Today Is Boxing Day, A Great Idea That Turned into Wretched Excess

Today Is Boxing Day, A Great Idea That Turned into Wretched Excess:
The holiday used to have a real meaning.

The original idea made some sense; the Victorian gentry couldn't do anything without servants, certainly not cook up a Christmas dinner, so all their staff worked Christmas Day and got the next day off to spend with their families. They took away their annual bonuses, gifts and leftovers, while gentry ate cold cuts prepared the day before.

The churches opened up their alms boxes and distributed the contents to the poor; there was also a tradition of keeping one unopened gift and donating it to charity. Many people today work in food banks, donate excess gifts to the poor and make a point of polishing off leftovers.

Wikipedia/CC BY 2.0

It was a holiday about equity- ensuring that everyone got a day off, even those who had to work on Christmas. It was a real buy-nothing day; you were supposed to use up what you had left over and give away what you didn't need. It was the exact opposite of the orgy of consumption that it has become.

Perhaps Australians, at one time a more egalitarian culture, had no need of such a tradition. But now, the idea of boxing up the leftovers and the sweaters we don't need (or the ones that are replaced) for delivery to the homeless and hungry might not be a bad tradition to start.

Scientists create first solar cell with over 100 percent quantum efficiency

Scientists create first solar cell with over 100 percent quantum efficiency:

Researchers over at the National Renewable Energy Lab have reportedly made the first solar cell with an external quantum efficiency over 100 percent. Quantum efficiency relates to the number of electrons-per-second flowing in a solar cell circuit, divided by the number of photons from the energy entering. The NREL team recorded an efficiency topping out at 114 percent, by creating the first working multiple exciton generation (MEG) cell. Using MEG, a single high energy photon can produce more than one electron-hole pair per absorbed photon. The extra efficiency comes from quantum dots 'harvesting' energy that would otherwise be lost as heat. The cell itself uses anti-reflection coating on a transparent conductor, layered with zinc oxide, lead selenide, and gold. NREL scientist Arthur J. Nozik predicted as far back as 2001 that MEG would do the job, but it's taken until now for the concept to leap over from theory. The hope is, of course, that this will lead to more competitively priced solar power, fueling the transport of the future.

Scientists create first solar cell with over 100 percent quantum efficiency originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Dec 2011 06:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Geologists Find Source of Stonehenge’s Inner Stones

Geologists Find Source of Stonehenge’s Inner Stones:


By Mark Brown, Wired UK

A team of geologists from Britain have pinpointed the exact quarry that Stonehenge’s innermost circle of rocks came from. It’s the first time that a precise source has been found for any of the stones at the prehistoric monument.

Robert Ixer of the University of Leicester and Richard Bevins of the National Museum of Wales painstakingly identified samples from various rock outcrops in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

For nine months the pair used petrography — the study of mineral content and textural relationships within rocks — to find the origins of Stonehenge’s rhyolite debitage stones. These spotted dolerites or bluestones form the inner circle and inner horseshoe of the site.



They found the culprit on a 65-metre-long outcropping called Craig Rhos-y-Felin, near Pont Saeson in north Pembrokeshire. It lies approximately 160 miles from the Stonehenge site.

The question remains though, as to how neolithic people transported huge chunks of rock from Wales to Wiltshire, some 5,000 years ago. Some historians reckon that these stone age builders quarried the stones in Pembrokeshire and brought them over to England, while others argue that giant glacial shifts moved the stones, hundreds of thousands of years earlier.

Ixer and Bevins hope that by finding the exact source for some of the monument’s stones, they will be able to discover new clues as to when and how they made their 160 mile journey.

The more well-known and iconic stones, the huge sarsens, were incorporated into the monument several centuries later. They came from somewhere in the Marlborough Downs, 20 miles north of Stonehenge.

Image:Waaghals/Flickr/CC-licensed

Source: Wired.co.uk

Breakthrough could double solar energy output

Solar panels at the Sarnia Photovoltaic Power Plant in Sarnia, Canada, the world's largest photovoltaic plant. (Brent Lewin / Bloomberg)
By Dean Kuipers
December 16, 2011, 4:39 p.m.
A new discovery from a chemist at the University of Texas at Austin may allow photovoltaic solar cells to double their efficiency, thus providing loads more electrical power from regular sunlight.

Not only that, but it’s way cheap. Chemistry professor Xiaoyang Zhu and his team discovered that an organic plastic semiconductor could double the number of electrons harvested out of one photon of sunlight. Yep, plastic.

An issue with regular photovoltaic panels is that much of the energy delivered by sunlight comes in the form of “hot” electrons, which are too high-energy to be converted to electricity in silicon and are instead lost as heat. For that reason, the max insolation-to-electricity efficiency of a silicon solar cell used today is considered to be about 31%. Capturing those hot electrons could boost it to 66%.

Zhu’s process involves absorbing the photon of sunlight in a plastic – in his experiments, pentacene – to produce a dark quantum “shadow state” from which two electrons can be retrieved, instead of just one.

Right now, his experiments use ordinary sunlight, and not focused sunlight, and he’s getting 44% efficiency. That’s a big boost in electricity, and it means it could be done with ordinary rooftop panels.

Breakthroughs in the solar industry seem to be coming fast of late. Just two weeks ago we heard about researcher Douglas Keszlar at Oregon State University in Corvallis, who is studying the photovoltaic potential of fool’s gold– pyrite – and discovered instead that some more ordinary materials could make improved photovoltaics, especially iron silicon sulfide. Once again, the advantage would be that it’s hyperefficient and cheap.

All of this goes to reinforce a recent study by Joshua Pearce at Queen’s University in Toronto, who found that cost estimates for solar technology used by energy analysts are greatly inflated. The technology is changing so fast that many studies don’t reflect the newest realities. For instance, the cost of solar panels has dropped 70% since 2009, and their productivity only declines 0.1% to 0.2% per year, rather than the 1% per year that was the norm.

The bottom line? Commonly used studies have listed dollars-per-watt of electricity as high as $7.61. According to Dr. Pearce, the real cost in 2011 is under $1 per watt.

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Scientists Close to Reviving Wooly Mammoths From Extinction

Scientists Close to Reviving Wooly Mammoths From Extinction:

Some 450 generations after our ancestors armed themselves with sharpened sticks to kill mammoths, scientists are now working to revive them -- and they're actually incredibly close to doing it.

Thousands of years ago, Wooly mammoths were pretty much wiped off the face of the Earth from a likely combination of climate change and over-hunting from humans. But now, about 450 generations after our ancestors armed themselves with sharpened sticks to kill mammoths, scientists are now working to revive them -- and they're actually incredibly close to doing it. Japanese and Russian researchers are suggesting that in just five short years the currently extinct Wooly mammoth may roam again thanks to advancements in cloning science, offering a bit of hope for countless other species that have already perished at the hands of humans.

A report from PhysOrg outlines the surprisingly-easy sounding process of bringing an extinct species back to life:

By replacing the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those taken from the mammoth's marrow cells, embryos with mammoth DNA can be produced, Kyodo said, citing the researchers. The scientists will then plant the embryos into elephant wombs for delivery, as the two species are close relatives, the report said.

Securing nuclei with an undamaged gene is essential for the nucleus transplantation technique, it said.
For scientists involved in the research since the late 1990s, finding nuclei with undamaged mammoth genes has been a challenge. Mammoths became extinct about 10,000 years ago.

According to scientists, the real breakthrough that ups the chances for a wooly redux came with the discovery of a well-preserved mammoth bone in Siberia last Summer, inside which DNA from marrow could be relatively easily harvested. Ironically, the find was made possible thanks to the region's receding ice coverage due to climate change -- the same phenomenon considered partially to blame for the species decline some 10,000 years ago.

While the notion of reviving that iconic Ice Age-era species from the emptiness of extinction is endlessly fascinating, there exists today an untold number of plants and animals on the verge of a similar fate due to the same factors which snuffed out mammoths in the first place.