kiev in Ukraine, claims that partial sight has been restored and she can detect light and discern simple shapes. … News of the alleged breakthrough has been met with bewilderment and scepticism among eye experts in Moscow and London. …

Zinaida Moroz, head of Moscow’s cornea transplant and surgery centre, said: “There’s nothing scientific to discuss here. Whole eye transplants are not possible today.”

But Prof Muldashev acknowledges that impossibility; it is why he has dubbed his operation “combined eye tranplantation” in which 70% of the restored eye is regenerated tissue stimulated by a biomaterial treatment called Alloplant, which he and his colleagues in Ufa developed in the 1970s and have been refining ever since.

Alloplant is manufactured from the tissue of fresh corpses. In Russia, legislation allows any organs to be taken from a body unless the person expressly proscribed such an action while alive.

Prof Muldashev said that he took the donor’s eye and extracted the cornea and the retina. He removed Ms Gorbacheva’s atrophied eyeball, and laid the Alloplant – dead tissue – at the base of the eye. The retina and cornea were transplanted onto the Alloplant, a process requiring a total of 200 stitches. He claims the eye then effectively rebuilt itself. “It’s like eye-cloning, self-regeneration,” said Prof Muldashev. “This has never been done before and honestly we don’t fully understand what’s happened here.”

He estimated the cost of the surgery at $100,000 …
via GuardianUK

>OMG and LOL make it in the Oxford English Dictionary

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Mark Williams – … OMG stands for “Oh my God” or “Oh my goodness” or gosh, according to the OED. LOL stands for “laughing out loud”. It is used to describe ones reaction to a statement, picture of video.

The makers of the dictionary say the expressions are associated with the “language of electronic communications”. They are commonly used on forums, in emails, Tweets and text messages. Users may also see them on blogs and in Facebook entries.

The dictionary previously inserted IMHO, BFF and TMI into their publication. IMHO stands for “In my humble opinion”. Many users have shorted it to IMO – in my opinion – especially if they don’t feel their opinion is “humble” LOL.

BFF stands for “Best Friends Forever” and TMI stands for “Too much information”. TMI is commonly used when some describes bodily functions or explicit acts.

The OED says that the words are typically not spoken, but they are written. “in print, and even in spoken use… where there often seems to be a bit more than simple abbreviation going on,” their statement read.

via OMG and LOL make it in the Oxford English Dictionary | Digital News Report.