Could Solar Energy Be Generated with Balloons?

Over the years, solar energy has made great strides. In the U.S., utility-scale solar project developers have negotiated sales agreements to utilities at prices averaging 5 cents/kWh, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reported in September. And installed project costs have dropped more than 50% since 2009.

But for all the technological advances made, there’s one thing that can’t be controlled by man: the whims of the weather.

Jean-François Guillemoles, the director of the French National Center for Scientific Research and the French director for NextPV, wants to change that. Not the weather, but how we collect solar energy. The answer: balloons.  

“What if, instead of waiting for sunlight to reach solar panels on the ground, balloons were used to capture solar energy up in the air, where space is not restricted, where yields would be multiplied and clouds would never interrupt production?” he muses in a post.

Scientists Observe Visible Light from Black Hole

For 26 years, the black hole binary V404 Cygni was dormant. Then, a force awakened. On June 15, 2015, the black hole binary underwent an outburst, with the matter falling into it from its accretion disk emitting enormous amounts of energy, including X-rays.

Now, an international team of scientists who studied the active black hole are reporting these outbursts are detectable via visible light. The team’s study was published in Nature.

“We now know that we can make observations based on optical rays—visible light, in other words—and that black holes can be observed without high-spec X-ray or gamma-ray telescopes,” said the study’s lead author Mariko Kimura, of Kyoto Univ.

New Microscope Creates Near-real-time Videos of Nanoscale Processes

State-of-the-art atomic force microscopes (AFMs) are designed to capture images of structures as small as a fraction of a nanometer — a million times smaller than the width of a human hair. In recent years, AFMs have produced desktop-worthy close-ups of atom-sized structures, from single strands of DNA to individual hydrogen bonds between molecules.

But scanning these images is a meticulous, time-consuming process. AFMs therefore have been used mostly to image static samples, as they are too slow to capture active, changing environments.

Now engineers at MIT have designed an atomic force microscope that scans images 2,000 times faster than existing commercial models. With this new high-speed instrument, the team produced images of chemical processes taking place at the nanoscale, at a rate that is close to real-time video.

Solar Cells That Face Almost any Direction and Keep Themselves Clean

In recent years, a complicated discussion over which direction solar cells should face — south or west — has likely left customers uncertain about the best way to orient their panels. Now researchers are attempting to resolve this issue by developing solar cells that can harvest light from almost any angle, and the panels self-clean to boot. Their report appears in the journal ACS Nano.

Commercial solar panels work best when sunlight hits them at a certain angle. Initially, experts had suggested that solar panels face south to collect the most energy from the sun. But an influential 2013 report by Pecan Street, an energy-research organization, advised that systems tilt westward to maximize efficiency. Further analysis has found that determining the ideal angle is more complicated — in essence, it depends on where you live. And even if customers get the positioning correct, they’re still losing out on prime sunlight because most residential systems can’t move or adjust to the sun’s track across the sky. Jr-Hau He, Kun-Yu Lai and colleagues wanted to address this shortcoming.

Graphene proves a perfect fit for wearable devices

Cheap, flexible, wireless graphene communication devices such as mobile phones and healthcare monitors can be directly printed into clothing and even skin, University of Manchester academics have demonstrated.

In a breakthrough paper in Scientific Reports, the researchers show how graphene could be crucial to wearable electronic applications because it is highly-conductive and ultra-flexible.

The research could pave the way for smart, battery-free healthcare and fitness monitoring, phones, internet-ready devices and chargers to be incorporated into clothing and ‘smart skin’ applications – printed graphene sensors integrated with other 2D materials stuck onto a patient’s skin to monitor temperature, strain and moisture levels.

Technique could set new course for extracting uranium from seawater

An ultra-high-resolution technique used for the first time to study polymer fibers that trap uranium in seawater may cause researchers to rethink the best methods to harvest this potential fuel for nuclear reactors.

The work of a team led by Carter Abney, a Wigner Fellow at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, shows that the polymeric adsorbent materials that bind uranium behave nothing like scientists had believed. The results, gained through collaboration with the University of Chicago and detailed in a paper published in Energy & Environmental Science, highlight data made possible with X-ray Absorption Fine Structure spectroscopy performed at the Advanced Photon Source. The APS is a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Argonne National Laboratory.

“Despite the low concentration of uranium and the presence of many other metals extracted from seawater, we were able to investigate the local atomic environment around uranium and better understand how it is bound by the polymer fibers,” Abney said.

Scientists blueprint tiny cellular 'nanomachine'

Scientists have drawn up molecular blueprints of a tiny cellular 'nanomachine', whose evolution is an extraordinary feat of nature, by using one of the brightest X-ray sources on Earth.

The scientists produced the structural map of this nanomachine - diacylglycerol kinase - by using a "hit and run" crystallography technique. In doing so, they have been able to understand how the tiny enzyme performs critical cellular duties - answering questions that have been on the table for over 50 years about this 'paradigmatic protein'.

Kinases are key players in metabolism, cell signalling, protein regulation, cellular transport, secretory processes, and many other cellular pathways that allow us to function healthily. They coordinate the transfer of energy from certain molecules to specific substrates, affecting their activity, reactivity, and ability to bind other molecules.