* Astronomy

The cost of installing and owning solar panels will fall even faster than expected according to new research.
Their tests show that 90% of existing solar panels last for 30 years, instead of the predicted 20 years.
According to the independent EU Energy Institute, this brings down the lifetime cost.

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Plastics that convert light to electricity could have a big impact
Researchers the world over are striving to develop organic solar cells that can be produced easily and inexpensively as thin films that could be widely used to generate electricity.
But a major obstacle is coaxing these carbon-based materials to reliably form the proper structure at the nanoscale (tinier than 2 millionths of an inch) to be highly efficient in converting light to electricity. The goal is to develop cells made from low-cost plastics that will transform at least 10 percent of the sunlight that they absorb into usable electricity and can be easily manufactured.

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Title: Metabolic Insertion of Nanostructured TiO2 into the Patterned Biosilica of the Diatom Pinnularia sp. by a Two-Stage Bioreactor Cultivation Process
Authors: Clayton Jeffryes, Timothy Gutu, Jun Jiao and Gregory L. Rorrer

Diatoms are single-celled algae that make silica shells or frustules with intricate nanoscale features imbedded within periodic two-dimensional pore arrays. A two-stage photobioreactor cultivation process was used to metabolically insert titanium into the patterned biosilica of the diatom Pinnularia sp. In Stage I, diatom cells were grown up on dissolved silicon until silicon starvation was achieved. In Stage II, soluble titanium and silicon were continuously fed to the silicon-starved cell suspension (4 x 10^5 cells/mL) for 10 h. The feeding rate of titanium (0.85-7.3 mol Ti L^-1 h^-1) was designed to circumvent the precipitation of titanate in the liquid medium, and feeding rate of silicon (48 mol Si L^-1 h^-1) was designed to sustain one cell division. The addition of titanium to the culture had no detrimental effects on cell growth and preserved the frustule morphology. Cofeeding of Ti and Si was required for complete intracellular uptake of Ti. The maximum bulk composition of titanium in the frustule biosilica was 2.3 g of Ti/100 g of SiO2. Intact biosilica frustules were isolated by treatment of diatom cells with SDS/EDTA and then analysed by TEM and STEM-EDS. Titanium was preferentially deposited as a nanophase lining the base of each frustule pore, with estimated local TiO2 content of nearly 80 wt %. Thermal annealing in air at 720 °C converted the biogenic titanate to anatase TiO2 with an average crystal size of 32 nm. This is the first reported study of using a living organism to controllably fabricate semiconductor TiO2 nanostructures by a bottom-up self-assembly process.

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US researchers have developed an antireflective coating that boosts the amount of sunlight captured by solar panels.
An untreated solar cell absorbs only 67.4 per cent of sunlight, reflecting away about a third of it, "unharvested" for electricity conversion.

"To get maximum efficiency when converting solar power into electricity, you want a solar panel that can absorb nearly every single photon of light, regardless of the suns position in the sky. Our new antireflective coating makes this possible" - Shawn-Yu Lin, professor of physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who led the research project.

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