I don’t know if it’s the most amazing view of a solar eruption ever recorded, but it probably is. When our friends at NASA Goddard sent us this image of the latest solar eruption today, we just couldn’t believe how astonishing and ominous it looked. More »
For all its ruthless atomic power, the Sun does some really cute things sometimes. Other than making flowers grow and tan Kate Upton’s skin, I mean. Like this pretty good impression of a lightbulb, taken by the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) C2 instrument aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). More »
For as long as we’ve bothered to care about heavenly bodies other than our own, we’ve thought that the size of the Sun varies throughout its 11-year solar cycles. Intense magnetic forces, the theory went, rendered it as malleable as a sturdy stress ball. That was a good theory, backed up by decades of data. More »
Snow blindness, arc eye, welder’s flash, bake eyes—these all describe the common effects of staring at an intensely bright light source. But what actually happens to your eyes when you try to hold a staring contest with our closest star? It’s not pleasant, that’s for sure. Here’s a look at what you shouldn’t see for yourself. More »
Tanning can be dangerous, especially if you fall asleep on the beach while soaking in some rays. These UV-sensing wristbands will let you know when you’ve had too much sun. Once you’ve had your fill, they change colors to let you know when to cover up.
The bands work through an acid-releasing agent that picks up UV light. A dye responds to pH levels in the indicator. Once you’ve reached a predetermined UV level, the bands change from yellow to pink. The Swedish company Intellego Technologies plans on releasing different sensitivity levels, because people react differently to UV exposure: some people can tolerate more while others can tolerate less. Of course, you’ll still want to use sunblock and not just rely on the wristband to protect your skin.
The wristbands are supposed to be pretty cheap when they are released, so there’s no excuse anymore for getting all red from your last excursion to the beach. They will be available starting spring 2013.
[via DVice]
Harnessing the power of the sun is a tricky business, but even the past few weeks have seen some interesting developments in the field. In this latest installment, researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California have figured out a way of making solar cells from any semiconductor, potentially reducing the cost of their production. You see, efficient solar cells require semiconductors to be chemically modified for the current they produce to flow in one direction. The process uses expensive materials and only works with a few types of semiconductors, but the team’s looking at using ones which aren’t normally suitable — the magic is to apply an electrical field to them. This field requires energy, but what’s consumed is said to be a tiny fraction of what the cell’s capable of producing when active, and it means chemical modification isn’t needed.
The concept of using a field to standardize the flow of juice isn’t a new one, but the team’s work on the geometrical structure of the cells has made it a reality, with a couple of working prototypes to satisfy the skeptics. More of these are on the way, as their focus has shifted to which semiconductors can offer the best efficiency at the lowest cost. And when the researchers have answered that question, there’s nothing left to do but get cracking on commercial production. For the full scientific explanation, hit up the links below.
Filed under: Science
Researchers make unsuitable parts work as solar cells, could lead to cheaper panels originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 11 Aug 2012 11:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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A Swedish company called Intellego Technologies is set to commercialize a special wristband, much like the kind wrapped around your wrist at concerts and music festivals, that can alert its wearer when it’s time to get out of the sun so as to avoid burning or potentially carcinogenic sun damage. More »
These days, with the heat and the rain, it always makes sense to open up a weather app before you leave home to check out what the temperature will be like. These two new apps are elegant and minimal, easy to use and best of all free.
Instead of an over-cluttered display, Weather Neue focuses on the weather predictions on your current location. There are only a few settings and there’s a cool animation while the app figures out your location and displays the weather conditions as well as a forecast. It’s available for free through the app store or for Android phones through Google Play.
Sun is another weather app, which has an even simpler display. To get Sun, you just need to navigate to this page and then select “add to my home screen”. Once you’ve done that, the app will work just like any other. The app has a couple of themes and lets you check the weather as well as the forecast for four cities. Sun, however isn’t an iOS app, and instead it’s a web app that runs in Safari. Still, it looks pretty slick, and it is free.
[via Purplelime]
NASA has shown just what it can do with the short window of science allowed by its “sounding” or sensor-equipped suborbital rockets — having taken the sharpest pictures ever of the sun’s corona. A 460-pound telescope called the High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) was lofted for about 10 minutes into space, ample time for its mirrors to capture over 150 images of the solar fringe at 16-megapixels each, before parachuting back to earth. The scope shot exclusively in a sun-friendly high ultraviolet range and used innovative new optics consisting of an array of mirrors, allowing it to resolve the sun down to 135 miles. That bested the previous champ, NASA’s own Solar Dynamics Observatory, with almost five times the magnification. For maximum effect, the space agency took advantage of an unusually high amount of solar activity to focus on a large, active sunspot. To see the results in glorious multihued HD, check the video after the break.
Filed under: Science
Visualized: Telescope aboard suborbital NASA rocket takes clearest ever images of sun (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Jul 2012 09:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The planet is hot and getting hotter. But while most plans to use geoengineering to alter the weather have been rather hypothetical, now a pair of Harvard engineers have announced that they intend to spray thousands of tons of particles into the sky to block the sun’s rays—within the coming year. More »
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