Solar Cell

Solar cells are subjected to a lot of harmful ultraviolet light, as they're typically placed for maximum sunlight exposure. A new eco-friendly coating could help protect them from those UV rays, and its active ingredient is extracted from onion skin.

Honeybee Robotics has outlined a plan to build a kind of power grid on the Moon, with a network of Statue of Liberty-sized towers containing solar panels and batteries that provide power and communications, and even act as streetlights.

Implanting tiny solar panels into people's eyeballs may sound like science fiction, but that's exactly what a team of Australian scientists are working on. The next-gen tech could vastly improve quality of life for people with incurable eye diseases.

With the aim of allowing astronauts to live off the land as much as possible when they return to the Moon, NASA has awarded Blue Origin a US$35-million contract to develop the company's Blue Alchemist process to make solar cells out of lunar soil.

Solar farms and agriculture are competing for land. UCLA Scientists have now tested a way to combine the two by placing semi-transparent solar cells on the glass roofs of greenhouses, finding that they actually improve the growth of plants inside.

Engineers at UIC have developed a device that can efficiently convert captured carbon dioxide into ethylene, a plastic precursor material. When run using renewable energy, the technique could make for net negative emissions in plastic production.

Radio waves don't travel well through water, which is why devices such as ROVS have to be linked to their operator via a communications cable. According to a new study, however, solar panels may soon allow for practical light-based communications.

A simple home test for breast cancer and a UV energy-harvesting window made of recycled materials are the big winners of this year’s James Dyson Awards. The annual competition encourages university students to develop innovative solutions to problems.

​If you're using the sun to power a mobile device, it only makes sense to put the solar cells on something you're wearing that will be receiving a lot of sunlight. With that in mind, researchers have created a pair of sunglasses that generate electricity via solar cells that double as their lenses.

While not quite as significant as the one-time accidental discovery of penicillin, 2016 did have its share of chance findings in the scientific community. Here we take a look at five of them.​

Strides have been made in the last few years to develop solar windows. Known as luminescent solar concentrators, these haven’t proven efficient or scalable, but now researchers have demonstrated a new technique that could make for larger, more practical solar energy-harvesting windows.

​​If you look at a cicada wing under a microscope, you'll see that it's covered in nanoscale spikes. Now, researchers have replicated those spikes' antireflective properties, and the resulting technology could be used to create more efficient solar cells. ​