sun

We can build it. We have the technology.

One thing you can say about the Solar Taxi is that it’s eye-catching. I showed pictures of it from a press conference Wednesday to my co-worker. “Hey, I saw that on the street this morning and wondered what it was,” she says. “That’s the solar car?”

For the past few years, astronomers and scientists have been looking up at a sun that is, more often than not, rather blank. Almost too blank. That is, the sun has been relatively free of the dark patches, called “sunspots,” that appear within 30 degrees of the sun’s equator and travel across the surface. Although low sunspot counts are normal in a typical sunspot cycle, this period has gone on longer than usual, scientists noted at an international solar conference on “Solar Variability, Earth’s Climate and the Space Environment” held in early June at Montana State University in Bozeman.

Solar energy is an abundant resource, but so far, solar panels have tended to be relatively expensive and less efficient than desired. Now researchers at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., may have solved both those problems by inventing a new inexpensive dye that works as a “solar concentrator” when painted on ordinary window panes. The dye gathers light energy over the entire surface of the window, then transports it out to the edge of the pane to a line of energy-collecting solar cells.