Gizmorama - December 15, 2014

Good Morning,

Solar power efficiency has now set a world record thanks to researchers in Australia. Learn about this noteworthy conversion rate and what this could mean for the future of renewable energy.

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Researchers in Australia set world record for solar efficiency with 40 percent conversion --*
SYDNEY (UPI) - Researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia have set a world record for solar efficiency by converting over 40 percent of the sunlight that hit their solar panel system into electricity.

They conducted tests outdoors in Sydney, and their results were confirmed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL) facility in the United States.

"This is the highest efficiency ever reported for sunlight conversion into electricity," UNSW Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP) Professor Martin Green said.

They used readily available commercial solar cells and used filters that reflect certain wavelengths of light and transmit others, which makes it so more sunlight that would usually be wasted is now converted into energy.

An Australian company named RayGen Resources is currently developing towers that can take advantage of this achievement.

"The new results are based on the use of focused sunlight, and are particularly relevant to photovoltaic power towers being developed in Australia," Professor Green said.

A paper explaining the research will soon be published in the journal Progress in Photovoltaics.


*-- NASA: Asteroid 2014 UR116 nothing to worry about --*
WASHINGTON (UPI) - NASA issued a statement Monday insisting that newly identified asteroid 2014 UR116 isn't an immediate threat to Earth. In the wake of the asteroid's discovery, ominous new reports (mostly from Russian media sources) suggested the mountain-sized rock could potentially collide with Earth during one of its triennial flybys.

"While this approximately 400-meter sized asteroid has a three year orbital period around the sun and returns to the Earth's neighborhood periodically, it does not represent a threat because its orbital path does not pass sufficiently close to the Earth's orbit," NASA officials wrote in their released statement.

According to NASA, Tim Spahr, the director of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, used data collected from an Near Earth Object with a similar orbit to project UR116's future trajectory. His number crunching confirmed the false alarm.

"These computations rule out this object as an impact threat to Earth (or any other planet) for at least the next 150 years," officials with NASA' Near Earth Object (NEO) Program concluded.

Last week, a group of scientists and citizen-astronomers -- including former Queen guitarist Brain May, who has a PhD in astrophysics -- encouraged a stronger push for experimental asteroid-location and deflection technologies.

"Nasa has done a very good job of finding the very largest objects, the ones that would destroy the human race," Ed Lu, a former astronaut who thrice crewed the International Space Station, told the Financial Times. "It's the ones that would destroy a city or hit the economy for a couple of hundred years that are the problem."

NASA isn't completely ignoring the warnings from these vocal scientists. It is currently hosting a competition for crowd-sourced asteroid detection algorithms, and it has entertained some ideas on how to potentially deflect an asteroid on a collision course with planet Earth.

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