Before we get a lot of comments saying "what's so good about this?" it's actually pretty interesting. I did some undergraduate research with dye-sensitized solar cells (and am currently a graduate student researching inorganic semiconductors) and the basic thing you hear is that if you can get an organic solar cell to 10% efficient, they will be viable because they're so much cheaper than inorganics. While this may be true, the problem with dye-sensitized cells is, like they say in the paper, that they degrade in a rather short period of time. I saw this first-hand doing research on them - we had to make sure our batches were kept in darkness while making them otherwise the solution would degrade in a matter of hours, and after they were made I believe they only lasted a few months. If you can make 10% efficient organic solar cells that will last as long as inorganic ones (typically 20-30 years), you have a very attractive alternative to brittle, expensive and often toxic inorganics. I didn't see in the paper how long their new cells are supposed to last but anything you can do to make it more stable is going to help.

Am I the only one that was hoping their website was www.org.org?

I apologize, I was hurried and didn't explain myself very well in the first post. You're correct, graphene (and apparently now silicene) has sp2 hybridization, but as the AC reply to your post suggests, it's the fact that carbon is group IV that gives it such interesting characteristics as a 2D structure. As a sidenote, I'd hesitate to assume silicene's electronic properties - silicon doesn't naturally form anything like graphite (i.e. stacks of loosely bonded monolayers) that I know of and since the properties of diamond and graphene are so different and I don't study monolayer materials, it'd be irresponsible of me to say "silicene will have X band gap" etc. Very interesting stuff, though, I'll be interested to see how this develops.

None of those have the same crystal structure as carbon or silicon, which both form diamond lattices due to being group IV materials. As someone who works with silicon/gallium arsenide semiconductors and crystal formation, I think this is pretty exciting news. There's a large difference between observing something and making it work the way you want it to, though, so my guess is it'll be a while before silicene can be properly studied, let alone used in commercial semiconductor devices.

I don't know anything about networking, but that all sounded REALLY sexual.

Dammit, for some reason the computer logged me out when I was posting this so now it's anonymous.

True, and phase change memory is pretty badass. However, there's definitely a larger size limit on phase change memory than magnetic data storage - you pretty much by definition have to have more than one atom in a system to determine what phase it's in. Also, you then have to figure out how to read the data (probably either optically or my measuring the resistance of the bit), all of which would require a fair sized bit.

Interesting point, I hadn't though of that. Although what you're talking about is still only one "bit" per atom, but each bit would have more possibilities than just ones and zeroes. So you could have - for example - a bit with the possibility of being 0-5 for each of the cardinal directions, in which case you'd have to use a language with base 6 instead of binary. Still, conceptually very interesting.

I'm a materials science graduate student, and my research is on semiconductors. While I don't work with materials for data storage, I have a pretty good background in electronic properties of materials so maybe I can shed some light on the situation.

Basically, I suppose this would be hypothetically possible but the problems you'd face would be very, very difficult to solve. The big problem here is that in order to keep something ionized, you would have to completely isolate it from any other atoms that might donate/steal an electron. Again it's hypothetically possible, but impractical considering most of those are noble gasses. Not to mention, storing data as ionized/unionized atoms is fundamentally different from the way we store data now (magnetic domains). I think the more reasonable idea would be to shrink magnetic domains, as well as the number of magnetic domains required to form a bit. If I remember correctly, currently each magnetic domain consists of several hundred atoms and each bit consists of around 100 magnetic domains. As the article states, the best we could get is one atom representing one bit, and the probability of using magnetism over changing to ionization as the mechanism for differentiation between ones and zeroes is very high.

Hi, I'm a previous solar car driver for a university in the U.S.. Although I never raced in WSC, I did race in ASC (American Solar Challenge) and they have similar rules.

The amount of time you get to charge the batteries is severely limited. In ASC each team is allowed to charge for one hour before they start driving and one hour after they stop. I'm not sure how much time, if any, teams are allowed to charge outside the normal driving time.

One of the main challenges in racing a solar car is finding a good balance between speed, power consumption and reliability. Obviously, the faster you go, the faster you finish the race, but that's assuming you have enough power to finish. Power doesn't just mean what's coming from your array - you have to take into consideration losses due to electronics, aerodynamics of your shell, and road resistance. Finally if your car breaks down halfway through the race, you're going to be hurting until you can get it up and running again. It's been my experience that reliability makes the largest difference - you can be going much slower than other teams, but if you're on the road the entire time and not having to pull over to fix your car, you'll be in pretty good shape.

It's my understanding that Tokai had a combination of all three - they had the speed they needed, the power to continue at that speed, and very few, if any, unplanned stops.