As new CEO, Larry Page is under pressure to deliver something big. Recently, Malcolm Gladwell argued (in his typically contrarian fashion) that the Internet "search solves problems that aren't really problems":
Can we make a better Google or Bing? Yeah; sure we can. But it solves a problem that isn't really a problem. You cannot point to any area of intellectual activity or innovation that is today being compromised or hamstrung by their lack of access to search technology. Can we honestly go to some scientist to say that the reason you haven't cured cancer is because you don't have access to some information about cancer research? No!
There isn't a problem that's any bigger or more real than generating renewable energy and bringing it to market. If Google can find big ways in just the next few years to solve only a part of that puzzle, turning Google's energy wing into a business remotely as robust as its search and software core, then Page will have delivered something big indeed.
Previous attempts to use the nanotubes, however, had been thwarted by two problems. First, the making of carbon nanotubes generally produces a mix of two types, some of which act as semiconductors (sometimes allowing an electric current to flow, sometimes not) or metals (which act like wires, allowing current to flow easily). The new research, for the first time, showed that the effects of these two types tend to be different, because the semiconducting nanotubes can enhance the performance of solar cells, but the metallic ones have the opposite effect. Second, nanotubes tend to clump together, which reduces their effectiveness.
And that’s where viruses come to the rescue. Graduate students Xiangnan Dang and Hyunjung Yi — working with Angela Belcher, the W. M. Keck Professor of Energy, and several other researchers — found that a genetically engineered version of a virus called M13, which normally infects bacteria, can be used to control the arrangement of the nanotubes on a surface, keeping the tubes separate so they can’t short out the circuits, and keeping the tubes apart so they don’t clump.
(...) In their tests, adding the virus-built structures enhanced the power conversion efficiency to 10.6 percent from 8 percent — almost a one-third improvement.A dramatic and surprising magnetic effect of light discovered by University of Michigan researchers could lead to solar power without traditional semiconductor-based solar cells.
The researchers found a way to make an "optical battery," said Stephen Rand, a professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Physics and Applied Physics."This could lead to a new kind of solar cell without semiconductors and without absorption to produce charge separation," Rand said. "In solar cells, the light goes into a material, gets absorbed and creates heat. Here, we expect to have a very low heat load. Instead of the light being absorbed, energy is stored in the magnetic moment. Intense magnetization can be induced by intense light and then it is ultimately capable of providing a capacitive power source."
