http://gizmodo.com/5832557/genius-13...r-breakthrough


Genius 13-Year-Old Has a Solar Power Breakthrough

When I was 13 I was smoking cigarettes I'd found on the ground and
playing Super Nintendo like it was my life's work. This kid discovered a
way to draw 20-50% more power from solar cells. He is way cooler.

7th grader Aidan Dwyer was walking in the woods during the winter, and
looking up, he noticed something about the bare branches above him. They
didn't appear to be growing randomly. So he took some measurements of
the angles of the branches, crunched some numbers, and wouldn't you know
it, he found that the ubiquitous Fibonacci Sequence was behind it all.
He suspected there was a reason behind this. That trees were using this
pattern to gather more light.

So he did an experiment. Using the same number of solar cells, he built
two working models. One was a traditional, flat array will all of the
panels on a single plane. The other used the Fibonacci Sequence to
create the same spiraled pattern he observed in the trees. The results?
The little man himself reports:

The tree design made 20% more electricity and collected 2 1/2 more
hours of sunlight during the day. But the most interesting results were
in December, when the Sun was at its lowest point in the sky. The tree
design made 50% more electricity, and the collection time of sunlight
was up to 50% longer!"

Did you hear that? All of the smart-guys in the country who spent their
time trying to make solar power more efficient were just outsmarted by a
thirteen-year-old and a tree. You can read Aiden's extremely
well-written full-report here. Aiden just won the Young Naturalist Award
from the American Museum of Natural History. It's kids like this that
make me think that just maaaaaybe this country isn't so screwed after all.

- - -

Wow! Thank goodness his parents didn't push him into motorbike racing.
--
Don't forget to leave a bit of beef for rec.boat's right-wing
conservatrashers and ID spoofers to feed upon. The more they feed, the
quicker rec.boats will fall into the black hole of cyberspace and disappear.