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Automating Solar PV Installation With Alion Energy's Robots
Alion Energy has officially transformed from its origins in thin-film manufacturing, to now offering a way to significantly streamline utility-scale solar plant construction, using robots.
Germany Energy Storage Incentive Could Push PV Market Further
As more and more solar is installed and some countries, like Germany, are seeing consumers get an increasing amount of their electricity from intermittent sources, grid storage and batteries are sure to be hot topics at this yearâ€™s Intersolar Europe in Munich. Tobias Rothacher, senior manager of renewable energies at Germany Trade and Invest, will
Are Solar Utilities Obsolete?
Are traditional solar photovoltaic (PV) financing models dead? Are solar utilities dinosaurs, about to become extinct? For utilities, says Dirk Morbitzer, general manager of analysis firm Renewable Analytics, â€œthe old times are gone. Utilities must embrace renewables or suffer the consequences.â€
Residential Solar Projects Insured for Success
Demand for solar residential systems is at an all time high. In 2013, residential solar photovoltaic (PV) installations are expected to grow by 40 percent due to lower pricing and alternative solar financing options, according to the U.S. Solar Market Insight: Year-in-Review 2012 research report conducted by Solar Energy Industries and GTM Research.
Japan: Solar's Real Deal?
Japan's solar market is soaring. Spurred by a generous incentive, developers are announcing mega-scale projects, investors are closing deals and manufacturers are placing orders. The nation is fast becoming the industry champion of 2013.

The Econimist: Science & Technology

Lifts and skyscrapers: The other mile-high club

WHEN Elisha Otis stood on a platform at the 1854 World Fair in New York and ordered an axeman to cut the rope used to hoist him aloft, he changed cityscapes for ever. To the amazement of the crowd his new safety lift dropped only a few inches before being held by an automatic braking system. This gave people the confidence to use what Americans insist on calling elevators. That confidence allowed buildings to rise higher and higher.They could soon go higher still, as a result of another breakthrough in lift technology. This week Kone, a Finnish liftmaker, announced that after a decade of development at its laboratory in Lohja, which sits above a 333-metre-deep mineshaft which the firm uses as a test bed, it has devised a system that should be able to raise an elevator a kilometre (3,300 feet) or more. This is twice as far as the things can go at present. Since the effectiveness of lifts is one of the main constraints on the height of buildings, Koneâ€™s technologyâ€”which replaces the steel cables from which lift cars are currently suspended with ones made of carbon fibresâ€”could result in buildings truly worthy of the name â€œskyscraperâ€.The problem with steel cables (or â€œ...
Animal behaviour: Planet of the apes
Extrovert? Moi?
HUMAN personalities, it is widely agreed by psychologists, can be measured along five dimensions: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience. One person may be more extrovert than another, less agreeable, more conscientious and so on, and to an extent how well two people will get on can be predicted from how their personalities mesh.People who donâ€™t get on, though, have the option of avoiding each other. That is not true of animals in zoos. But they too have personalities. So, to prevent trouble between members of one speciesâ€”the chimpanzeeâ€”Hani Freeman of Lincoln Park Zoo, in Chicago, has developed a way of assessing those personalities. In doing so, she sheds an intriguing light not only on chimpanzee psychology, but also on the mental evolution of Homo sapiens.As they report in the American Journal of Primatology, Dr Freeman and her colleagues started by surveying the existing literature on chimpanzee behaviour. This search threw up 55 terms, ranging from bold and jealous to stingy and sexual, that previous investigators had applied...
Modelling tsunamis: The dangers of insularity
Death is now my neighbour
SURFERS shun beaches shielded by islands off the coast. That, as generations of swarthy, golden-haired hulks will tell you, is because such islands create a natural breakwater. This dampens waves and makes for a boringly calm surf best left to sunbathers. The surfersâ€™ reasoning is sound for the short-wave, wind-generated swells that they ride. But Themistoklis Stefanakis, of the Ecole Normale SupÃ©rieure in Cachan, France, warns it may not be true for the longer wavelengths of tsunamis. As he and his colleagues show in a paper posted on arXiv, an online repository, littoral islands may actually exacerbate, rather than diminish, the effects of these waves.Anecdotal evidence for this counterintuitive assertion comes from (mercifully rare) episodes where the same tsunami has battered different types of coastal topography. In 2010, for instance, when one hit the Mentawai islands in Indonesia, areas of coastline directly behind islets bore the brunt of the damage, according to Costas Synolakis, a tsunami expert at the University of Southern California who is one of the studyâ€™s co-authors.Dr...
AIDS in India: The cost of living
LIFE is priceless to those who possess it. Policymakers, though, must take a more hard-headed approach. That is particularlyâ€”if unfairlyâ€”true in poorer parts of the world. It is important for the authorities to understand the cost-effectiveness of a health programme, so that its value can be compared with that of other claims on the public purse.How to go about doing this is illustrated by a paper published in the Public Library of Science by Kartik Venkatesh of Brown University and Jessica Becker of Yale. Dr Venkatesh and Dr Becker asked themselves if it would be a good idea for the government of India to try, at regular intervals, to test the countryâ€™s population for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, in order to treat those who unknowingly harbour it. The short answer is that, if it were feasible, it would be.Though HIV in India has not turned into the widespread epidemic some experts feared it would a few years ago, it is reckoned to affect about 2.4m people, many of whom do not realise they are infected. If they were identified, these people could be given antiretroviral drugs to stop the symptoms of AIDS developing. That would also have the bonus of reducing the chance of their passing the virus on.The calculations made by Dr Venkatesh and Dr Becker rely on a model developed by the World Health Organisation and already in use in America, France,...
Cancer therapy: Checkpoint Charlie

THE lexicon of oncology is filled with military metaphors: the war on cancer, aggressive tumours, magic bullets. And although these are indeed only metaphors, they do reflect an underlying attitudeâ€”that it is the clinicianâ€™s job to attack and destroy his patientâ€™s tumour directly, with whatever weapons are to hand. As in real warfare, those weapons may be conventional (surgery), chemical (cancer-killing drugs) or nuclear (radiation therapy). There is even talk of biological agents, in the form of viruses specifically tailored to seek out and eliminate their tumorous targets.Which is all well and good as strategies go. But as Sun Tzu observed, the wisest general is not one who wins one hundred victories in one hundred battles, but rather one who overcomes the armies of his enemies without having to fight them himself. And one way to do that is to get someone else to do your fighting for you.That, in an oncological context, is where immunotherapy comes in. Instead of attacking cancer directly, immunotherapy recruits a patientâ€™s immune system to do the attacking. The latest way of doing so is by removing the controls which keep the immune system in check during times of...