A multidisciplinary engineering team at the University of California, San Diego developed a new nanoparticle-based material for concentrating solar power plants designed to absorb and convert to heat more than 90 percent of the sunlight it captures. The new material can also withstand temperatures greater than 700 degrees Celsius and survive many years outdoors in spite of exposure to air and humidity. Their work, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's SunShot program, was published recently in two separate articles in the journal Nano Energy.Physics.org
New solar power material converts 90 percent of captured light into heat
University of California, San Diego
4 comments:
We need more stories about how government spending is not always wasteful, inefficient and does not crowd out private sector investment. Successful cooperation gives people opportunity to compete to capture and patent government research as their own. It's a very effective and efficient variation on burying money to let people dig it up and help society solve long term technical challenges in the process. The problem, as with most of US government is that two party politics and the mass hysteria of rhetoric takes over and funds get directed to "research" partisan goals, and predictably the models always show what the partisans want it to show and then the opposite party just blocks all spending because they see the process as a threat. Hopefully junk economics and quack science using unrealistic modelling to demonstrate whatever pattern people set out to see is no longer supported in any form. We also need less arrogance from the academics who benefit from the policy to ensure that they spread around the benefits of these policies to ensure that those who can't or won't become educated aren't oppressed by academic elitism.
As it is more than 50% of government subsidized graduate positions in US engineering schools are held by foreign nationals, many of which get no domestic applicants. Free money for education and research, but no one here that can see any opportunity in taking it. Educational exports are huge industry but are a real cost. We should not only be consuming all our own educational opportunities, we should be net importers of education from elsewhere, if sufficient funding were available to consumers.
I doubt we have excess capacity in education, probably we have institutions that are too exclusionary, and we have too high of price on education. Brainwashing by Demo-Repubs about long term fiscal constraints and lack of innovation by government has blinded people to the opportunities. The 1970s failure of Keynesian policies never demonstrated that innovation and efficiency gains don't include government contrary to popular economic modelling. Unless / until we get the two party politics out of science and econ, we can't enjoy what we have the ability to produce.
"As it is more than 50% of government subsidized graduate positions in US engineering schools are held by foreign nationals,"
The schools probably get affirmative action points for this... citizenship is not a criteria, only race...
"We also need less arrogance from the academics": Seconded!
Academics can always just "flunk" their students... the rest of us dont have this luxury to be lazy like the academics in this regard...
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