From a Discover Magazine blog:

Forget those bulky rooftop solar panels–the hot new thing in solar energy could be rooftop shingles that convert sunlight into electricity, and that blend in seamlessly with the standard asphalt shingles that top most houses. Dow Chemical has announced that it will begin selling its Powerhouse Solar Shingles in limited quantities in 2010, with a full roll-out the following year.

Yes! I’ve been waiting for this, now all I have to do is convince my friendly neighborhood HOA to modify our CCRs to allow Solar Shingles!

Spam isn’t just an annoyance, it’s an environmental menace. The carbon footprints of Vermont and Wyoming, for example, aren’t as big as the annual footprint of global spam which could power over 2 million homes for a year.

From BBC News: Spam ‘produces 17m tons of CO2′

From PopSci.com we learn of a media expert at Stanford that details the ways in which online multiplayer games can reflect and reward real-world eco-friendly behavior. The idea is to tie in your home power usage and metrics to an online game, like World of Warcraft is an example the expert touts as one vehicle to encourage people to reduce power consumption.

A scenario might be this: Within the game the user receives feedback on their home’s power consumption, let’s say that you left a bunch of lights on. If you then turn the lights off, the game detects the decrease in power and your character in the game is rewarded somehow to reinforce the eco-friendly behavior.

The concept of rewarding people for reducing power consumption is good, and I think being able to provide live feedback to consumers is also great. But the implementation details this expert gives are screwed. A WoW player, most any MMORPG or online FPS gamer for that matter, is not going to be motivated to alter their real world lifestyle to impact their online experience.

Now maybe if there was a way to tie the reduced power usage to a reduced WoW subscription fee or for free online game time, that is something I’d consider useful.

The Washington Post asks whether society is leveraging global climate models properly in their decision making process to slow or limit the warming trends. The author talks to Lenny Smith, a statistics professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science:

They can yield information on plausible risks and minimize vulnerability, although not necessarily provide totally reliable estimates of the odds. As Lenny puts it: "When I cross the street, average statistics about cars and how they are driven are of less value to me than the sound of a bus heading my way. Models help us listen for that bus."

Link to the Washington Post article

Researches from the Future Chips Constellation have developed an anti-reflective film for solar panels to take efficiency from 67% today up to 96% within a few years. The film is made of seven layers of silicon dioxide and titanium dioxide nanorods positioned at an oblique angle. These nanorods effectively bend the light down towards the next layer, each one taking its part to reduce the solar loss of ultraviolet, infrared and visible light.

Highlights from the CNN article:

• Scientists create a new coating that could make solar panels more efficient
• The coating boost sunlight-absorption rates from 67.4 to 96.21 percent
• The seven-layer, anti-reflective coating also captures sunlight from all angles
• Researchers hope to have the product on the market within two to three years