How does visible light make its way through an opaque object?
I know you aren't supposed to read TFA, but ""It's like putting a flashlight behind your hand," said Sylvain Gigan... "You cannot see an image, but you can still see a faint glow.""
I voted pure mathematics, and this is why.
and the alt-text is why I voted physics.
This is really ridiculous.
Agreed
(1) Hair is not conductive. How can hair produce electricity if it can't conduct electrons worth a darn?
As everyone else has said it's a semiconductor, that's what you want, not a conductor
(2) Hair is not polarized-- it's the same all the way through and throughout its length. How can there be any potential difference set up across something uniform?
Solar panels are essentially p-n junctions, which means that if he somehow doped some of the hair, or part of the hair, then it could (conceivably) work.
(3) The amount of hair shown captures maybe 0.1 cm^2 of sunlight.
This is the clincher, the panel shown is just ridiculous, I'd like to see what 2 amps does to a strand of hair, I'm guessing it's not there for very long.
Even if it were more likely, I wouldn't trust something only reported in the mail
It turns out that you can turn CO2 into fuel by exposing it to a titanium oxide catalyst in the presence of sunlight.
That's just another form of solar power, it's just you're using the sunlight to produce fuel rather than electricity. If it's more efficient than solar electrical generation (very possible) then it's a good idea, it's bound to be more efficient than biofuels, but whether it's more efficient than solar water heating, I don't know.
You'd probably need a concentrated source of CO2 for that, so it would either reduce efficiency, by using some energy to concentrate CO2, or would use existing power plants outputs, meaning it's not carbon neutral.
Everyone should read this http://www.withouthotair.com/
Get 'em now while they're relatively cheap and unwanted...
relatively cheap? $5,000? If I was to get one (I prefer my regular bike) I would wait until every other child in China is building them, and they're selling on eBay for $50.
At least switching to a whizbang invention has less shame involved.
Right up until they ask you how much you paid for it.
The reason is that I believe that many of these mutations are from virus, not from random mutations.
A virus exists to invade a cell and use the cell machinery to produce as many copies of itself as it can, this inevitably kills the host cell, meaning that any cells invaded by a virus are destroyed by it (or killed by the immune system to prevent them from producing more virus copies). This aside, viruses don't change your DNA, they add their DNA (or RNA) to yours, which means that it doesn't invade any particular chromosome, so the fact that they singled out the Y chromosome would mean that no viral DNA would be included.
SMBC is completely accurate on this count.
Yep, it's obvious that we're all mutants, how else does evolution happen? The bbc seems to have missed the point, which to me is that they've now got a decent (they claim) estimate of the rate of mutation. This is, however infinitely less interesting than the bbc title.
Yeah. Macs ARE PCs.
They can't be a PC, they have that pretty picture of an apple on them... PCs don't have that...
There are no games on this system.
