Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: solar power

Unlocking defect-free graphene electrodes for transparent electronics

Transparent electrodes transmit light while conducting electricity and are increasingly important in bioelectronic and optoelectronic devices. Their combination of high optical transparency, low electrical resistance, and mechanical flexibility makes them well suited for applications such as displays, solar cells, and wearable or implantable technologies.

In a significant advancement, researchers led by Professor Wonsuk Jung at Chungnam National University in the Republic of Korea have introduced a new fabrication technique called one-step free patterning of graphene, or OFP-G, which enables high-resolution patterning of large-area monolayer graphene with feature sizes smaller than 5 micrometers, without the use of photoresists or chemical etching.

Published Microsystems & Nanoengineering, the method addresses a key limitation of conventional microelectrode fabrication, where lithographic processes often damage graphene and degrade its electrical performance.

Powering AI from space, at scale, with a passive tether design

Penn Engineers have developed a novel design for solar-powered data centers that will orbit Earth and could realistically scale to meet the growing demand for AI computing while reducing the environmental impact of data centers.

Reminiscent of a leafy plant, with multiple, hardware-containing stems connected to branching, leaf-like solar panels, the design leverages decades of research on “tethers,” rope-like cables that naturally orient themselves under the competing forces of gravity and centrifugal motion. This architecture could scale to the thousands of computing nodes needed to replicate the power of terrestrial data centers, at least for AI inference, the process of querying tools like ChatGPT after their training concludes.

Unlike prior designs, which typically require constant adjustments to keep solar panels pointed toward the sun, the new system is largely passive, its orientation maintained by natural forces acting on objects in orbit. By relying on these stabilizing effects, the design reduces weight, power consumption, and overall complexity, making large-scale deployment more feasible.

Molecular seal strengthens perovskite solar cells, while pushing efficiency to 26.6%

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are known for their impressive ability to convert sunlight into energy, their low production costs and their lightweight design. They may well be the rising stars of renewable energy, but they are not yet as common as traditional solar panels. PSCs are also notoriously fragile and can break when heated during manufacturing.

But these problems could soon be a thing of the past. For their study published in the journal Science, a team from Xi’an Jiaotong University in China has developed a new method that protects the cells from damage during fabrication.

Physicists eye emerging technology for solar cells in outer space

Solar cells face significant challenges when deployed in outer space, where extremes in the environment decrease the efficiency and longevity they enjoy back on Earth. University of Toledo physicists are taking on these challenges at the Wright Center for Photovoltaics Innovation and Commercialization, in line with a large-scale research project supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory.

One recent advancement pertains to an emerging technology that utilizes antimony compounds as light-absorbing semiconductors. A group of UToledo faculty and students recently published a first-of-its-kind assessment exploring the promising characteristics of these antimony chalcogenide-based solar cells for space applications in the journal Solar RRL, which highlighted the work on its front cover.

“Antimony chalcogenide solar cells exhibit superior radiation robustness compared to the conventional technologies we’re deploying in space,” said Alisha Adhikari, a doctoral student in physics who co-led the team of undergraduate, graduate and faculty researchers at UToledo. “But they’ll need to become much more efficient before they become a competitive alternative for future space missions.”

Reentry and disintegration dynamics of space debris tracked using seismic data

Therefore, there is a pressing need to develop tools that can be used to determine the trajectory, size, nature, and potential impact locations of reentering debris in near real time. This is a critical step toward mobilizing appropriate response operations (7). In this work, we have demonstrated that open-source seismic data are capable of fulfilling this requirement.

Past work has demonstrated the sensitivity of seismometers to reentry-generated shockwaves and explosions of natural meteoroids [for example, (8–10)]. However, the trajectories, speeds, and fragmentation chains of artificial spacecraft falling from orbit are distinct from those of natural objects entering from beyond the Earth‒Moon system. This means that the patterns of debris fallout that artificial spacecraft produce are also potentially more complex; for example, some components such as fuel tanks are structurally reinforced and hence more likely to survive and impact the ground, whereas others (such as solar panels) are deliberately designed to demise during reentry. Therefore, techniques used for natural objects require modification.

Elon Musk Holds Surprise Talk At The World Economic Forum In Davos

The musk blueprint: navigating the supersonic tsunami to hyperabundance when exponential curves multiply: understanding the triple acceleration.

On January 22, 2026, Elon Musk sat down with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the World Economic Forum in Davos and delivered what may be the most important articulation of humanity’s near-term trajectory since the invention of the internet.

Not because Musk said anything fundamentally new—his companies have been demonstrating this reality for years—but because he connected the dots in a way that makes the path to hyperabundance undeniable.

[Watch Elon Musk’s full WEF interview]

This is not visionary speculation.

This is engineering analysis from someone building the physical infrastructure of abundance in real-time.

Continue reading “Elon Musk Holds Surprise Talk At The World Economic Forum In Davos” | >

Forget solar panels in summer: Here’s why winter Is the best time to switch your home to solar

Regardless of which U.S. state you live in, we can all agree that electricity in the U.S. is quite expensive. Of course, prices may vary depending on where you live, but in general, investing in clean energy has never been more desirable than it is now. But with so many options to choose from, when are solar panels, for example, your best option? Well, if you live in a region with colder weather, your best option may be to invest in solar energy, as a PV expert believes that solar panels are more efficient in cold weather.

Investing in clean energy: Your options

The majority of Americans most likely got quite the fright when they opened their last utility bill, and things may not look up just yet this month. Beyond the fact that one’s heating and thus electricity bill skyrockets during the winter due to increased usage, other factors also play a significant role in driving up electricity prices.

Overcoming symmetry limits in photovoltaics through surface engineering

A recent study carried out by researchers from EHU, the Materials Physics Center, nanoGUNE, and DIPC introduces a novel approach to solar energy conversion and spintronics. The work tackles a long-standing limitation in the bulk photovoltaic effect—the need for non-centrosymmetric crystals—by demonstrating that even perfectly symmetric materials can generate significant photocurrents through engineered surface electronic states. This discovery opens new pathways for designing efficient light-to-electricity conversion systems and ultrafast spintronic devices.

The work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Conventional solar cells rely on carefully engineered interfaces, such as p–n junctions, to turn light into electricity. A more exotic mechanism—the bulk photovoltaic effect —can generate electrical current directly in a material without such junctions, but only if its crystal structure lacks inversion symmetry. This strict requirement has long restricted the search for practical materials.

Quantum simulator reveals how vibrations steer energy flow in molecules

Researchers led by Rice University’s Guido Pagano used a specialized quantum device to simulate a vibrating molecule and track how energy moves within it. The work, published Dec. 5 in Nature Communications, could improve understanding of basic mechanisms behind phenomena such as photosynthesis and solar energy conversion.

The researchers modeled a simple two-site molecule with one part supplying energy and the other receiving it, both shaped by vibrations and their environment. By tuning the system, they could directly observe energy moving from donor to acceptor and study how vibrations and energy loss influence that transfer, providing a controlled way to test theories of energy flow in complex materials.

“We can now observe how energy moves in a synthetic molecule while independently adjusting each variable to see what truly matters,” said Pagano, assistant professor of physics and astronomy.

/* */