One of the holy grails of solar cell technology may have been found, with researchers at UCLA announcing they have created a new organic polymer that produces electricity, is nearly transparent and is more durable and malleable than silicon.

The applications are mind-boggling. Windows that produce electricity. Buildings wrapped in transparent solar cells. Laptops and phones – or even cars or planes – whose outer coverings act as chargers. It might even be sprayed on as a liquid. The promise of cheap and easy-to-apply site-generated solar electricity might now be a lot closer to reality.

Of course, the idea of solar films and solar plastics is not new. The breakthrough to making a transparent film, however, came with isolating only one band of light in the spectrum.

‘[A solar film] harvests light and turns it into electricity. In our case, we harvest only the infrared part,

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Scientists in Germany have found which centers of the brain become active when we are aware of ourselves, the so-called state of ‘metaconsciousness’. Their study, which appears online in the July issue of SLEEP, is the first to show visible evidence of the neural networks that underpin the human conscious state.

They identified them by comparing brain scans of a volunteer during ‘lucid dream’ episodes, to brain scans taken during normal dream states.

The areas they pinpointed as the seat of meta-consciousness belong to a network in the outer layer (cortical) of the brain that includes the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the frontopolar regions and the precuneus.

Some people can have episodes of self-awareness while they sleep and dream. These ‘lucid dreamers’ are aware that they are dreaming, and are also able to control their dreams. During lucid dreaming episodes they can access their memories, perform actions and are aware of themselves, even though they are unmistakeably in a dream state and not awake.

First author Martin Dresler, from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, explains:

‘In a normal dream, we have a very basal consciousness, we experience perceptions and emotions but we are not aware that we are only dreaming. It’s only […]

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Farmer George Naylor sounds a little too much like the fictional character Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh when I ask about his corn crop. June is usually a wet month, but not this year. One time it ‘rained

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National Instruments, a major U.S. company that produces tools for engineers and scientists offers an annual ‘NI Week’ trade show, this year at the Austin Convention Center in Texas.

Francesco Celani, a physicist with the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Frascati, Italy, brought a LENR device he developed that uses hydrogen gas and a specially treated nickel wire.

Daniel Rocha sums up the demo on Brian Wang’s NextBigFuture site with these details.

Celani has shown that excess heat was produced during the conference for 6 hours, but it continued after the conference for 55 hours, up to the time when this email was sent. The short summary lists:

-Celani’s demo reactor was turned on for about 6 hours before NIWeek 2012 started, on Saturday.
– On Sunday the demo reactor was brought to the NIWeek 2012 hall where it got turned on before 12:00 and *still is working*, so for a total of 55 hours as of writing.
– The reaction is stable. Peak excess heat power was 22W, currently stabilized at about 14W.
– Testing performed in front of a wide audience.
– Celani’s testing wire is made as a Cu-Ni-Mn alloy, a good sample that was already previously used […]

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RANJIT NAGAR, India – When the United Nations wanted to help slow climate change, it established what seemed a sensible system.

Greenhouse gases were rated based on their power to warm the atmosphere. The more dangerous the gas, the more that manufacturers in developing nations would be compensated as they reduced their emissions.

But where the United Nations envisioned environmental reform, some manufacturers of gases used in air-conditioning and refrigeration saw a lucrative business opportunity.

They quickly figured out that they could earn one carbon credit by eliminating one ton of carbon dioxide, but could earn more than 11,000 credits by simply destroying a ton of an obscure waste gas normally released in the manufacturing of a widely used coolant gas. That is because that byproduct has a huge global warming effect. The credits could be sold on international markets, earning tens of millions of dollars a year.

That incentive has driven plants in the developing world not only to increase production of the coolant gas but also to keep it high – a huge problem because the coolant itself contributes to global warming and depletes the ozone layer. That coolant gas is being phased out under a global treaty, but the effort has […]

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