A University of Southern California team has produced flexible transparent carbon atom films that may have great potential for a brand new variety of solar cells. Inside a paper recently published in the journal ACS Nano, researchers stated that organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells have been proposed as a method to obtain low price energy due to their ease of manufacture, light-weight, and compatibility with flexible substrates.

This work shows that graphene, an extremely conductive and highly transparent type of carbon made up of atoms-thick sheets of carbon atoms, has high possibility to fill this role. While graphene’s existence has been known for many years, it has only been studied extensively since 2004 due to the impracticality of manufacturing it in high quality and in quantity.

The University of Southern California team has produced graphene/polymer sheets ranging in sizes nearly 150 square centimeters that in turn may be used to create dense arrays of flexible organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells. These organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices convert solar radiation to electricity, although not as efficiently as silicon cells.

The energy provided by sunlight on a sunny day is about 1,000 watts per meter square, for every 1,000 watts of sunlight that hits a square meter part of the standard silicon solar cell, 14 watts of electricity will be generated, Organic solar cells are less efficient; their conversion rate for that same 1,000 watts of sunlight in the graphene-based solar cell would be only 1.3 watts.

But what graphene organic photovoltaic (OPV) lack in efficiency, can potentially be compensated by its lower price and, greater physical flexibility. Researchers think it may eventually be possible to cover with inexpensive solar cell layers extensive areas like newspapers, magazines or power generating clothing. In the meanwhile Prof. Ruoff and his colleagues of the mechanical engineering department at the University of Texas at Austin, are studying the basic science in the introduction of graphene-based ultracapacitors for usage in electronics and other fields.

Prof. Ruoff says batteries are relatively slow, they can store energy but require sometime to charge up, and then they distribute energy slowly, over time. Ultracapacitors can be charged very quickly, in seconds, and discharge quickly, but, today, they can’t store very much electrical energy. The introduction of stable and cheaper ultracapacitors should be a key step in using wind or solar-generated power, especially if researchers will find ways to enable capacitors to store energy longer, which is not yet possible.

Even with their current storage capacity, the graphene devices could provide quick energy when needed in certain situations on the ecological way. They could be used, for instance, to absorb heat generated in braking an automobile or train, and store it for a short time, and then employ it for the electrical needs of the vehicle (i.e. starting the automobile or acceleration).

About the writer – Sophia H. Walker writes for the solar battery charger blog, her personal hobby weblog dedicated to tips to help individuals save electricity using solar energy for small gadgets.

Being a college student usually means that your book expenses were more than your food expenses… which is not exactly fun at all. Well, Questia plans on making learning a bit more inexpensive and modern with their Apple iPhone and iPod Touch app.

The application, called Questia Library, provides mobile access to the full text of 74,000 books and over 2 million journal, magazine, and newspaper articles. The collection consists mostly of copyrighted works and is selected and organized by professional librarians to facilitate academic research in the humanities and social sciences.

“The research process is becoming increasingly mobile,” said Tim Harris, President and CEO of Questia. “Questia Library enables students and other researchers who are on the move to search, browse, skim, and read a large and valuable collection for the same price they might pay for a single ebook. Questia Library delivers amazing resources all in the palm of your hand.”

The application makes browsing for research purposes easier than ever, allowing users to quickly navigate Questia’s subject category schema and drill down to one of 6,700 research topic pages, such as psychology of war or magical realism, where they can view the top librarian-recommended books and articles for that topic.

24/7 access to just about every book!? I could have definitely used this while I was at the University of Colorado at Boulder – that’s Norlin Library above in the picture by the way.

The price of the app is 99¢ via the Apple iTunes Music Store and gives users permanent access to 5,000 public domain books and 1 week of access to every publication in Questia Library. After one week, users may purchase additional access to the full library through iTunes on a non-recurring basis and most books are quite inexpensive for purchase, while many are free public domain books.

Think I can pass for a freshman?

[ Questia ] [ Questia Library Plus ]

Some people can travel by landmarks alone. Some people can be given a list of streets and be just fine. I’m a landmarks type of traveler… as long as you’ve included the street names too.

Microsoft is playing around with some tech that will make Google Maps look like an old world map that Lewis and Clark might have used.

While onboard navigation systems are gaining in importance, maps are still the medium of choice for laying out a route to a destination and for way finding. However, even with a map, one is almost always more comfortable navigating a route the second time due to the visual memory of the route. To make the first time navigating a route feel more familiar, we present a system that integrates a map with a video automatically constructed from panoramic imagery captured at close intervals along the route. The routing information is used to create a variable speed video depicting the route. During playback of the video, the frame and field of view are dynamically modulated to highlight salient features along the route and connect them back to the map. A user interface is demonstrated to allow exploration of the combined map, video, and textual driving directions.

Since this is part of the Microsoft Research endeavors, no clue when this is coming out in even a beta release. But I hope it’s soon.

[ Microsoft ] [ Microsoft Research ]

Could the entry of Walmart into the arena of prepaid cellular wireless, a rapidly growing market sector in the US [ read more here ] be a real big game changer in terms of pricing, offers and signal an even bigger shift away from contract cellphone service?

The announcement Wednesday that Wal-Mart, the United States’ largest retailer, will offer a branded low-cost prepaid service, “Straight Talk,” at the $30 and $45 levels, could end up being the “tipping point for millions of consumers who are already considering moving away from expensive contract-based cell phone service,” according to New Millennium Research (NMRC) executive director Allen Hepner.

With average monthly contract plans reported to be about $81, the more than 140 million U.S. contract-based wireless customers who use less than 550 minutes a month may now have even more reason to consider switching to a less expensive cell phone option, particularly in a changing environment in which plans for 1,000 minutes are available through Wal-Mart for $30 per month, according to Hepner.

Highlights of the March 2009 and December 2008 NMRC surveys include the following:

• Two out of five Americans with contract-based cell phones– are likely to cut back on their cell phones to save money if, as is widely expected, the economy gets worse over the next six months. (March 2009)
• No fewer than 40 million Americans – 26 percent of consumers with contract-based cell phone service — are “more inclined today than … six months ago to look at a way to save money on your cell phone bill, such as by switching to a prepaid cell phone service.” (March 2009)
• Of those Americans with cell phones, fewer than one in five (16 percent or nearly 29 million people) have a prepaid phone. Of the balance, 85 percent have “postpaid”/contract-based service where they pay a monthly fee. (The two percentages add up to more than 100 percent because of a small number of consumers who have both prepaid and postpaid cell phones.) (December 2008)
• Only 44 percent of those age 18-24 years of age say they know when their contract-based wireless phone penalty ends. This percentage increases to 58 percent among those 25-34 and reaches its peak of 61 percent with those age 35-44. The percentage decreases somewhat to 55 percent for those aged 45-64 and declines sharply to 37 percent among those age 65 and over. (December 2008)

Apparently the NMRC (New Millennium Research) thinks that the Walmart prepaid cellphone market entry is the “tipping point” that could lead to a serious game changer.

This and T-Mobile’s upcoming “Project Dark/Black” could definitely mean better competition as far as pricing goes. And for the consumer… that’s a good thing. But then again, Walmart did enter into the electronic music store business and it didn’t quite slow down the Apple iTunes Music Store either.

[ NMRC ] [ Walmart ]