It’s called the Plant Host Drone (PHD) and it’s a wheeled robotic plant holder that will actively seek out the sun’s rays, moving over to where it (and the plant it holds) can soak in some sunlight. The PHD was developed by Stephen Verstraete, a scupltor from Belgium, and it is designed to look like a trilobite. It moves around on a RP5 tank-tread platform, finding the areas of higher light intensity. Like a Roomba, it also has collision switches to prevent it from bashing into your walls, doors, banisters and furniture.

If you want to have a sun-seeking plant holder of your own, Verstraete has posted the schematics online and you can make your own. If you’d prefer a little more guidance, he plans on producing a DIY kit of some kind for about $32. While it would incredibly logical sense for the PHD to be solar-powered, it is just regular battery-powered at the moment. Verstraete says that he is thinking about an optional solar kit though.

[Source]

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Have you ever wanted to have your own private tropical island, but you couldn’t be bothered to buy the land? What if you want to be eco-friendly while on your sunny vacation too? Apparently, you can with this floating island.

To be fair, it’s not really an island. It’s probably more appropriate to call it an island-shaped boat that’ll work as a self-enclosed resort. Designed by Michele Puzzolante, the Solar Floating Resort (SFR) concept is large enough to accommodate six people with plenty of room to spare. There’s a Jacuzzi on deck and you can go underneath for an underwater observation room.

The biggest feature, though, is the use of a photovoltaic thin-film skin all along the round roof. These solar panels can collect sunlight throughout the day, generating enough clean electricity to power you through the night. And inside, the same photovoltaic skin is used to capture power from your artificial interior lights.

Aside from the obvious hurdles associated with manufacturing such a seafaring mobile resort, there’s one other issue: there doesn’t appear to be any closets. Where are you going to put your eco clothing? That’s not very luxurious at all.

[Source]

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I’m not entirely sure that some small solar panels are going to be able to absorb enough power to run a netbook for a substantial amount of time, but I’ll be more than happy if Samsung proves me wrong. We’ve seen solar panels as supplemental power on concept devices before, but if they can step it up even further, it’d be fantastic for places like Kenya where wall plugs aren’t exactly as accessible as you might think.

And that’s precisely where Samsung is holding a forum this week. They’re in Kenya showing off their usual array of notebooks, tablets, and other electronics for Africa, but the solar netbook is really going to be the media darling if it holds up. That sure beats the hand crank we once saw the OLPC.

Photo: Concept

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Researchers at Purdue University have successfully implemented their ultrafast laser scribing technique for thin-film solar cells, a promising innovation that may bring down production costs and boost efficiency of photovoltaics.

Solar panels have long been flat and solid, limiting their placement and usage over the years. But thin-film solar cells are rapidly gaining ground in the market, as the flexible cells can be used as rooftop shingles and tiles, building facades, or glazing on skylights.

The problem with thin film so far has been manufacturing costs and efficiency, both of which are the direct result of the “microchannels” in solar cells. The microchannels, which interconnect solar panels with one another to generate usable amounts of electricity, have traditionally been created using a mechanical stylus – a slow process that often creates imperfect, inefficient cells.

“Production costs of solar cells have been greatly reduced by making them out of thin films instead of wafers, but it is difficult to create high-quality microchannels in these thin films,” said Yung Shin, mechanical engineering professor and director of Purdue University’s Center for Laser-Based Manufacturing. “The mechanical scribing methods in commercial use do not create high-quality, well-defined channels. Although laser scribing has been studied extensively, until now we haven’t been able to precisely control lasers to accurately create the microchannels to the exacting specifications required.”

But the team’s ultrashort pulse laser and its “cold ablation” process has overcome that boundary. The laser uses pulses that only last a quadrillionth of a second, creating precise microchannels very quickly without causing enough heat to damage the film.

“It creates very clean microchannels on the surface of each layer,” said Shin. “You can do this at very high speed, meters per second, which is not possible with a mechanical scribe. This is very tricky because the laser must be precisely controlled so that it penetrates only one layer of the thin film at a time, and the layers are extremely thin. You can do that with this kind of laser because you have a very precise control of the depth, to about 10 to 20 nanometers.

“The efficiency of solar cells depends largely on how accurate your scribing of microchannels is,” added Shin. “If they are made as accurately as possibly, efficiency goes up.”

Thin-film solar cells account for about 20 per cent of watts generated in the photovoltaic market globally, and are expected to account for 31 per cent by 2013. Though, that number may rise quickly once the pulse-laser technique is refined and commercialized over the course of their study.

Their work is being funded by a three-year $425,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

[Daily Tech via Purdue]

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Something like a death ray.

And that’s exactly what Indiana resident Eric Jacqmain decided to do with $90 worth of parts, including a fibreglass satellite dish, wagon parts and 5,800 mirror tiles. The result is somewhat of an environmentally-friendly inverted disco ball of doom, designed to focus the sun’s rays to a single point capable of almost instantly vaporising metal, turning mud to magma and bursting logs into flames.

“Reflected sunlight from all 5,800 mirrors collects into a 1 cm spot with a brightness of over 5000 suns,” Jacqmain wrote in the death ray’s demo video on YouTube before slipping on protective goggles and holding up everything in arm’s reach to a fiery demise.

It may have been karma that led to the satellite’s own fiery demise in an unfortunate shed fire; Jacqmain says it was probably “suicide.” Either way, the end of the R5800 death ray in December has only paved the way for better things, as Jacqmain is working on replacing his awe-inspiring invention with a second solar death ray. Only this time, much bigger and with a total of 32,000 mirrors.

One has to wonder just what practical applications such a powerful invention could be used for. Aside from entertainment, of course.

[Eric Jacqmain via Daily Mail]

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