Artificial Photosynthesis As A Power Source. One drinking-water bottle could provide enough energy for an entire household in the developing world if Dan Nocera has his way.
A chemist from M.I.T. and founder of the company Sun Catalytix, Nocera has developed a cobalt-based catalyst that allows him to store energy the same way plants do: by splitting water. "Almost all the solar energy is stored in water splitting," Nocera told the inaugural ARPA-E conference on March 2. Photovoltaic Breakthrough = Better Solar Power. Enough sunlight bathes Earth's daytime half in an hour to meet all human energy needs for a year.
Sadly, there are several problems with meeting human energy demands by tapping such abundant, free solar power—not least of which is the cost of making semiconducting material that can cheaply harvest the power in sunlight. But material improvements from the California Institute of Technology and IBM might just lower the cost of solar power. Graduate student Michael Kelzenberg and other materials scientists at Caltech employed vertical crystals of silicon—microwires, like "blades of grass," Kelzenberg says—to capture as much as 85 percent of the full spectrum of incoming sunlight, the researchers report in the February 14 Nature Materials. Simple Photos Can Test Machine Conciousness. **Update: This contest ended as of September 1st, 2011 at 11:59pm ET.
Thank you for your interest. If you would like more information on this topic, take a look at Christof Koch's June 2011 article, A Test for Consciousness.