Michael Gratzel has come clean and revealed that he stole his award-winning design for a new kind of solar cell–stole it from a leaf, that is. The Swiss inventor and first prize-winner of the $960,000 Millennium Technology Prize believes he has a cheap way to power everything from cell phones to street lamps, copying plants’ power to harness sunlight and turn it into energy.

“I was always intrigued with natural photosynthesis,” Gratzel says in a Millennium Technology Prize video (see below), “the way the plant uses molecules to generate charges.”

His solar cells aren’t as efficient as the current silicon photovoltaic panels, but they do use cheaper manufacturing materials.

“Gratzel’s innovation is likely to have an important role in low-cost, large-scale solutions for renewable energy,” Ainomaija Haarla, president of Finland’s Technology Academy, says in a prepared news release on the group’s website. [CNN]

Gratzel can also make his solar cells transparent or flexible. This means that designers might integrate them into existing structures, for example windows or even furniture.

“You can imagine using those cells as electricity producing windows…. What’s very exciting is that you collect light from all sides, so can capture electricity from the inside as well as the outside…. You could think that the glass of all high-rises in New York would be electricity generating panels,” he said. [BBC]

In 1991, Gratzel published a paper in Nature on how the cells, which use a mixture including a (not necessarily green) dye, absorb light and create an electric current.

Only 10 micrometers thick, the [dye] mixture is sandwiched between two glass plates or embedded in plastic. Light striking the dye frees electrons … [and] semiconducting titanium dioxide particles collect the electrons and transfer them to an external circuit, producing an electric current. [eWeek]

Gratzel believes the cheap cell will prove essential in India and Africa, where he foresees its use for communications and medical purposes.

Related content:
80beats: The Dream: Print-Out Solar Panels That Can Be Stapled to Your Roof
80beats: Glitter-Sized Solar Cells Could Be Woven into Your Power Tie
80beats: Self-Assembling Solar Panels Use the Vinaigrette Principle
DISCOVER: Sun Catcher Promises Cheaper Solar Power

Image: flickr / seeks2dream

People have now recovered nearly 500 oiled-but-alive birds from the Gulf region. Many of these are the brown pelicans, which—adding insult to tragedy—is Louisiana’s state bird. They have become grimy symbols of BP’s catastrophe, and responders are racing to save the birds and clean them.

But increasingly, the disheartening but necessary question has arisen: Should we euthanize them instead of trying to save them?

YES

Ron Kendall, director of the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University, told the AP that it might be hard to stomach the thought, but trying to save the brown pelicans and other oily birds could be futile. To help the birds, responders must capture them, hold them in captivity, go through the exhaustive process of cleaning them, and set them free somewhere where they won’t fly back to the oil. In the case of BP’s leak, oil has spread so far that rescuers are currently taking Louisiana birds all the way to Tampa Bay, Florida.

Kendall, for one, is skeptical that our efforts do much good, and the data aren’t encouraging.

The arm of the federal government that nominally oversees offshore rigs agrees with Kendall, and has for some time. “Studies are indicating that rescue and cleaning of oiled birds makes no effective contribution to conservation, except conceivably for species with a small world population,” the U.S. Minerals Management Service said in a 2002 environmental analysis of proposed Gulf oil drilling projects. “A growing number of studies indicate that current rehabilitation techniques are not effective in returning healthy birds to the wild” [AP].

UC-Davis Ornithologist Daniel Anderson points out that we can’t really address damage oil has done to internal organs, either, which is part of the reason the numbers show no significant survival rates for the hard-to-save animals over the long term. He says:

“It might make us feel better to clean them up and send them back out. But there’s a real question of how much it actually does for the birds, aside from prolong their suffering” [Newsweek].

NO

But, Anderson counters, maybe we just owe it to them.

“If nothing else, we’re morally obligated to save birds that seem to be savable,” Anderson said [AP].

And methods seem to be improving, at least slightly, as responders sadly get more practice.

In the past, birds were cleaned right away, and volunteers often worked through the night bathing rescued birds. But, as research has since shown, the stress of capture and cleaning can be profoundly deleterious to a bird’s health—knocking hormones out of balance and exacerbating organ damage. So now, captured birds are left to rest for a day or two before being cleaned, and only washed during the day, so as not to disrupt their circadian rhythms [Newsweek].

Part of the argument for euthanizing could be that time would be better spent on saving habitats or endangered species as opposed to cleaning doomed birds. But, as Anderson points out, citizens demand it and will try to do it themselves if organized responders don’t. If you care about birds, or devoted your life to them, how could you not?

“What do you want us to do? Let them die?” said Jay Holcomb, executive director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, who has aided oiled animals for 40 years [AP].

Recent posts on the Gulf oil spill:
80beats: Meet the Oil-Covered Pelicans, Symbols of the BP Oil Spill
80beats: This Hurricane Season Looks Rough, And What If One Hits the Oil Spill?
80beats: We Did the Math: BP Oil Spill Is Now Worse Than the Exxon Valdez
80beats: “Top Kill” Operation Is Under Way in Attempt to Stop Gulf Oil Leak
80beats: Scientists Say Gulf Spill Is Way Worse Than Estimated. How’d We Get It So Wrong?

Image: flickr / IBRRC

BABloggee John Kennedy (no relation, of course, to Jamie) sent me word about a fun pareidolia site: Happy Chair is Happy. It features inanimate objects that look like faces. It’s really a fun series to poke through, and it’s brought to you by the I Can Haz Cheezeburgers folks.

I’ll note with some amusement that in a recent entry they included a picture I featured here in March of an alien prickly pear cactus. They didn’t have the source, so I left a comment with a link. I do love that picture!

Comet McNaught on May 15, 2010 Credit: Michael Jager via aerith.net

There is a viewable comet out there as I mentioned yesterday.  It is named C/2009 R1 (McNaught) or as I called it here plain Comet McNaught.  For the sticklers out there I know there is more than one with the same “name” but for here and now I am referring to C/2009 R1.

I did mention Seiichi Yoshida had this at a mag. 5.5 and you might wonder why you would need a pair of binoculars (at least) and dark skies.  I have found the magnitude of a comet is about 2 magnitudes higher than an equivalent star.  So if they talk about a 5.5 magnitude comet, that would equate to a 7.5 star.  Could be it owes to the diffuse nature of a comet and this is just my observation.

So this is nice looking green colored comet (not sure why), located off the end of Pegasus.  The comet rises in the northeastern sky at about 01:00 AM your local time and I hate to tell you this but I think the best time to see it is going to be about 03:30 AM.  What really rots for me is I might not get a great look at it due to the mountains and a nearby Maple tree.   The comet isn’t all that far from the Sun so by the time it gets high enough for me daylight might be breaking.  So you know it’s not going to be real high in the sky anyways.

My saving grace is going to be putting my little scope in the car and go to a spot west of here to get a better look in that direction.   I also have to beat the clouds.

This comet is going to be around for a little bit and it could be a naked eye object pretty soon, I will let you know

Here is a finders chart for 0330 AM.  This should be valid for your local time zone.  You can see the Great Square of Pegasus on the right, and the comet to the left of it.  Find M34 and you will have find the comet.

Sure, when blood hits the water, sharks know exactly where to go. But how do they hunt for less-obvious meals? New research says they use math.

How exactly the sharks move seems to vary with how much food is around.

Imagine yourself in a Walgreens, picking up a few necessities on your way home from work. You might make short movements, darting between aisles, crossing and recrossing your path as you debate between generic and name-brand. Apparently, sharks do the same thing when they have a lot of food in one area. Scientists even suggest their pattern is Brownian, no more intelligent than the aimless sway of microscopic particles buffeted by water molecules.

But in the vast expanses of a Walmart on a Saturday afternoon, your hunt might look a little different. After picking up a few items in one section of the store, you make a long traverse to another section, rolling your blue cart ahead of you. In food-sparse environments, the researchers argue that sharks also seem to make these long journeys. Here, the sharks appear to use Lévy flight search patterns, long suspected by mathematicians as the most effective way to hunt, but never before successfully traced to an animal’s actual search patterns.

The research team, including David W. Sims of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, used radio tags to study the hunting patterns of fourteen species of open-ocean predatory fish, including sharks, tuna, billfish, and ocean sunfish.

Though other studies have been quick to call animals’ motions Lévy-like, such as an investigation of albatross travels in 1996, previous scientists didn’t have enough data to fit the motion with the mathematical pattern. Sims’ team gathered more than 12 million data points over 5,700 days. He told Science News that this research is “the strongest evidence yet that these Lévy patterns are exhibited by wild animals.”

Related content:
Discoblog: Sea Section: Shark Bites Shark & 4 Babies Pop Out
Discoblog: New Shark Has “Retractable Sex Appendage” on Its Forehead
80beats: Rare Discovery About Mysterious, Giant-Mouthed Shark: Where It Winters
80beats: Female Shark Gets Pregnant on Her Own, No Male Required
80beats: Ancient “Big Tooth” Shark Had the Mightiest Bite in History

Image: Wikimedia / Levy Flight / flickr / Jeff Kubina