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While the leaves on a tree appear to be as static as the PV cells on a solar panel, they’re not; sunlight is actually quite destructive, and to counter this effect leaves rapidly recycle their proteins as often as every 45 minutes when in direct summer sunlight. This rapid repair mechanism allows plants to take full advantage of the sun’s bountiful energy without losing efficiency over time.

To recreate this unique regenerative ability, the MIT team devised a novel set of self-assembling molecules that use photons to shake electrons loose in the form of electricity. The system contains seven different compounds, including carbon nanotubes that provide structure and a means to conduct the electricity away from the cells, synthetic phospholipids that form discs that also provide structural support, and other molecules that self-assemble into “reaction centers” that actually interact with the incoming photons to release electrons.

Under certain conditions, the compounds assemble themselves into uniform structures suitable for harvesting solar energy. But in the presence of a surfactant (similar to the stuff used to disperse oil during oil spills) the structures break down into a solution of nanotubes, phospholipids, and other constituent molecules. By pushing the solution through a membrane to remove the surfactant, the elements once again assemble into working, rejuvenated solar cells undamaged by their prior exposure to the sun.

The cells are work at 40 percent efficiency, and researchers think with some tweaks they could push that efficiency much higher. And because they don’t degrade over time – just give ‘em a quick shake with the surfactant and they're essentially brand new – the tech could be the next big step forward for solar technology.

[Eurekalert]

This week in the future on PopSci:

Technological Tracking of Free-Range Felons Could Make Incarceration Obsolete

Development of Tiny Thorium Reactors Could Wean the World Off Oil In Just Five Years

Video: Yale's Grab Lab Demonstrates an Unmanned Helicopter With a Grabbing Hand

Climate Villain Bjørn Lomborg Does U-Turn, Says Global Warming is a $100 Billion Problem

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Led by a University of California-San Francisco scientist, a consortium of about 10 different research teams unveiled a new artificial kidney prototype this week, saying a room-sized version has already shown promise for the sickest patients. Fabrication processes used to make silicon chips could conceivably be used to make coffee-cup-sized devices, which could take thousands of people off dialysis machines or kidney-donor waiting lists.

The multi-institutional team, led by UCSF professor Shuvo Roy, formerly of the Cleveland Clinic, is the first to demonstrate technology that could be feasibly downsized into a transplant device.

It’s a two-stage system involving thousands of nanoscale filters placed in a “BioCartridge,” which would remove toxins from the blood. A "HemoCartridge" bioreactor made of engineered renal tubule cells would mimic the metabolic and water-balancing roles of a real kidney. The system uses a patient’s blood pressure to perform filtration without the use of pumps, according to a UCSF news release.

Currently, transplants and dialysis are the only ways to treat kidney failure. An implantable device would obviously be preferable, but so far, scientists have not been able to come up with a system that mimics everything the kidney can do.

The new system relies on the latest advances in nanotechnology and tissue generation, Roy said. He hopes to use silicon-fabrication technology to make the device small enough for transplant.

“This could dramatically reduce the burden of renal failure for millions of people worldwide, while also reducing one of the largest costs in U.S. healthcare,” he said.

[ScienceDaily]

Professor Walter Trahanovsky was using a high-temperature chemistry process to see if he could obtain sugar derivatives from cellulose. It’s based on supercritical fluids, which are heated under pressure until their fluid and gas states merge. It is not quite as exotic as it sounds — supercritical carbon dioxide is used to decaffeinate coffee.

Trahanovsky and his colleagues put cellulosic materials in alcohols and subjected them to high temperatures and pressures. They got the sugars they were looking for, but they also found something else: significant amounts of propylene glycol and ethylene glycol. This was totally unexpected, Trahanovsky said.

Anyone who has ever read a body-lotion bottle would recognize the name propylene glycol — it’s a key moisturizing ingredient. It is used in a variety of products, including as a food additive. Ethylene glycol is most commonly used in antifreeze, polyester fabric and plastic bottles.

The supercritical fluid process could be a better way to obtain these materials from biomass instead of petroleum. Current biomass-refining processes require strong acids or other harmful or expensive reagents, and the processes also generate hazardous waste.

Trahanovsky said the process also produces sugar compounds that can be converted into glucose for ethanol production or other uses. The Iowa State University Research Foundation Inc. filed for a patent based on his technology.

[Iowa State University News]

NASA just announced five science experiments that will fly on the scorching probe, which will be protected by a carbon-fiber heat shield that can withstand temperatures of 2,500 degrees F.

When the probe is 4 million miles away, the solar disk will loom 23 times wider in the sky than it does on Earth.

The mission will help scientists better understand solar radiation. Improved solar storm forecasts could protect future long-distance space explorers who would not be protected by Earth’s magnetic field.

The SWEAP solar wind experiment will count the electrons, protons and helium ions in the solar wind and measure their properties. It will also catch some in a special cup for analysis.

Another science mission will use a wide-field camera to take 3-D pictures of the solar wind as the spacecraft flies through it. Another will take direct measurements of the sun’s magnetic fields, radio emissions and shock waves, and the one more will take an inventory of the sun’s contents.

“For the very first time, we'll be able to touch, taste and smell our sun,” said Lika Guhathakurta, Solar Probe Plus program scientist at NASA headquarters.

NASA’s goals are to figure out why the sun’s corona is several hundred times hotter than the surface and why it produces an accelerating solar wind. Scientists already have high-resolution images and data of the transition zone between the atmosphere and the surface, and the solar wind has been studied extensively — but still, no one can answer some fundamental questions about the sun’s evolution. The only way to do it is to go to the source, NASA says. Here's hoping the spacecraft doesn't get burned.

[NASA]

Miss the good old days of daily oil disaster news? Worry not, for another oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded this morning, leaving all 13 crew members in the water but – according to initial reports – all are alive and only one is injured. The rig is owned by Mariner Energy (somewhere a BP exec is breathing again) and is not currently producing, according to the Coast Guard. Updated. Details are sketchy right now, but rescuers are en route to the site about 80 miles south of the central Louisiana coast. We'll update as this one develops.

Update: Reuters is reporting that the Coast Guard has spotted a one-nautical-mile by 100-foot oil sheen in the water at the site of the rig explosion. The fire has been contained, but the flames have not yet been completely extinguished.

Update: USA Today now reports that the initial claim of an oil sheen by Mariner Energy cannot be confirmed by the Coast Guard, and that an aerial flyover by Mariner personnel could not locate the oil sheen reported earlier. In other good news, the fire aboard the oil platform has now been extinguished.

[NYT]

The paper, recently submitted to Physical Review Letters and posted to the physics arXiv, suggests the fine structure constant is not actually constant at all. This could mean that if we were in a different place or time period, atoms would not stay together and nothing — neither planets nor people — could exist.

A team led by John Webb at the University of New South Wales, Australia, has been studying whether the fine structure constant, otherwise known as alpha, changes over time. Alpha is a special number that essentially describes the strength of the electromagnetic force. The famous physicist Richard Feynman called its value "one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics." If it is not 1/137.036, things fall apart.

If alpha was different in the past, the universe might have looked different, too, which could be determined by looking at distant interstellar gases and how they absorb light. Observations by Webb and others at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii suggest that this is exactly the case — over time, alpha has changed ever so slightly.

Competing studies did not find the same result, however, so this is still a controversial idea. But it’s a fair bet Webb’s follow-up is even more tendentious: He says alpha also changes over space. According to his theory, we’re smack in the Goldilocks zone, where alpha is exactly the right value to make matter possible.

This paper happened because Webb and his team wanted to reexamine their Keck findings, which suggested alpha was a tiny bit smaller about 9 billion years in the past. They went to the Very Large Observatory in Chile to check it out, and were shocked by what they saw: the further they looked, the bigger alpha got. The discrepancy is even stranger given the two telescopes’ positions: they are in two different hemispheres, so they look in two different directions.

So, to recap: in one direction, alpha was once smaller; in exactly the opposite direction, it was once bigger. This implies that alpha continuously varies throughout space. As Technology Review’s physics blog puts it, that's a mind-blowing result. If it’s true and can be verified, it could mean the universe is much larger than what we can see, and that the laws of physics vary within it.

It would not be possible for our type of life to exist in a place where alpha were any different. So here’s to here and now.

[The Economist]

The BBC recounts how Charles Darwin helped build an artificial forest on Ascension Island, one of his subjects of study from his trips on the HMS Beagle. Today, the island is home to species of plants that would not naturally co-exist. Darwin and his friends put them there, and nearly two centuries later, their grand experiment is living proof that we can transform natural environments.

Originally used as an outpost to keep an eye on Napoleon in exile, Ascension Island, between South America and Africa, was a busy Atlantic waystation in Darwin’s day. It had meager fresh water supplies, however, so Darwin and his botanist friend, Joseph Hooker, set out to change things.

The BBC interviews Darwin biographer David Catling, a professor at the University of Washington-Seattle, who says he believes Darwin decided to build a lush “Little England” on the volcanic island after visiting it in 1836.

Darwin’s friend Hooker explored Ascension a few years later, and in 1847, Darwin convinced Hooker to get his father -- director of the Kew Gardens -- to send trees, hoping they would capture rain, prevent erosion and reduce evaporation.

Beginning in 1850 and continuing each year, ships brought an assortment of plants from botanical gardens in Europe, South Africa and Argentina, the BBC says. By the late 1870s, eucalyptus, Norfolk Island pine, bamboo, and banana had taken hold.

Today, Ascension is home to a cloud forest that would have taken millions of years to evolve naturally, according to Dave Wilkinson, an ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.

It’s proof that humans can build a fully functioning ecosystem simply through trial and error, he said. As the BBC reports, the same principle could be used in future Mars colonies: “Rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it find its own way.”

Intelligent design, indeed.

As of Wednesday morning, Hurricane Earl was a Category 3 storm, but an especially large one. Storm-force winds extend 200 miles from its eye, seen above in a photo snapped from the International Space Station.

NASA scientists are flying airplanes into this swirling mass, measuring the hurricane’s wind speeds, precipitation and more. As part of NASA's GRIP program — Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes — a NASA DC-8 flew through Earl’s eye six times as the hurricane intensified from a Category 2 to a Category 4 storm.

Meanwhile, an ISS crew member used a digital camera with a 50mm lens to take the above photo, from a much safer distance.

Lomborg's forthcoming book, Smart Solutions to Climate Change, declares that global warming is "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today." He examines eight methods to reduce or stop it, including wave, wind, solar and nuclear power, as well as geoengineering, and advocates a carbon emissions tax to finance investment.

As the British media points out, it's a nice U-turn from a man whom the UN climate chief once compared to Adolf Hitler. In a great example of climate politics making strange bedfellows, the same UN chief, Rajendra Pachauri, provides a book-jacket endorsement: "This book provides not only a reservoir of information on the reality of human-induced climate change, but raises vital questions and examines viable options on what can be done."

In an interview with the Guardian, Lomborg explains that he reached his conclusions like any good economist: By studying the numbers. In 2004, economists at Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus think tank were asked how they'd spend $50 billion to solve the world's problems. They ranked climate change near the bottom of the priority list, below issues like HIV and malaria. But four years later, economists tackled the question again, and interest in climate change had risen like the polar temperatures. Lomborg said this prompted him to consider new climate change policies, so global warming wouldn't languish at the bottom of the list.

Earlier this summer, we ripped Lomborg for railing against programs and treaties that aim to lessen or halt anthropogenic climate change. Now that he says it should be a top priority, we'll take him off our villain list. And give him credit for his media savvy -- the guy knows how to sell books.

[the Guardian]