Learn how human hair can improve solar panels and why people tend to add, not subtract, when trying to improve something. Scientists are using human hair to make carbon nanodots for displays & solar panels by Grant Currin Carbon dots from human hair boost solar cells. (2021). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-04/quot-cdf040721.php Pham, N. D., Singh, A., Chen, W., Hoang, M. T., Yang, Y., Wang, X., Wolff, A., Wen, X., Jia, B., Sonar, P., & Wang, H. (2021). Self-assembled carbon dot-wrapped perovskites enable light trapping and defect passivation for efficient and stable perovskite solar cells. Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 9(12), 7508–7521. https://doi.org/10.1039/d1ta00036e Lim, S. Y., Shen, W., & Gao, Z. (2015). Carbon quantum dots and their applications. Chemical Society Reviews, 44(1), 362–381. https://doi.org/10.1039/c4cs00269e Additional resources from Leidy Klotz: Pick up "Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less" on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3ePsfzf Nature study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03380-y Website: https://www.leidyklotz.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Leidyklotz Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free!
Learn how human hair can improve solar panels and why people tend to add, not subtract, when trying to improve something.
Scientists are using human hair to make carbon nanodots for displays & solar panels by Grant Currin
Additional resources from Leidy Klotz:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free!
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-we-always-forget-that-less-is-more-w-leidy-klotz
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how scientists are using human hair to make better solar panels. Then, you’ll learn why people tend to add rather than subtract when they want to improve something, with help from university professor and author Leidy [LIE-dee] Klotz.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Customers at a barbershop in Brisbane [Briz-bin], Australia, have helped scientists inch a bit closer to a carbon-free future. Researchers have turned their hair into carbon dots that improve the performance of cutting-edge solar panels.
Perovskite solar panels are a new kind of solar panel that researchers have been developing for about a decade. They’re potentially cheaper than silicon panels, and they’re flexible. More importantly, they gobble up solar energy like nobody’s business.
Researchers are pretty sure that perovskites are going to play a big role in the future of electricity. But if they’re going to power the world, they have to be easy to make and last a long time.
That’s where the hair comes in. It turns out that burning human hair at roughly the maximum temperature of a typical home oven produces things called carbon nanodots. These are particles 1,000 times smaller than a red blood cell that can conduct electricity and emit light, which makes them handy when it comes to things like biomedical imaging and chemical analysis.
Scientists have known about carbon nanodots for about 15 years. But it was just last year that other researchers first made them out of human hair.
The researchers behind this new breakthrough had previously used other nano-scale carbon materials to improve the performance of solar panels, and so they tried adding a solution of nanodots during the manufacture of perovskite solar cells in the lab.
The carbon dots spontaneously surrounded the perovskite crystals, forming what one of the researchers described as “armor.” The dots seem to help keep the sensitive crystals dry and protect them from other environmental variables.
Even better, panels with the dots were more efficient and more stable than regular old perovskite panels. They also performed better for longer, though it’s difficult to test longevity over the decades that experts hope these panels will keep working.
This finding may get us one step closer to greener electricity here on Earth, but the researchers have high-flying plans for their hairy innovation. The International Space Station is currently powered by 4 huge solar panel arrays. Those silicon solar panels are working just fine right now, but when they need replacing, perovskite might be a great solution. One big reason is that the new material is a lot lighter, which is a big deal when it comes from, you know, escaping Earth’s gravity.
But there’s one problem: those panels go through a lot of abuse. We’re talking extreme levels of radiation and humongous temperature swings. Perovskite solar panels aren’t up to the job quite yet, but carbon nanodots might make the difference.
If that happens, we’re gonna need a lot more hair.
They say that less is more. But when you need to improve something, your first thought is probably to add something new. Whether it's clothes in our closets, events in our calendars, or ingredients in a dish, it turns out that we have a systematic tendency to overlook the possibility that removing something could make it better. That's according to a study that was published in Nature last month. And today, a researcher behind that study is going to tell us how his team came to this conclusion, and what might be causing it. Leidy [LIE-dee] Klotz is a professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. Leidy says he first noticed this tendency when he was building a LEGO bridge with his son. It was lopsided, so he turned around to get more bricks to prop it up. But by the time he'd turned back, his son had taken a few blocks away and the bridge was level. That led him to design a study to see if this tendency to add instead of subtract was universal. Here's how that went down.
[CLIP 6:04]
CODY DROP: I'd love to hear any tips you can give a regular person to implement some of these ideas. Do you have a top one or two?
---
You heard him: next time you're trying to make something better, see if there's something you can remove instead of add. I'd say that's a great...takeaway. Again, that was Leidy [LIE-dee] Klotz, a professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. You can find a link to pick up the book in the show notes.
Let’s recap the main things we learned today
[ad lib optional]
ASHLEY: The writer for today’s first story was Grant Currin.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer, who was also an audio editor on today’s episode
ASHLEY: Our producer and lead audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow
ASHLEY: Stay curious!
...maybe
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!