Lourful 'solar glass' means entire buildings can generate clean power | Environment. A solar power company capable of "printing" colourful glass that can generate electricity from the sun's energy announced a £2m funding boost on Tuesday. Oxford Photovoltaics, a spin-off from the University of Oxford, said the investment from clean-tech investors MTI Partners will help its solar glass, which can be dyed almost any colour, take a step closer to the commercial market. "What we say here is rather than attach [solar] photovoltaics to the building, why not make the building the photovoltaics?
" Kevin Arthur, the company's founder and CEO, told the Guardian. "If you decide to build a building out of glass, then you've already decided to pay for the glass. If you add this, you're adding a very small extra cost. [The solar cell treatment] costs no more than 10% of the cost of the facade. " These generally cost between £600 and £1,000 per square metre, meaning the new cell treatment wouild cost just £60-£100 extra per square metre. YouTube. A day in the life of a physics student. Exoplanet Transit - Deep Sky Videos. The University of Sheffield - The Edge of Space project 2011. Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sheffield - student profile. Physicists urge caution over apparent speed of light violation | Science. Scientists around the world reacted with shock yesterday to results from an Italian laboratory that seemed to show certain subatomic particles can travel faster than light.
If true, the finding breaks one of the most fundamental laws of physics and raises bizarre possibilities including time travel and shortcuts via hidden extra dimensions. Scientists at the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment in Gran Sasso, Italy, found that neutrinos sent through the Earth to its detectors from Cern, 450 miles (730km) away in Geneva, arrived earlier than they should have. The journey would take a beam of light around 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after running the Opera experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 neutrinos, the scientists have calculated the particles arrived at Gran Sasso 60 billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second.
What has been discovered? What are neutrinos? New material to combat counterfeit banknotes. 19 May 2011Last updated at 14:01 These banknotes show how coloured polymer materials can be used as anti-counterfeit measures Scientists have developed a material which mimics the rainbow effect of butterfly wings to help the fight against counterfeit money. The intensely-coloured polymers are difficult to copy, researchers at the universities of Hull and Sheffield say. They do not use pigments but exhibit intense colour due to their structure, similar to the way nature does on beetle shells and butterfly wings. The colour also changes depending on the viewing angle. Scientists believe the new system could have advantages in terms of cost, processing and colour selection compared with existing systems. The complexity of the chemistry involved in making the polymers means they are very difficult for fraudsters to copy, making them ideally suited for use on passports or banknotes. 'Funky-coloured' This helped them understand how the colours were formed, and how to improve the appearance.
Tim's 24 hour Children In Need Science-a-thon. Twitter. BBC Radio 4 Programmes - Material World, 12/08/2010. BBC - Nick Clegg officially opens Sheffield Solar Farm. A new solar farm has been officially opened in Sheffield by Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg. It's one of dozens of renewable energy projects springing up around South Yorkshire.
Solar panels, wind turbines, even water power are making an appearance as individuals and organisations try to save money and save the planet. Sheffield Solar Farm is an array of 70m² photovoltaic panels on the roof of the University of Sheffield's Hicks Building on Hounsfield Road. Photovoltaic panels (PV panels) take energy from the sun and convert it into electricity. The ones at Sheffield Solar Farm provide electricity to the building itself and to the National Grid. The solar array is also being used to test new and experimental designs. In the University's Department of Physics and Astronomy, work is underway to develop new generations of solar cells using plastic as opposed to silicon which will make them cheaper. Hot water comes from photovoltaic panels placed on the roof.
Opposition Community energy. Welcome - Microgen Database. Sheffield Solar Farm | Solar power research and application in the UK. Astronomers detect 'monster star' By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News They are among the true monsters of space - colossal stars whose size and brightness go well beyond what many scientists thought was even possible. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote Planets take longer to form than these stars take to live and die” End QuoteProf Paul CrowtherSheffield University, UK One of the objects, known simply as R136a1, is the most massive ever found. The star is seen to have a mass about 265 times that of our own Sun; but the latest modelling work suggests at birth it could have been bigger, still. Perhaps as much as 320 times that of the Sun, says Professor Paul Crowther from Sheffield University, UK.
"If it replaced the Sun in our Solar System, it would outshine [it] by as much as the Sun currently outshines the full Moon," the astronomer told BBC News. R136, a cluster of young, massive and hot stars (ESO). NGC 3603 is relatively close in cosmic terms - just 22,000 light-years distant. 'Farthest' star-mass black hole. An artist's impression of the black hole pulling gas off its companion Astronomers have spied a star-sized black hole much further away than any such object previously known. It has a mass 20 times that of our Sun and is sited six million light-years away in the galaxy NGC 300. The discovery was made using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) facility on Mount Paranal in Chile.
The scientists' data indicates the object has a huge companion star that will, most probably, end its days as a black hole, too. "In the time it's taken for the light to reach us from this galaxy, the companion star will have blown up in a supernova to produce its own black hole," said Professor Paul Crowther, from Sheffield University, UK, and the lead author of the scientific paper reporting the discovery. "If you could instantly teleport yourself to that system right now, you'd presumable find a pair of black holes spiralling around each other," he told BBC News. Black holes tend to come in two sizes. Themes : The University of Sheffield - Knowledge Transfer Account.