Isn't it amazing that "electromagnetic" had 21 upvotes (here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813103 ) saying "The science is rather sound on this; ..." and then proceeding to try to justify why this seems right with a bunch of nonsense? Or was he joking as well? I can't tell for sure...
Anyway, the problem with this particular case is that like most good hoaxes it is partially truthful.
If I had to make a stab at how all this happened it would be something like this:
Melanin really has some photo electric properties. They must have read that somewhere, decided to build a 'science fair' project around it.
After figuring out they couldn't get it to work they may have been tempted to fake it (since that is pretty easy).
The the press picked it up and they could no longer back out, maybe still believing that they could make it work, that they had just rigged the demo to cover the fact that somehow their implementation was faulty, instead of the basic principle.
If Pons & Fleischman could fall for that temptation I'm sure a bunch of kids can fall for that.
Same subject, after all. Cheap, free energy, the world a much better place and you in the spotlight.
edit: what made me especially suspicious was the source (I would expect to read this in a different spot first, rather than the dailymail, which has a bit of a reputation) and the fact that hair is not a semiconductor, which is something you will need in order to direct the stream of electrons excited by the photo-electric effect. Without a diode at the most fundamental level in the circuit somewhere all the free electrons will simply use the path of least resistance to restore the balance.
Hair per se may not be a semiconductor but melanin, particulalry eumelanin (the melanin in darker hair) is! Indeed there's even been successful semi-c devices built using melanin. Such research a priori lends credence to this type of announcement.
hair is a well structured layered tube and this could provide a good scaffold for the eumelanin - but it seems not sufficient to create a photoelectric device.
When hair was mentioned as used in the device one thinks "bunkum" or similar. Then one learns that melanin is a semi-conductor and that initial thought is at least tempered with "they may have something of interest; if that device produces that output I'll eat my hat, but perhaps it has some output?".
I was having a little fun at others' expense. I never said it wasn't a hoax, but the science is there, but it isn't 'here' in the sense that it's usable today. I got upvoted talking about photosynthesis with no mention of photovoltaics in an article about a PV cell.
Chlorophyll is currently being developed as a low cost dye in solar cells (the dye is the photoelectric material sandwiched in the middle that produces the electricity). Melanin itself is currently of interest due to it enabling the standard dyes (silicon dioxide, titanium dioxide, etc) to capture electrons they shouldn't be able to, it somehow takes low-energy light (even infra-red) and kicks it up a notch for the standard dye to capture.
Melanin in itself has a few amazing properties. It's apparently photoelectric right through from IR to Gamma rays, and also alpha, beta and neutrons produce the same effect in it. The IR and UV effects are the best features, making it an efficiency booster in existing solar panels by one means or another. The fact that it can potentially produce electricity through radiation has a whole other interesting factor to it, it creates the potential for a direct radiation->electricity just as solar cells have provided for solar energy (coal, oil and natural gas are just dead plants and animals that harvested solar energy a million years ago, wind is the thermal effect from solar, hydroelectric comes from rivers that came from rain that came from a heated ocean, etc). The two raw power sources we have are solar and nuclear (I suppose technically tidal and geothermal are raw sources too, but neither are developed enough), skipping the middle-men, so to speak, in the process is likely to be crucial in our future.
Melanin photovoltaic cells could enable the direct harvesting of radiation to produce electricity from many sources. Either stray radiation in a nuclear reactor (basically as radiation shielding that makes you money), or as an alternative to RTG's, but currently its greatest use in this field could be harvesting energy from nuclear waste, both the thermal products and the ionizing radiation. It's also of interest for space, as ionizing radiation there is immense, the sun emits vast amounts of x-rays constantly, we're just buried under our planets radiation shields.
The science is there for melanin as I said, but it'll likely take a lot of R&D before a melanin-based cell is on the store front, and it likely won't appear on its own to the general public as the uses of melanin-based cells are likely to be found where civilians are not (IE radioactive places or space).
You weren't having fun at other's expense, you were had just like everyone else. You never said it wasn't a hoax because you didn't know it was a hoax.
There are two lessons to be had from this, and the recent facebook fax hoax 1) Traditional Journalism is good because they do fact checking and blogs do not. 2) The real time web is easily hackable.
People don't take the time to do research. They just read and accept. Slower news helps it be more real. Most of what comes into our brains now is just forgotten anyway. It may actually be better for us to read stuff a week or two after it comes out so it has time to be vetted by the community.
We may be doing ourselves a disservice by staying so "up" on the news because we could be polluting our brains with false information. We should be in constant doubt of everything we read on blogs, but unfortunately, we are not.
There are two lessons to be had from this, and the recent facebook fax hoax 1) Traditional Journalism is good because they do fact checking and blogs do not.
What? The original story was published by the Daily Mail, and it appears to have been debunked by a blogger.
Let's not even mention the fact that on the day it was debunked, CNN was running a story about a terrorist attack on Washington, D.C. that turned out to be a Coast Guard training exercise.
The exception proves the rule? A blogger righted the issue with Dan Rather a couple years ago as well. I suppose we have to look at the majority case here and the majority of bloggers are regurgitators. The news regurgitates a lot too. I have lost a lot of faith in our institution of media lately.
The journalistic ethic is going in the toilet because it doesn't spur ratings...
There are those who do their homework, have writing skills and do their utmost to produce quality content, there are the plagiarists that will copy whole blogs verbatim and pass them off as their own, in between there is everything else.
To put all bloggers in the same corner is the same as saying that all people are unethical. The 'majority' may be right, it may be off but my feeling is that there is plenty of excellent content out there and plenty of crap. I wouldn't be so fast to discard the majority, especially in other languages than English the amount of regurgitation is less than you'd expect.
Regurgitators = thinly veiled plagiarism, what in school would be called 'rewriting' instead of 'writing'.
And newspapers that print bloomberg or reuters stories are also regurgitators.
I can't be 100% sure, but here's why I believe he was had. First, this community is one in which he would be rewarded more for outing a hoax than he would get from some internal desire to "have fun at others expense." That kind of thing doesn't go over well here.
There's also a saying, "He who says the most in an argument is in the wrong." electromagnetic spoke a lot to "cover his trail." I believe he was hopeful that the hoax was not a hoax. I was had too, I thought, wow, that's clever, if it's true the world will change. I was hopeful.
It's okay to be wrong.
I suppose you could say I believe he was had as well, because of intuition. Intuition is knowing something without knowing how you know it. I don't believe he would have spent so much time supporting the idea if he thought it was a hoax. He even back-peddled a little bit by saying "What I said was true even if this isn't true."
If he believed it was a hoax, why not say, "This is probably a hoax, but here's the science..."
> First, this community is one in which he would be rewarded more for outing a hoax than he would get from some internal desire to "have fun at others expense." That kind of thing doesn't go over well here.
I think that is exactly what makes it more rather than less likely that he's telling the truth. It's an honest admission that could get him some flak.
After all, why admit to this now if it wasn't the truth.
With a moniker like electromagnetic and a fair amount of accurate knowledge at his disposal he threw off enough 'good stuff' to confuse the hell out of me. I had to go to some trouble to get the "'wtf', this guy seems to know what he's talking about, so how come he defends it?" feeling out of my system.
I actually suspected that he was doing it on purpose but I wasn't brave enough to call him out on it. And I don't feel bad for admitting that, I really think that it was a pretty good prank.
When he said 'it is true, even it if isn't true' that is exactly what it is. The basic principle is sound, this implementation is absolutely not.
FWIW, I've been a member of fieldlines for many years and one of our pet activities there is to debunk bullshit renewable energy schemes.
Another thing that threw me off was that they claimed to be using some kind of solvent, but then when I got to the bit where it worked indoors I realized it must certainly be a hoax, or at least a gross misunderstanding of electro-chemical processes. The 'has to be moist' was a pretty bad sign that something else was going on here, the metals another (hair being a pretty much perfect insulator).
So, after all that the only questions remaining are:
How do they do it ?
No way those fluorescent lamps are staying lit without some additional source of energy spliced in there somehow.
Are they themselves still deluded by their invention ? (hard to imagine, given the above)
Are they aware of the basic flaws and are they keeping up a pretense hoping the media attention will die off (that usually doesn't take very long), or are they in too deep now ?
And congratulations to electromagnetic on a pretty good prank, to quote GWB, fool me once ... ;)
Sadly no, aside from solar I'm highly critical of the alternate energy craze. So I've kept well read on the subject, the topic of melanin and its use as a semiconductor come from a few other fields of overlapping interest.
Solar is becoming popular at a time when interest in biomimicry is also high, I personally believe that copying off nature will give us the needed advantage if we've got a hope to change global warming.
I'm actually believing the 'debunker' here is wrong, I believe it is a hoax (knowingly or unknowingly) but he's claiming they've built a simple DIY cell. I'm thinking they created a galvanic battery, they talk of using copper and there's no mention of what the casing is made of but IMO looks steel (I doubt in rural Nepal they have readily available aluminium). If it's stainless steel, they've got the three components for a basic lemon battery Copper, Zinc and an acid/electrolyte (in this case table salt).
By my guess they've got over 150 cells formed in there (if it's working how I'm suspecting it is), which would easily mean they could get the 9V/18W they're claiming. The 'debunkers' theory on what they're doing is somehow hiding a solar panel under the black craft paper and still getting power, which is absurd, or he's claiming they're using a battery, but the power visibly fluctuates far more than it should from a commercial 9V battery.
The simplest explanation is usually the best, and in this case I believe the simplest explanation is ignorance. Copper + stainless steel + salt = battery.
A lot of people ignore common sense for platitudes. Sensationalist pro-greenwash caterwauling is just another trend among many that persists across generations, since before our modern era of lulz-inducing post-pamphleteers (Wells, Chesterton, etc.)
I don't know anything about physorg.com, it sounds like they should know science - except they don't. The electricity does not come from the tree, it comes from the metal probes.
Cold fusion has the same problem. One person reported how a certain batch of palladium worked great and made energy, but now the palladium is used up, and new batches don't work.
His mistake is that the palladium and the cold fusion had nothing to do with it. Palladium is sometimes refined from nuclear waste, and that batch was slightly contaminated.
Doing science is hard, especially correcting for all the variables. Very few people learn how to do it properly.
That, and hope. A good rule is that if it looks too good to be true then it probably is. Check and check again before you make a fool of yourself in such cases.
I really don't blame these kids, I blame their teacher and the dailymail.
Actually, if you read the article, they mention using two probes made of the same metal to eliminate any current generated by the differences in redox potential between them.
There is still a difference. The probes are placed in different things, so the two probes have differing ability to oxidize.
Oxidation of a metal is a much more likely source of electricity than a tree, so much so, that they need a much better experiment before I'll be convinced that the tree is making electricity.
For example, let it run for a long time and check for any evidence of corrosion.
Are there metals that don't corrode? Perhaps palladium?
They could also try a variety of different metals for the probes (both at the same time) and see if they get different voltage readings.
I run a chat server dedicated to RE and we had our 'hoax' flag up just about immediately.
Kudos to Craig for taking the time and effort to put this one to rest.
Every couple of weeks there is some piece in the news about some renewable energy breakthrough by some teenager, and every time it is either a hoax, it doesn't scale, it produces piddly little bits of power, the economics don't work out or they misunderstood the physics (or any random combination of these).
I'm really happy that kids are interested in renewables, it's a fantastic way to get into science and it is also good to have consciousness raised about our 'footprint'.
But I really wished that the press would fact check this stuff a bit more, one of these days somebody is going to have a real breakthrough and the public will react with 'meh', just another hoax.
Looking for renewable energy source in unlikely places (the windbelt for instance) is interesting because there are plenty of opportunities to get press and sometimes even funding, even if your physics is lousy. The hope humanity has for solving our dependence on oil coupled with dirt cheap renewable energy is what fuels this kind of response.
In practice, engineering is hard and it pays off to do your homework.
I'm curious if the kids that did this will now go on the defense or if they will own up to what the did.
This debunking article is convincing. However, it begins by calling the news story a hoax and then continues to establish why such a device would not work as advertised but never shows any evidence that the story is a hoax.
A hoax implies deliberate fraud. Many scientific theories turn out to be wrong, but are not hoaxes. Newtonian mechanics or the Bohr atom model, for example.
This was not the case of a theory being wrong. He's making the case that the device they show can not possibly have the characteristics the makers claim. And it's hard to say that's not deliberate. At a minimum grossly negligent.
The experiments that lead to the development of Newtonian mechanics (the Copernican laws, for example) are still valid. It's just their interpretation that has changed.
"hoax - something intended to deceive; deliberate trickery intended to gain an advantage"
I know we all like to think that every 18 year old Nepali kid has at least a master's in electrical engineering and a PhD in materials science. However, It could simply be they are 18 year old kids and are wrong. I have seen no evidence of fraud.
Here's the evidence of fraud:
1. "I'm trying to produce commercially and distribute to the districts. We've already sent a couple out to the districts to test for feasibility." means they have built and distributed prototypes for evaluation.
2. "Two teens in Nepal, Milan Karki and Harihar Adhikari, have developed a low cost solar panel from human hair. Silicon dioxide, cupreous oxide, copper wire, glass, plywood and black hair is all they required to prepare the solar panel." a cupreous oxide (US spelling cuprous oxide) cell produces 2.35 mW per square meter and they would need a panel 120m x 120m to produce 9V at 18W.
3. Their panel is just about the right size to contain a commercially available 9V 18W unit which can be purchased from a company like Maplin in the UK.
4. If they have distributed panels that supposedly produce 9V at 18W and the panels are the size shown in the photogrqaphs, this could only happen if they have concealed conventional silicon solar panels inside the prototypes. Either that or they haven't distributed any prototypes.
5. Based on the information published so far, including direct quotes from the inventors, these students do not understand the science behind their own invention.
Wrong, misguided or they talked themselves in to a tight spot and it got a lot tighter because of the media. Hard to tell which without more information.
Father (bursting in):Son what are you doing shaving your balls with my electric razor ...?!?!
Son: Err ...
Father: Well.
Son: It's for school, err, ... I'm making a hair powered solar cell.
Father: Really? Wow ... I always told your mother you were a great kid.
If hair is a non-conductor, then it cannot be a semiconductor
False. For example, pure silicon is non-conductive, but when you add slight boron or phosphorous impurities it becomes a semiconductor. So it's not impossible that hair has semiconducting properties when it absorbs salt water.
Of course, the claim of human hair solar is crap. But debunkers should be extra-careful not to make bogus claims of their own.
Then again, silicon is an atomic crystal, while hair's structure is defined on the cellular level, which makes doping silicon much more practical than doping hair. This is on top of the problem that solids without an atomic lattice of some form tend to have trouble allowing any kind of electron movement at all, regardless of what chemicals you add to it (there are quite a few exceptions, like chlorophyll, but even those tend to be well-defined at the molecular level).
Also, as the author mentions, hair soaked in salt water becomes conductive, not semiconductive - current running through it is simply passed on by the salt water - but this conductivity has nothing to do with the hair and everything to do with the water.
i'm just puzzled because right from the start i had the strong impression that this was a hoax. it always is, at least when kids from some random country claim to have solved major problems.
Okay, I was fooled. It certainly sounded feasible. Perhaps the only pointer for those not in the industry would be that he was inspired by "...a book by physicist Stephen Hawking, which discussed ways of creating static energy from hair"
That'd be the only iffy sentence that could have caught my eye. But it didn't. Caveat lector.
