I’ve never been a huge fan of solar panels when people start talking about renewable energy.  With no real accomplishments to speak of, solar energy is full of more questions than solutions.  First of all, you’re going to have a fat chance of convincing me to blow a couple dozen grand on a giant mirror that goes on my roof.  Second, the efficiency of those panels is so terrible that it would take acres and acres of land to order to provide practical solar power to any given community.  Add onto the cost and space concerns that you’ll have to manufacture some way to access electricity at night and you are either looking at using some measured amount of fossil fuels or installing a costly battery system that easily tacks on an addition $10,000 to your installation costs.

That said, NC State researchers have been tackling one aspect of solar power, and that is efficiency.  If you can increase the efficiency of the panel, you can reduce costs and the footprint needed for installations which will allow for investments in power storage for periods of darkness and… well… you see where this is heading.

Dr. Linyou Cao has been working on a delicious little project called a nano-sanwich that reduces the thickness of the energy-producing composite by almost 85%.  What makes this story particularly interesting is that Dr. Cao is using “conventional manufacturing processes” which is essential for making idealistic research into something practical for the industry.

Solar solutions may still be year away, but it’ll never come if we don’t try to find new and innovative ways to make it work.  There is a massive energy source up in the sky and it’s a shame to not take better advantage of it.  Unless the Mayans are right, it’s not like it’s running out of fuel any time soon.

It’s everything you could learn to hate about an insect: it stinks, it can “sting” (actually, leave welts), and it destroys the livelihoods of farmers across North Carolina.

In 2009, an NC State researcher began tracking a beatle that looked like a lady bug in the Atlanta area that has sense migrated across North Carolina.  It feeds on kutzu, but has recently found itself feeding on soy beans that are responsible for $500 million in revenue for North Carolinians annually.

So far, the bug has been found in 34 counties across NC (last tallied last year).

According to Dominic Reisig, an extension professor at NC State, the bugs are related to common stink bugs you see in the area, except the same oils they use to warn predators away with can also cause discoloration on the skin or event welts.  As one Clemson researcher put it, an insect like this that eats kutzu is a welcome guest in the US, but once it starts eating crops (and becoming dangerous to the population), that’s when it becomes a pest.  At the rate it is expanding, it’s likely it will be found in most of North Carolina throughout this growing season.

As of May 18th, 2012, Dominic is still attempting to determine possible weaknesses of the kutzu bug and trying to characterize it’s life-cycle (those who have owned and maintained a fish tank with “ick” will know the importance of understanding a pest’s life-cycle to eliminating it).  To date, the best advice Dominic has is to “carefully consider each individual case”.  As with some pests, it may be necessary to simply acknowledge the existence of the pest and make decisions on what you should and shouldn’t plant whether it be in a field or just around the house.

At the beginning of May, we published an article outlining the efforts of Amanda Traud, a Ph.D. student at NC State, as she looked deeper into how we were using social networking.  Her research indicated that people didn’t really use social networking to build “online communities”, but rather to reinforce traditional social groups (graduation classes, dorms they lived in, et al).  The entire thrust of the research appears to be that people aren’t really doing anything “new” with social networking; they’re just doing it differently.

A study by an assistant professor of communications (shout-out to CHASS), Dr. Andrew Binder wanted to look at Twitter and see if a similar trend existed, not necessarily related to who we “follow”, but with what information we shared.  Focusing on the recent nuclear disaster in Japan, he took a sample size of tweets, analyzed their intent and content, and determined whether people were actually sharing any new information via Twitter or just talking faster.

The conclusion was essentially that people are just talking faster.

The study also seems to imply that social media has not significantly changed the content of our communications.

“This case, at least, indicates that Twitter is allowing people to share news quickly and easily,” Binder says. “But the news they are sharing is not much different from that available to someone reading a print newspaper – they’re simply getting it sooner.” link

Again, the bottom line appears to be the same.  The idea of the internet is a “new world” is something that may just be generational to those who have been around for the genesis of widely-used connectivity.  For the rest of us, life goes on as normal.  Resources like Facebook and Twitter are little more than tools to help us support those traditional relationships better.

How awesome would it be if you couple recharge your phone, camera, computer, and car’s power without having to plug anything in?  We’ve all see technologies like the Duracell Powermat that allow you to recharge devices by physically placing them on a mat, but what if you could recharge all of your battery-power electronics by simply bringing them into range of a charging station?

It may sound futuristic, but Nikola Tesla was coming up with concepts for wireless power transfer over 100 years ago.  Recently, NC State researchers have been looking at applying this type of technology to large batteries, such as the ones you would find in an all-electric car.

In an article by the Green Optimistic, Dr. Srdjan Lukic’s and Ph.D. student Zeljko Pantic’s research is described as taking a known technology and applying it to future problems.  Essentially, they use the tuning mechanisms in you can commonly find in FM transmitters and use them to increase the efficiency of “transmitting power” to a receiver that can then recharge a battery.  What makes this research interesting is not that it is new or cutting edge (if anything, it’s the exact opposite of any of that); the novelty is that it’s practical and cost efficient.  Academians have a nasty habit of inventing new and ingenious ways to solve current and future problems without thinking of how their research can be commonly implemented.  This is a great example of “keeping the customer in mind” and producing quickly relevant technologies at the university level.