Before you ask, no, we will never, ever, ever get tired of this image.

Anyway, the good folks over at MIT have discovered how to make easily built and easily disassembled solar panels. It involves, not surprisingly, plants and carbon nanotubes. It turns out that a chemical known as phospholipids tend to stick together in a structure and emit electrons when exposed to light. Even better, they really love carbon nanotubes and stick to them like a Twihard to Robert Pattinson, and carbon nanotubes just so happen to be able to collect and distribute those electrons; i.e. it acts like a wire.

That’s not the end of the good news either. These solar panels spontaneously organize themselves, no need for any catalyst or other reaction beyond light. If you need to take it apart, one additive later, the phospholipids are off the grid. And if you need to reapply, that’s as simple as using a membrane.

While this is still in the testing stage, it’s got huge implications. These solar panels can pretty much be sprayed onto anything, and can be assembled in just a few minutes. That’s got great implications for everything from providing the Third World with cheap power to being able to bring your PS3 camping. Thanks, science!

[ via DVice ]

Sure everyone knows that Charles Darwin came up with the Theory of Evolution, but did you know that he was also one of the world’s first terraformers? That’s right, Darwin helped create one of the first self-sustaining ecosystems…and he did it on a barren island in the 1800′s.

Ascension Island is a tiny, volcanic speck stuck between South America and Africa and in the 1800′s, it was completely lifeless, with no trees and very little fresh water. (It was also a British military base intended to keep an eye on Napoleon, who was exiled on the nearby island of St. Helena.) Darwin visited the island during his historic voyage on the HMS Beagle, and several years afterwards, encouraged his friend, botanist Joseph Hooker, to develop a plan to forest Ascension with trees from England. And by England, we mean English gardens, which had trees from all over the world, including bamboo, Eucalyptus and Banana.

Today, Ascension Island is a lush oasis, as the hodgepodge of trees that never lived together before co-exist and suck moisture from the sea. It’s the first ever self-sustaining artificial ecosystem (Suck it, Biodome 2!), but few people have heard of it, including the scientists who should be learning from it.

BBC News recently interviewed Dr. Dave Wilkinson of Liverpool Johns Moores University, who has written extensively about the strange hodgepodge ecosystem that’s been created on the island and feels that it could tell us a lot about how a similar environment could be created artificially in space or on another planet.

“What it tells us is that we can build a fully functioning ecosystem through a series of chance accidents or trial and error.” He later added, “It’s a terrible waste that no-one is studying it,”

[BBC NEWS]

We all know that solar cells generate electricity by absorbing the sun’s light. We see huge ranks of the shiftless little circuits sitting around, just getting a tan, not being as efficient as they could be. Well, bums, the vacation’s over, thanks to some researchers who figured out you could actually be working.

Essentially, solar cells can be made more efficient by having them absorb the heat as well as the light of the sun. And this turns out to be fairly simple to do, as far as constructing complex energy generating devices can be considered “simple”. Simply add a Cold War technology called a thermionic energy converter, used by the likes of NASA, and bam, simple solar cells.

Now get to work, you shiftless bums! Daddy just downloaded “Wolfenstein 3D” and wants to waste some Nazis!

[ via Ars Technica ]