Highly efficient solar cells from quantum dots

The 22 August 2010 edition of Texas Science reports on research by chemist Xiaoyang Zhu at The University of Texas at Austin suggesting that conventional solar cell efficiency could be more than doubled, from the current limit of 30% to more than 60% using semiconductor nanocrystals, or quantum dots to capture the energy from "hot electrons."

The maximum efficiency of the silicon solar cell in use today is about 31 percent. That’s because much of the energy from sunlight hitting a solar cell is too high to be turned into usable electricity. That energy, in the form of so-called “hot electrons,” is lost as heat.
If the higher energy sunlight, or more specifically the hot electrons, could be captured, solar-to-electric power conversion efficiency could be increased theoretically to as high as 66 percent.

 “If we take the hot electrons out, we can do work with them,” says Zhu. “The demonstration of this hot electron transfer establishes that a highly efficient hot carrier solar cell is not just a theoretical concept, but an experimental possibility.”

Captured in a Flash: The Insect Photos of John Abbott

Very cool slide show of insects around Texas, captured in motion by Dr. John Abbott using high speed flash photography.

To see more of his images, visit www.flickr.com/abbottnaturephotography.

Planck telescope image "a thing of beauty"

The first full-sky image from the European Space Agency (ESA) Planck telescope has been released, and "It's a spectacular picture; it's a thing of beauty," Dr Jan Tauber, the European Space Agency's (Esa) Planck project scientist, told BBC News.

Planck, launched in May 2009, occupies an observing position more than one million km from Earth on its "night side." (Technically, Planck's operational orbit is around the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, L2.)

The detectors of Planck's High Frequency Instrument have an operational temperature of -273.05°C, only 0.1°C above absolute zero - the coldest temperature theoretically possible in our Universe. Such low temperatures are necessary for Planck’s detectors to study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the first light released by the universe only 380 000 yrs after the Big Bang, by measuring its temperature across the sky. Specifically, Planck will look for evidence of "inflation," the faster-than-light expansion that cosmologists believe the Universe experienced in its first, fleeting moments. Theory predicts this event ought to be "imprinted" in the CMB and its detail should be retrievable with sufficiently sensitive instruments.

For more information on the Planck mission, visit the ESA - Planck Web site.

For something extra cool, visit the Chromoscope site, which lets you explore our Galaxy (the Milky Way) and the distant Universe in a range of wavelengths from X-rays to the longest radio waves.

Update (2010-07-09) Uncovered this article (PDF, subscription required) in Science describing the Planck mission. Planck is the third to study the CMB, following the earlier COBE (1992) and WMAP (2003) satellites. From the Science article:

Planck will chart the temperature variations in CMB with 10 times WMAP's sensitivity and three times its angular resolution. The microwaves are also polarized so that the electric fields in waves coming from any particular spot in the sky wiggle in a definite direction—just as ordinary light waves reflected from a pond are polarized so they oscillate horizontally as they zip into your eye. WMAP sketched the polarization of the CMB; Planck will render it in great detail.

Planck will be far more sophisticated than its predecessors. WMAP sampled microwaves at five frequencies; Planck will monitor nine of them over a range 12 times wider. WMAP cooled its detectors by exposing them to the frigidity of space; some of Planck's detectors must be cooled to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero with a liquid-helium refrigerator. As WMAP did, Planck will circle the sun in synchrony with Earth, hovering at the so-called second Lagrange point, or L2 .

. . .
But the prize quarry for Planck researchers is the B modes. These features are swirls in the CMB polarization mapped across the sky, and spotting them would essentially clinch the case for the mind-bending theory of inflation.

The notion that the universe briefly expanded at faster than light speed might seem absurd, but it solves some thorny problems in cosmology, including a big one posed by the CMB itself. The temperature of background radiation is almost exactly the same—2.725 kelvin—all over the sky. That's perplexing because the distant reaches of the universe in opposite directions are so far apart that not even light has had time to travel between them. So they could not have interacted and should have no reason to have reached so nearly the same temperature. Inflation solves this problem by positing that opposite ends of the universe were cheek-by-jowl until the sudden expansion pulled them very far apart.

Although inflation fits the facts so far, researchers do not yet have direct proof that it occurred. The B modes would provide that. Current theory predicts that inflation should have generated gravitational waves and that those waves should have left lingering swirls in the polarization of the CMB.

John Wooden (1910 - 2010)

John Wooden died last Friday at the age of 99. From the New York Times obituary:

Wooden was a dignified, scholarly man who spoke with the precise language of the English teacher he once was. He always carried a piece of paper with a message from his father that read:

“Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.”

In An Appreciation, Harvey Araton writes

Wooden won a record 10 national titles, including seven straight from 1967 through 1973. His teams reached 12 Final Fours, and they won 88 straight games between 1971 and 1974. He had supreme talent, including the most dominant centers of the era, Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton.

He also had critics, who reason that there was little competition out west and remind us that Sam Gilbert, a U.C.L.A. booster, served as friend and fixer for many a Bruin star, landing the university on probation six years after Wooden retired in 1975.

Who knows what Wooden knew or didn’t want to know? Temptation was not invented with John Calipari or Jim Calhoun, but there was one compromise Wooden absolutely refused to make.

His players never took control of the gym. Great as they were, Pauley Pavilion never became their stage to pose for the pros, and doing it the coach’s way was about more than getting a haircut.

“His skills as a coach are overlooked because everyone focuses on the talent,” Geno Auriemma, the Connecticut women’s coach, whose team currently has a 78-game winning streak, wrote in an e-mail message. “He taught the game as well as anyone ever has or will.”

It must have been during the run of championships that I had occasion (I don't remember the circumstances) to attend the NCAA regional being held in Freedom Hall in Louisville. At some point in the game the public address announcer, John Tong, came on and announced (in that wonderfully distinctive voice of his): "This score just in from the West Regional. Santa Clara, 52..." At this my mind jumped ahead and assumed Santa Clara had played a slowdown, and won in an upset, probably 52 - 50. But after a pause of just the right length, Tong continued, "... UCLA, 90."

Cassini images

Here are some amazing images from the Cassini imaging team, courtesy of Emily Lakdawalla's Planetary Society Blog last week.



Dione and Telesto
Dione, Saturn's third largest moon at 1,123 kilometers in diameter, shares the frame with Telesto, a tiny "rock," about 35 kilometers across, that orbits Saturn in the leading Lagrangian point of Tethys' orbit. Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI

(Full blog post at: Dione and Telesto, close on camera but far apart in fact )




Peering through the fountains of Enceladus
Here, unmannedspaceflight.com forum member Astro0 has combined two frames captured by Cassini during its May 18 encounter with Enceladus to include both the backlit plumes and the background imagery: Titan and the rings. Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI / processed by Astro0/unmannedspaceflight.com

Here's Emily's annotated version:



(Full blog post at: The most amazing image of Enceladus Cassini has captured yet )

Martin Gardner (1914-2010)

The Dover second revised (1957) edition of Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science was one of the first books to go on my "skeptics bookshelf," and it's still there, along with Gardner's Science - Good, Bad and Bogus (Prometheus Books, 1981). Oh, and of course there's The Annotated Alice (1961).

From the New York Times obituary, by Douglas Martin:

"Martin Gardner is one of the great intellects produced in this country in the 20th century,” said Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive scientist.

W. H. Auden, Arthur C. Clarke, Jacob Bronowski, Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan were admirers of Mr. Gardner. Vladimir Nabokov mentioned him in his novel “Ada” as “an invented philosopher.” An asteroid is named for him.

Mr. Gardner responded that his life was not all that interesting, really. “It’s lived mainly inside my brain,” he told The Charlotte Observer in 1993.
...
Mr. Gardner, who lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., for most of the years he wrote for Scientific American, resigned from the magazine in 1981. Two years later he began a column in Skeptical Inquirer, “Notes of a Fringe Watcher,” which he continued to write until 2002. He had already begun beating this drum, debunking psuedoscience, in his book “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.” He helped found the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

In The New York Review of Books in 1982, Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist, called Mr. Gardner “the single brightest beacon defending rationality and good science against the mysticism and anti-intellectualism that surround us.”

Michael Shermer, the publishing Editor of Skeptic magazine, wrote an essay about Gardner in 2002 titled, Hermits & Cranks.

In 1952 he expanded it into a book called In the Name of Science, with the descriptive subtitle “An entertaining survey of the high priests and cultists of science, past and present.” Published by Putnam, the book sold so poorly that it was quickly remaindered and lay dormant until 1957, when it was republished by Dover. It has come down to us as Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, which is still in print and is arguably the skeptic classic of the past half a century.

Thankfully, there has been some progress since Gardner offered his first criticisms of pseudoscience. Now largely antiquated are his chapters on believers in a flat earth, a hollow earth, Atlantis and Lemuria, Alfred William Lawson, Roger Babson, Trofim Lysenko, Wilhelm Reich and Alfred Korzybski. But disturbingly, a good two thirds of the book’s contents are relevant today, including Gardner’s discussions of homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, iridiagnosis (reading the iris of the eye to determine bodily malfunctions), food faddists, cancer cures and other forms of medical quackery, Edgar Cayce, the Great Pyramid’s alleged mystical powers, handwriting analysis, ESP and PK (psychokinesis), reincarnation, dowsing rods, eccentric sexual theories, and theories of group racial differences.
...
What I find especially valuable about Gardner’s views are his insights into the differences between science and pseudoscience. On the one extreme we have ideas that are most certainly false, “such as the dianetic view that a one-day-old embryo can make sound recordings of its mother’s conversation.” In the borderlands between the two “are theories advanced as working hypotheses, but highly debatable because of the lack of sufficient data.” Of these Gardner selects a most propitious example: “the theory that the universe is expanding.” That theory would now fall at the other extreme end of the spectrum, where lie “theories almost certainly true, such as the belief that the earth is round or that men and beasts are distant cousins.”

Geomagnetic Storm this morning!

From the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (via this post by Emily Lakdawalla in The Planetary Society blog):

A geomagnetic storm began at 05:55 AM EST Monday, April 5, 2010. Space weather storm levels reached Strong (G3) levels on the Geomagnetic Storms Space Weather Scale. The source of the storming is an Earth-directed Coronal Mass Ejection associated with a weak solar flare that occurred in Active Region 1059 on April 3 at 05:54 AM EST. This is expected to be an isolated storm that should subside quickly. Other than the flare and CME erupting on April 3, this active region has not produced any significant activity. Systems that can be affected include electric power systems, spacecraft operations, high-frequency communications, GPS, and other navigation systems.

Ebertfest 2010

The schedule for 12th Annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival has been posted.

The Wednesday night opener is Pink Floyd The Wall in 70mm. Also looking forward to seeing Apocalypse Now/Redux on the big screen.

Ebert writes about this year's festival on RogerEbert.com:

Charlie Kaufman, the writer and director of "Synecdoche, New York" (2008), my choice for the best film of the decade, will appear after the screening of his masterpiece at Ebertfest 2010. The 12th annual festival will be held April 21-25 at the landmark 1,600-seat Virginia Theater in Champaign-Urbana, and for the first time ever, all festival Q&A sessions and panel discussions will be streamed live on the Internet.

Presented by the College of Media of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the festival features a dozen screenings, along with lectures, guest appearances and special events. I program, produce and host the event, along with my wife Chaz. Thanks to my computer-generated voice, I plan to play a larger role onstage this year.

It's a Dog's world...

...But it wouldn't be nothing, nothing without a homo sapien.

Anyway, interesting NYTimes article about research on the canine brain.

In September, the Army announced that it would spend $300,000 to study the impact of pairing psychiatric service dogs like Jet with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. Both the House and Senate have recently passed bills that would finance the training and placement of these dogs with veterans.
...
But Clive D. L. Wynne, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Florida who specializes in canine cognition and has himself said he met a border collie who knew 1,500 words, takes issue with efforts to compare human and canine brains.

He argues that it is dogs’ deep sensitivity to the humans around them, their obedience under rigorous training, and their desire to please that can explain most of these capabilities. They may be deft at reading human cues — and teachable — but that doesn’t mean they are thinking like people, he says. A dog’s entire world revolves around its primary owner, and it will respond to that person to get what it wants, usually food, treats or affection.

“I take the view that dogs have their own unique way of thinking,” Dr. Wynne said. “It’s a happy accident that doggie thinking and human thinking overlap enough that we can have these relationships with dogs, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that dogs are viewing the world the way we do.”

Return of the blog

Jeem is returning to his blog, having neglected it for far too long....
In addition, I think I've got the posts going to the Notes section of my Facebook profile -- except I really don't want them all showing up on my news feed?!

Win Ben Stein's mind

[Apparently, I had written this back in December 2008 and neglected to publish it. Posting now (05.29.2010) with original post date and time.]

Roger Ebert has posted an essay, Win Ben Stein's mind, to his Journal in response to criticism that he hadn't written a review of Ben Stein's film Expelled!

Here are a couple of excerpts from Ebert's post:

Ben Stein, you hosted a TV show on which you gave away money. Imagine that I have created a special edition of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" just for you. Ben, you've answered all the earlier questions correctly, and now you're up for the $1 million prize. It involves an explanation for the evolution of life on this planet. You have already exercised your option to throw away two of the wrong answers. Now you are faced with two choices: (A) Darwin's Theory of Evolution, or (B) Intelligent Design.

Because this is a special edition of the program, you can use a Hotline to telephone every scientist on Earth who has an opinion on this question. You discover that 99.975 of them agree on the answer (A). A million bucks hangs in the balance. The clock is ticking. You could use the money. Which do you choose? You, a firm believer in the Constitution, are not intimidated and exercise your freedom of speech. You choose (B).

Squaaawk!!! The klaxon horn sounds. You have lost. Outraged, you file suit against the program, charging it is biased and has denied a hearing for your belief. Your suit argues that the "correct" answer was chosen because of a prejudice against the theory of Intelligent Design, despite the fact that .025 of one percent of all scientists support it. You call for (B) to be discussed in schools as an alternative theory to (A).

Your rights have been violated. You're at wit's end. You think perhaps the field of Indie Documentaries offers you hope.
...
You release your film "eXpelled."As you fully expect from all your experience, it is rejected almost unanimously by the MSM. It receives an 8% rating on the TomatoMeter, earning it a place on the list of the worst-reviewed films of all time. In a review not catalogued by Tomatoes, ChristianAnwers.net writes that your film "has made Ben Stein the new hero of believers in God everywhere, and has landed a smart right cross to the protruding jaw of evolution's elite."

Again, the useful excluded middle. Those for whom Ben Stein is not a hero are not believers in God. It also follows that the phrase "believers in God everywhere" does not extend to believers in God who agree with Darwin. So ChristanAnswers has excluded two middles at one fell stroke.

It's a long post, but well worth reading in its entirety!

M&Ms prove Darwin was right

Ok, so the (anonymous) M&M entry submitted to Roger Ebert's blog was copied/stolen from a 1996 listserv post signed by Emil Huston of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Ebert has added an attribution, and it's still an important piece of research (and in an easier-to-read format on Ebert's site).

We are a banana republic...

... with nukes.
After the House failed to pass the bailout package, on Monday afternoon Paul Krugman posted a blog entry titled OK, we are a banana republic in which he quotes himself from an earlier post:

So what we now have is non-functional government in the face of a major crisis, because Congress includes a quorum of crazies and nobody trusts the White House an inch.

As a friend said last night, we’ve become a banana republic with nukes.

And just because it's interesting, roll back the clock three years to his column of 8 August 2005, That Hissing Sound

Of course, some people still deny that there's a housing bubble. Let me explain how we know that they're wrong.

One piece of evidence is the sense of frenzy about real estate, which irresistibly brings to mind the stock frenzy of 1999. Even some of the players are the same. The authors of the 1999 best seller "Dow 36,000" are now among the most vocal proponents of the view that there is no housing bubble.

And speaking of "Dow 36,000" (and returning back to the future):

And last year, when the McCain campaign announced that the candidate had assembled “an impressive collection of economists, professors, and prominent conservative policy leaders” to advise him on economic policy, who was prominently featured? Kevin Hassett, the co-author of “Dow 36,000.” Enough said.

Ebert update (3 of 3): Creationism Q&A

Another Ebert commentary, this time, the seriously funny Creationism: Your questions answered. (I guess it's just seriously, uh, serious if you really believe men walked the earth with dinosaurs.)

Ebert update (2 of 3): Movie rating systems

Roger Ebert's Journal entry, You give out too many stars, wherein Ebert discusses stars, thumbs, and the "Little Man" of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Ebert update (1 of 3): Lost parts of "Metropolis" found

In a commentary posted 4 August, Roger Ebert writes:

It is the most sensational find in recent film history. A nearly-complete print of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927) has been discovered in Buenos Aires, 80 years after it was thought a quarter of the film was lost forever. Called by many the most important of German films, one of the landmarks of silent Expressionism, its plot had several loose ends that will now be repaired.

Qualifications

What's all the ruckus over John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate? As this article in the Anchorage Daily News quotes Alaskan State House Speaker John Harris, a Republican from Valdez: "She's old enough," Harris said. "She's a U.S. citizen."
And before running for governor, Palin was mayor of Wasilla, AK (pop. 8,471 per 2005 census estimate). We did, after all, once elect a ticket with Dan Quayle as vice president.

Addendum [09.03.2008]: Yes, the "bikini picture" is Photoshopped.

Pentagon: Iraq War a 'major debacle'

A McClatchy article from 17 April 2008 reports:

WASHINGTON — The war in Iraq has become "a major debacle" and the outcome "is in doubt" despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon's premier military educational institute.

The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush's projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.

The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins, a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations.

It was published by the university's National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research center.

"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle," says the report's opening line.
...
The report said that the United States has suffered serious political costs, with its standing in the world seriously diminished. Moreover, operations in Iraq have diverted "manpower, materiel and the attention of decision-makers" from "all other efforts in the war on terror" and severely strained the U.S. armed forces.

"Compounding all of these problems, our efforts there (in Iraq) were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East," the report continued.

We're number one!

A USA Today article reports that Lexington-Fayette County ranks number 1 in per capita carbon emissions according a report out of the Brookings Institution. Other cities in the top 10 include: Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, St. Louis, and Knoxville. On the other hand, among the cities with the lowest (per capita) carbon emissions include: LA, New York, San Jose, and San Francisco.

The counter-intuitive rankings are because (as the article summarizes), "Sprawling, car-dependent metropolitan areas with low-cost electricity emit more carbon dioxide per capita than densely populated cities with extensive mass transit systems where electricity is more expensive."

Here's a quick link to the Brookings report tables and supporting material (PDF).

She only grows stronger and more powerful

Here's a story of stunning political correctness. In May, Rachael Ray appeared in an ad for Dunkin' Donuts wearing a "black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design." Conservative bloggers, led by Michelle Malkin, saw something far more sinister: they likened the scarf to a keffiyeh, the type typically worn by Muslim extremists, calling it “jihadi chic” and saying the ads “casually promote the symbol of Palestinian terrorism and the intifada, the keffiyeh, via Rachael Ray.”

The backlash was swift and the story soon went viral. A New York Times blog wondering if doughnuts have replaced social security as the undisputed "third rail" of American politics. For more laughs, there's the YouTube video, “Rachael Ray Is a Terrorist” (This story comes up about halfway through, but the rest of the video is pretty funny, too.)

Rachael's critics and enemies would do well to heed Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef and food writer, who has warned against her “strange and terrible powers,” and has earlier said: “Complain all you want. It’s like railing against the pounding surf. She only grows stronger and more powerful.”

Full disclosure: I have a thing for Rachael Ray.