Teenager Invents Cheap Solar Panel From Human Hair 366
Milan Karki, 18, who comes from a village in rural Nepal, believes he has found the solution to the developing world's energy needs. A solar panel made from human hair. The hair replaces silicon, a pricey component typically used in solar panels, and means the panels can be produced at a low cost for those with no access to power. The solar panel, which produces 9 volts (18 watts) of energy, costs around $38 US (£23) to make from raw materials. Gentlemen, start your beards. The future of hair farming is here!
It's green... (Score:2)
to get a haircut!
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It's free for the taking because as of yet there is no value to freshly cut hair (unless it's long enough to make a wig out of). Even though this article has an overwhelming stench of bullshit, if it were true and human hair became an energy source, the price of that hair would rise dramatically. "Goldilocks" would take on a whole new meaning...
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If the article isn't bullshit (and I'm not sure either way) then Goldilock's hair, lacking in melanin, would be particularily worthless. The best would be young hair from a black African.
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IF the kid's theory is correct, any black mammalian hair would do. It's the light colored stuff that wouldn't work as well.
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as the reply says, barbershops have an excess of hair that already goes to other philanthropic/charitable interests, so getting some is easier to come by than what you are almost positive of. Lets just say wig shops aren't exactly in a shortage.
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Not if they found a way to harvest the hair sweaters that some of the dudes I saw at the beach sporting.
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I'm almost positive that a pound of human hair is a hell of a lot more expensive and harder to come by than a pound of silicon.
Not true. Hair is actually already a commercial product. There is some company that makes mats out of human hair for preventing weeds from growing in your yard. They have an arrangement with barbershops in china to buy the waste hair. It wouldn't be hard to do the same for solar panels, and with almost 7 billion people on the planet, a LOT of hair is being grown daily.
-Taylor
You insensitive clods! (Score:5, Funny)
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If your just bald, then you should still be able to spare a few pubes for Mother Gaia. If you are one of the few with no hair at all, then Richard Stallman should be willing to make a donation.
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Hey Lex, I hear Superman is looking for you.
Shampoo? (Score:2)
So in future, we'll use shampoo that maximizes the energy production of our hair?
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Someone Had Too (Score:4, Funny)
Like all technology this will be hair today and gone tomarrow
*I'll be here all week folks!
Neat (Score:3, Funny)
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You can't call them "bearded ladies" any more they prefer "Italian American" now.
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Everyday (Score:3, Insightful)
The world gets a little weirder...
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Scams are older than the human species.
The world doesn't get weirder, although I wonder if it gets more gullible...
I think there is a 9V battery in that contraption, going by voltage reader.
Re:Everyday - Scams (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what I thought too.
The chances of this being both real AND viable if developed in the best labs of Japan, Germany, Korea, or the US would be slim to none.
The chances of being developed by a kid from a village with no electricity are astronomically small. (Here is where I get modded troll for showing a western bias. So be it.)
Everybody up-thread is debating ohm's law and assorted fine points while failing to notice the 800 pound gorilla looking over their shoulder. Do these people thing materials research would have missed this attribute of hair? These things are not done by chance any more like Edison tinkering in his lab and jerking whiskers out of a passing cat trying to develop a filament for a light bulb. You need a material that has certain properties, you key it into the computer and out pops all the candidates, the good, the bad, and the ridiculous, all rated on any number of scales you wish.
A little skepticism goes a long way.
Re:Everyday - Scams (Score:4, Interesting)
* Most materials haven't had any meaningful measurements made for any property that is actually interesting.
* Most measurements are crap. Many published measurements are crap. The amount of practice and control necessary to make useful measurements is outlandish.
* Published data for any but the most lavishly studied materials range wildly. What's the vapor pressure of, for example, RDX at STP. Checking the published sources, you'll find answers ranging over 6 orders of magnitude. So, ..., where does "somewhere between 1 millisquat and 1 nanosquat" fall on this sorted list?
This idea that there's a giant database of materials properties that contains accurate and precise data for all technologically interesting properties of most materials is bunk.
And then, ..., what's hair? Since when did hair become a specific material? Thick hair? Thin hair? Oily hair? Dry hair? Which property were you asking about? Is the hair split? Follicle attached? Old and dessicated? New and slightly less dessicated?
Yes, I think the claim made in the article is bunk. And I bet no one here can provide a single (real) citation to a source for the current-voltage relationship for hair.
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This doesn't seem weird to me at all. I mean, if we can use our excrement for fuel for some form of power, why not use other things from our body that we generally don't have a use for?? Sounds more like a logical step, to me.
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This doesn't seem weird to me at all. I mean, if we can use our excrement for fuel for some form of power, why not use other things from our body that we generally don't have a use for?? Sounds more like a logical step, to me.
By that logic, I should expect every part of my body to be equally useful in terms of power-generation potential. In reality, that's simply not true. I hope that this guy really has discovered a use for human hair (and presumably that of some animals) in cheap production of energy, but assuming that there's a good chance this won't be reproducible is a fairly reasonable stance to take given the history of newly "discovered" forms of energy production.
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You know you could simply attach kinetic generators to your body and power many things, yes? On average, a human can produce .2kWh, that's enough to power a 13W CFL, your iPod, your Laptop, all while walking. Maybe even enough spare power left over for a few external hard drives. You'd just need to position the devices to harness kinetic energy in the right spots, at the end of limbs, at joints.
so yes, most parts of your body (besides internal organs) can be equally useful in terms of power generation.
Or, a
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...combined with a form of fusion, the Machines had all the power they would ever need....
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Why don't people with ponytails (Score:2)
get electrocuted when they go outside?
Re:Why don't people with ponytails (Score:4, Funny)
Their dry leather sandals prevent current flow to ground and if it's damp, the decreased resistance to ground merely lets the current drain away at a safe rate.
Your homework is to determine the capacitance and inductance of RMS, and at what frequency he would resonate.
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Because this is replacing silicon, which is a semiconductor.
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Honestly, I think people who associated "short hair = manly" (after wars of XIX and first half of XX century, where shaving was an effective way of supressing diseases without access to sanitation; when millions of young, shawed pawns in hands of rulers were coming back they suddenly became hero veterans...just for being pawns) should mind their own business.
Really, I can't believe how so many woman were scammed into this "model" of manhood - one that disguises poor personal hygiene, diseases and genetic di
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Wow, did your girlfriend get woo'ed away by a Jarhead? Why so hostile to dudes with buzz cuts?
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Don't kid yourself that I'm the one being hostile; hearing from various jerks in real life that I should look like them (helping some of them disguise their defects) is a semi-regular occurence, not the other way around (unless I respond, such as in the case of my post above)
And if I would ever loose a girl I care about due to those factors...well, her loss, for deciding on a mate using factors that are statistically disadvantageous to the health of her offspring.
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1) They are a priority. A species that doesn't select for them, doesn't survive long. Where you might misunderstand me is in having the impression that I suggest health, and even healthy hair, is all that matters - nonsence, I said no such thing. I'm simply amazed at the fact that current sexual selection in western societies promotes (among other things!!!) traits that are advantegous only to small group of unhealthy males. It's against the interests of females, it's against the interests of large group of
India (Score:3, Interesting)
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Melanin as a semiconductor (Score:5, Informative)
Turns out that Melanin is a semiconductor. Here are some references:
- http://www.organicsemiconductors.com/ [organicsem...uctors.com]
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/16014151_Semiconductor_properties_of_natural_melanins [researchgate.net]
While this may not be a solution for everyone, even small scale manufacture could be enough to spur research to improvement of the technology. Maybe the wool industry should start investing in this?
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Maybe the wool industry should start investing in this?
Why? Does the world really need another non-standard use for sheep?
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Maybe the wool industry should start investing in this?
What, after centuries of trying to figure out how to get the melanin OUT of wool, you suddenly want us to put it back IN?
Has anyone managed to duplicate the results? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ridiculous! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is really ridiculous.
The pictures show a few strands of hair. A few questions come to mind:
(1) Hair is not conductive. How can hair produce electricity if it can't conduct electrons worth a darn?
(2) Hair is not polarized-- it's the same all the way through and throughout its length. How can there be any potential difference set up across something uniform?
(3) The amount of hair shown captures maybe 0.1 cm^2 of sunlight. Even if it had 100% efficiency, that would only be 1/100th of one watt. How could it be lighting up a 5-watt fluorescent lamp with that?
Everything about this story sounds major-league bogus.
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Quantitatively, hair is a very good insulator. Like many megohms per square cm. Your typical semiconductor is like ten million times better aconductor.
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No, but it will take your ticket and tell you when to board the train.
agreed (Score:2, Funny)
This experiment is totally fake...
He is either soaking the hairs in cold fusion liquid solvent to obtain a voltage or using a simple subminiature matter- antimatter induction pump to produce it. Who does this bozo think he's fooling???
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Everything about this story sounds major-league bogus.
Someone pointed out above that melanin is actually a known semi-conductor. I could easily see this kid having come up with a genuine working device, but the reporter insisting on showing the fake human-hairs-tacked-to-board thingy to play up the "oh look how clever the primitive people are they found something all your big-name scientists missed" aspect of the story.
The job of a reporter is to entertain, after all, not to inform.
So while there's a lot o
Re:Ridiculous! (Score:4, Informative)
>Someone pointed out above that melanin is actually a known semi-conductor.
Yes, and someone also said that saw palmetto cures cancer.
Just because something is a semiconductor does not mean it's like, a *semiconductor*. Horse droppings are a semiconductor.
Your typical usable-for-electronics semiconductor has an impurity level of like one part per billion. It ceases to be interesting if the impurity level get much higher than this.
Please posit how this kid has purified melanin to one part per billion, then doped it with the right miniscule proportion of carriers.
Then we can talk about semiconductors.
Can anyone duplicate this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Polar Bear Hair? (Score:3, Informative)
"Polar bear hair may be a natural fiber-optic cable. A cross section (right) shows a solid shaft surrounding a reticulated core. The shaft apparently can trap ultraviolet light and aim it toward the skin (above)."
"Grojean believes the hair shaft somehow conducts scattered radiation to the surface of the skin (which is
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My assumption is they came to 18W by measuring the power output of this much hair, guessing how much more he could add in parallel, and scaling it to 18W. Normal photovoltaics increase current by wiring the cells in parallel, so I'm guessing that's the scale-up plan (assuming it works).
Rule of thumb with the Daily Mail (Score:2, Insightful)
If the Daily Mail headline is "Could X do/cause/be Y?", the answer is almost certainly "No".
Applying math (Score:2)
Let's say sun irradiance is 1000 Watts/meter^2, which is also pretty high. And lets say the solar cell is a
Irradiance * Size of Cell * Efficiency = Wattage
1000 W/m2*.1 m2 *.1 = 10 Watts
Even in superoptimal situations, there is
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The article claims the panel is 18W, not the individual cells making up the panel. Assuming the panel is about a square meter, bright sunlight of 1000W/m/m, and 2% efficient, that works out to 20W for the panel. If the panel were made of 64 cells (8x8) then each cell would be 0.3W.
Still not sure this is possible with hair, but the numbers are reasonable for photovoltaics.
well, as Borat said..... (Score:3, Insightful)
.....We can at last import energy from kazhakistan!!!!!! [youtube.com]
Dilemmas! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like free electricity, but I really hoped to write a successful computer language some day. What to do?
A more plausible explanation (Score:2, Insightful)
Alright, so everyone's probably been right so far that stringing a few strands of hair across a grid of thumbtacks probably won't light a CFL. Here's what probably happened: the kid made a device and showed that it can collect sunlight. Using a few rudimentary calculations, he scaled up his results to show that a working model with about a pound of hair would give something on the order of 18 watts of power (in full sunlight). The Daily Mail pounced on it because they don't know any better. And voila!
I think (Score:5, Funny)
this article was either posted 161 days too late, or 204 days too early. Not certain which.
Slapheads (Score:2)
So the old joke about a bald spot being a solar panel for a sex machine was completely wrong.
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I don't think the original article suggests they are the same, although it does seem surprising if this thing can produce 2A.
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I don't think the original article suggests they are the same, although it does seem surprising if this thing can produce 2A.
If it produces 9V, I would not be the least surprised if it puts out 2A across 4.5 Ohms resistance.
Re:9V != 18W (Score:5, Informative)
The same principle applies to any other non-ideal voltage source. A solar panel that produces 9V open circuit or at some low current is not necessarily able to produce 9V at 2A.
Re:9V != 18W (Score:5, Insightful)
The conductivity of hair is very low. I know this because I have inadvertently applied 600 V between 3/4" of hair and my (thankfully dry and unsweaty) skull, yet I live to type about it. The possibility of a hair solar cell is, in my oh-so-humble opinion, exceedingly unlikely.
However, I was [for once] inspired to RTFA.
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Did it every occur to you that the CFL was there to illustrate the solar panel producing 9V?
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Oops. I saw two different photos. One is using a voltmeter while the panel is illuminated by a CFL and the other is the one with him standing holding a CFL.
Re:9V != 18W (Score:4, Informative)
he solar panel, which produces 9 volts (18 watts) of energy, costs around $38 US (£23) to make from raw materials.
That is raging bullshit.
9V at 18 watts = 2 AMPS at 9 volts. The teenager is lying, the summary is lying, or whole thing is fake.
so this kid stumbled upon a cheap system that is 900X more efficient than the best Solar panels made by industry? either that or his solar panel is 30 feet long by 2 feet wide.
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The 'active ingredient' is the melanin in hair. The catch is, this degrades over the period of a few months, not a few years. This is the reason why the price can be so low - there's a hidden 'cost' in lifespan.
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From TFA:
Half a kilo of hair can be bought for only 16p in Nepal and lasts a few months, whereas a pack of batteries would cost 50p and last a few nights.
So, no it's not a hidden cost, it's just cheaper than the existing costs.
Re:9V != 18W (Score:4, Funny)
Only breathing every two months?
God man, i can barely last 2 minutes...
Well, here i go... huuuuuuuuuuuup
Re:9V != 18W (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure how you've worked that out. At a fairly optimistic 10% efficiency, I reckon he would need about a fifth of a square meter to output 18W, given that sunlight has an energy density of 1kW/m^2, give or take. That roughly matches area of the device he's shown holding. A 30ftx2ft similar panel would have roughly 600W output.
This doesn't mean it's not bullshit, naturally; it just means that the numbers *could* add up.
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It is barely possible that he kluged up something that puts out 9 volts into the extremely high impedence of a digital voltmeter. The rest is bullshit, perhaps originated by the same doofus who thinks that a watt is a unit of energy.
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No, an Amp is NOT an energy value. It is Coulombs per second. No Joules.
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He's from Nepal.
Why do you think those Injuns were always scalpin people?
I watched Inglorious Basterds last night. Beautiful movie.
Maybe they needed solar power for their radios?
Too bad scalpin isn't a renewable source of energy.
Re:9V != 18W (Score:4, Funny)
This is nothing. I once created the Ultimate Pleasure Device from 2 bottles of cheap wine, 10 ounces of ground beef (lean) and and a 12" piece of PVC tubing.
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Interesting.
How much to subscribe to your newsletter???
Re:9V != 18W (Score:5, Funny)
But what did you do with the other 9" of the PVC tubing?
-
Re:9V != 18W (Score:4, Interesting)
True, this is false.
There's a picture of a multimeter, and a lighted bulb, but the panel shown is IN THE DARK! Unless it's on a totally different panel that is in the sun, it's way fake. And, as pointed out, 9volts is trivial, but 18 watts is actually really hard.
Also, the reporter is not energy-literate, but that's not a surprise.
I once showed an artist a calculator running on a lemon battery. Not knowing about CURRENT and POWER, she then went and proposed a project to a museum where a classic Gameboy would run on lemons, and they accepted it. Of course this would take a few thousand lemons! Luckily, it was an art museum, not a science museum. We ended up hiding double-A's inside some of the lemons. (We came clean to anyone smart enough to ask!)
I suspect similar shenanigans...
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True, this is false.
There's a picture of a multimeter, and a lighted bulb, but the panel shown is IN THE DARK! Unless it's on a totally different panel that is in the sun, it's way fake. And, as pointed out, 9volts is trivial, but 18 watts is actually really hard.
Also, the reporter is not energy-literate, but that's not a surprise.
I once showed an artist a calculator running on a lemon battery. Not knowing about CURRENT and POWER, she then went and proposed a project to a museum where a classic Gameboy would run on lemons, and they accepted it. Of course this would take a few thousand lemons! Luckily, it was an art museum, not a science museum. We ended up hiding double-A's inside some of the lemons. (We came clean to anyone smart enough to ask!)
I suspect similar shenanigans...
The REAL question is... did you get some?
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Before just debunking something based on opinion, would you care to clarify how you think this is fake...?
It was reviewed by peers (engineers none the less) within that field, and has shown some promise.
The calculs might be off a bit, however, I think the overall concept seems more plausible then you let on...
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How do you figure? A 1200mA solar panel is fairly common:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=1200mA+solar+panel [google.ca]
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Voltage is not the same as power.
That doesn't appear to be the only glaring mistake in this article:
Milan, whose hero is the inventor Thomas Eddison, [...]
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Voltage is not the same as power.
Umm, yes it is. What's next, are you going to say you can borrow yourself out of debt?
Voltage is electromotive potential. It measures a sort of pressure that occurs on electric charge. Current is measured in amps and measures the flow of charge itself. You can't have power (watts) without current. So, no, voltage is not the same as power.
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I see that heroine is still a hell of a drug.
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There's no getting around Ohm's law...
Ha! I see that the Electric Police Force (aka The Faraday Fuzz) aren't nearly as corruptible as they around around here. A Benjamin or two to grease the wheels of Electric Justice, and they'll turn a blind eye to just about anything.
Hell, the other day I was running 100A through a 1k ohm load off a 9V battery, and my local Electric Police Officer just gave me a knowing smile and a tip of the hat before carrying on his merry way.
I heard down in Mexico you can do pret
Re:And I just shaved my head!!! (Score:4, Funny)
I got drunk with my Dad and Uncle last week and we shaved our heads, now everywhere I look someone is rubbing in the fact I don't have hair anymore!!!! Like OMG!!!
So, how's life in your trailer park?
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It's an incomplete story. What we need to know to evaluate cost is A. life expectancy, and B. W/m^2. A solar panel that produces the same wattage for a price comparable to some of the higher density solar panels (IIRC) is cool if it lasts at least as long and has similar density. Otherwise, the replacement costs or the shipping costs and installation footprint make it more expensive, respectively.
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The article mentions that the cell lasts only a few months, after which it is "easily replaced". Crystalline solar panels can last over 30 years. Combine this with my skepticism that his cell can make 18W (may be it's 18mW? :) and you have one rotting deal.
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Unless the energy density is a huge win, at $2 per watt and lasting only a few months, that's pretty uninteresting, particularly when you consider that silicon is the second most abundant elements in the earth's crust. If it's pricey, there's something very wrong. I can pick up a handful of the dioxide form for free just a few blocks from here. Of course, there are usually cigarette butts and shell fragments in it....
Now if they were replacing germanium, selenium, gallium or indium arsenide, or some of t
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> And for crying out loud I WANT SOLAR POWER.
Then get off your ass and create it. Or shut up.
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Careful you don't nick the plastic with the razor or all of the air will escape.