Repelight, from Compact Impact of Japan, is a 26-watt compact fluorescent “bug light” that glows gold but acts green.
With tropical mosquito-borne diseases like West Nile Virus and Dengue Fever on the rise, it makes sense to bolster your backyard bug banishers before the pesky varmints put the bite on you and your family. Now you can do just that while at the same time save bucks – and the environment – with the Repelight CFL (compact fluorescent light) energy efficient bulb.
Saving power is the green way to go these days and Panasonic is making energy conservation ever more effortless.
“Auto-eco Light-control Twin Pa” is a real mouthful but once ordered and installed, you may never need to refer to it again. That’s because this environmentally friendly ceiling lamp automatically adjusts its brightness level to light rooms evenly, no matter what time of day or night it is, regardless of outside weather conditions.
Supposedly in Japan, people often leave lights on during the day so by using this new light, average power consumption can be reduced by up to 60 percent.
Green diode indicates the light sensor is working
The lamp employs a luminance sensor that measures the brightness of an area directly below, much like an old-fashioned light meter used in better cameras. It then adjusts the lamp’s brightness from 10 to 100 percent to match a pre-set level. Adjustments are made in over 65 increments so any adjustments are barely noticeable.
Light up my life… at a regularly adjusted, optimum level.
The Auto-eco Light-control Twin Pa (memo to Panasonic: come up with a shorter name) is scheduled to be released for retail sale in Japan on March 9, 2009, and will come in 89-watt and 74-watt models priced at ¥35,000 (approx US$390) and ¥32,000 (approx US$355) respectively.
Pricey yes, but Panasonic sees a bright future for the lamp with an estimated 200,000 sales in the first year. (via Tech-On!)
Inexpensive solar cells, vastly improved medical imaging techniques and lighter and more flexible television screens are among the potential applications envisioned for organic electronics. Yes, that means that soon you could have a solar powered TV or even a solar x-ray machine at the local hospital. (Hopefuly your bill will go down with their power costs). Recent experiments conducted by Greg Scholes and Elisabetta Collini of University of Toronto’s Department of Chemistry may bring these within closer by provding more information on the way molecules absorb and move energy. These findings were published inl journal Science on January 16.
The U of T team looked specifically at conjugated polymers which are believed to be one of the most promising candidates for building efficient organic solar cells.
What exactly is a conjugated polymer anyway?
I know, it is not exactly a household name and most of us need the introduction. Conjugated polymers are very long organic molecules that possess properties like those of semiconductors and so can be used to make transistors and LEDs. When these conductive polymers absorb light, the energy moves along and among the polymer chains before it is converted to electrical charges.
“One of the biggest obstacles to organic solar cells is that it is difficult to control what happens after light is
absorbed: whether the desired property is transmitting energy, storing information or emitting light,” explains Collini. “Our experiment suggests it is possible to achieve control using quantum effects, even
under relatively normal conditions.”
“We found that the ultrafast movement of energy through and between molecules happens by a quantum-mechanical mechanism rather than through random hopping, even at room temperature,” explains Scholes. “This is extraordinary and will greatly influence future work in the field because everyone thought that these kinds of quantum effects could only operate in complex systems at very low temperatures,” he says.
This discovery opens the way to designing organic solar cells or sensors that capture light and transfer its energy much more effectively. It also has significant implications for quantum computing because it suggests that quantum information may survive significantly longer than previously believed.
These experiments consist of the use of ultrashort laser pulses to put the conjugated polymer into a quantum-mechanical state, whereby it is simultaneously in the ground (normal) state and a state where light has been absorbed. This is called a superposition state or quantum coherence. Then they used a sophisticated method involving more ultrashort laser pulses to observe whether this quantum state can migrate along or between polymer chains. It turns out that they can, to a limited extent.
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