History of blue led and why its worth for nobel prize:

History of blue LED:

• Many considered creating a GaN LED too difficult to produce,Nakamura was fortunate that the founder of Nichia, Nobuo Ogawa (1912–2002) was initially willing to support his GaN project. However the company eventually ordered him to suspend work on GaN, claiming it was consuming too much time and money. Nakamura continued to develop the blue LED on his own and in 1993 succeeded in making the device.
• The blue LED was demonstrated by Shuji Nakamura in 1994 based on Indium gallium nitride(InGaN). Its development built on critical developments in GaN nucleation on sapphire substrates(blue shaded) and the demonstration of p-type doping of GaN, developed by Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano in Nagoya.In 1995.
• Alberto Barbieri at the Cardiff University Laboratory investigated the efficiency and reliability of high-brightness LEDs and demonstrated a "transparent contact" LED using indium tin oxide (ITO) on (AlGaInP/GaAs).
•  The existence of blue LEDs and high-efficiency LEDs quickly led to the development of the first white LED, yellow light with blue light produces light appears white.
• Nakamura has also worked on green LEDs, and is responsible for creating the white LED and blue laser diodes used in Blu-ray Discs and HD DVDs.

Why blue LED worth for nobel prize:

• White LED lamps emit a bright white light, are long-lasting and energy-efficient. They are constantly improved, getting more efficient with higher luminous flux (measured in lumen) per unit electrical input power (measured in watt). The most recent record is just over 300 lm/W, which can be compared to 16 for regular light bulbs and close to 70 for fluorescent lamps. As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth’s resources. Materials consumption is also diminished as LEDs last up to 100,000 hours, compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights.
• The LED lamp holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids: due to low power requirements it can be powered by cheap local solar power.
• The invention of the blue LED is just twenty years old, but it has already contributed to create white light in an entirely new manner to the benefit of us all.

Butterfly wings grown successfully in lab

• Scientists have successfully grown a wing of the blue morpho butterfly in the laboratory.

• Professor Andrew Parker, of the Natural History Museum in London hopes to find a way of making the microscopic structures in the insect's wing which act like tiny prisms, splitting light into different colours and the brightly iridescent colours seen in the wings of some insects could one day be used in paints and cosmetics, the Independent reported.

• Parker added that conventional pigments work by absorbing some wavelengths of light and scattering others. But the wings of the blue morpho contain transparent structures that refract light in a way that gives it its vivid colouration

Internet is going to boost 100 times than existing.

• Graphene in telecommunications could make the internet a hundred times faster than existing. 

• Researchers from the Universities of Bath and Exeter have shown that a few layers of graphene stacked on top of each other could act as a formidable material for optical switches, delivering speeds up to 100 times faster than current telecommunications technology.

• Ordinarily optical switches respond at rate of a few picoseconds - around a trillionth of a second. Through this study physicists have observed the response rate of an optical switch using 'few layer graphene' to be around one hundred femtoseconds - nearly a hundred times quicker than current materials. 

• Graphene is pure carbon in the form of a very thin, nearly transparent sheet, one atom thick. It is remarkably strong for its very low weight (100 times stronger than steel) and it conducts heat and electricity with great efficiency.  

• "We've seen an ultrafast optical response rate, using 'few-layer graphene', which has exciting applications for the development of high speed optoelectronic components based on graphene," lead researcher Dr Enrico Da Como said.

• I think this technology should research faster .
• The study was published in Physical Review Letters.
   

Scientists Discover How to Produce Oxygen Without Plants

• There's new scientific evidence that shows oxygen can be produced without the help of photosynthesis from green plants.
• Scientists revealed that the breakthrough can bring about a better understanding of how the Earth's early atmospheric oxygen was formed before there were plants, and how oxygen may also exist in the atmosphere of other planets that have no vegetation.

• According to researchers from the University of California, carbon dioxide molecules break in half if they experience specific wavelengths of light radiation. The result is a C molecule and an O2 molecule.
• Scientists previously thought that dioxide molecules separated into a CO and O molecule regardless of what light wavelength they're exposed to since this is considered as a molecular process where least resistance is involved.
• Researchers revealed that to separate CO and O molecules from the carbon dioxide molecule, five electron volts are needed to break them, but for C and O2 to come together, an energy of around 11.4 electron volts is required.
• According to Arthur Suits, a chemist at Wayne State University in Detroit, the molecular behavior of carbon dioxide is very difficult to study when exposed to high energies.
• The results are not consistent, however, as researchers say experiments yielded a C and O2 result of only five percent when carbon dioxide molecules are exposed to intense light radiation.
• Author Cheuk-Yiu Ng from the University of California said that when carbon dioxide molecules are hit with this type of radiation, they can break apart in more than one channel and some five percent were the only CO2 that became C and O2.
• Suits added these findings may provide clues how oxygen formed in the Earth's atmosphere and in other planets and even dying stars and interstellar dust clouds.
• The study was published in the journal, Science.

First rechargeable solar battery

• It’s a solar cell! No… it’s a rechargeable lithium-air battery! No… wait… it’s both: It’s the world’s first all-in-one solar battery!
• Integrating the function of a solar panel that captures light, and a cheap battery that stores energy into one hybrid device, researchers have successfully invented the world’s first solar battery.

• The device will help bring down the costs of renewable energy by 25 percent, the researchers said.The key to the innovation is a mesh solar panel that allows air to enter the battery, and a special process for transferring electrons between the solar panel and the battery electrode.Inside the device, light and oxygen enable different parts of the chemical reactions that charge the battery.
• The invention also solves a longstanding problem in solar energy efficiency, by eliminating the loss of electricity that normally occurs when electrons have to travel between a solar cell and an external battery.
• “With this new design, light is converted to electrons inside the battery, so nearly 100 percent of the electrons are saved,” the researchers said. 

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191438-this-air-breathing-solar-panel-stores-its-own-electricity-cutting-the-cost-of-solar-power-significantly

Wonder material that obsorb the oxygen

• Researchers have developed a new crystalline material that absorbs oxygen in large quantities and stores it. The material is so effective at binding oxygen that only a spoon of it is enough to suck up all the oxygen in a room.
• According to researchers from University of Southern Denmark (USD), the substance can absorb and bind oxygen in a concentration 160 times greater than the concentration in the air around us.
• The stored oxygen can be released again when and where it is needed.
• The key component of the new material is the cobalt which is bound in a specially designed organic molecule.

• It can absorb and release oxygen many times without losing the ability.
• It is like dipping a sponge in water, squeezing the water out of it and repeating the process over and over again

anti-pollution suit to clean air around you

The researchers from Eindhoven University have developed BB.Suit 0.2: Wearable Clean Air, a garment which improves air quality.

The anti-pollution suit utilizes cold plasma technology to split water and oxygen molecules into free radicals, which react with toxic gases in the air to purify it.

The suit has been incorporated with an air quality sensor that monitors the levels of methane, LPG and carbon monoxide in the surrounding air. It collects geo-localised data and allows extensive analysis of the problem.

The BB suit: wearable air cleaning exhibition is held in Dashilar district in Beijing. It shows how future clothing can contribute to the health and comfort of people residing in polluted urban areas.

The high voltage components in the suit are locked safely in a sealed case, thus making it safe and secure to wear.

13,300 year-old spear made from a rhino horn found in Siberia

• A spear made from a woolly rhino horn which has been unearthed on an island in Siberia could be more than 13,300 years old, said a report. 

• The spear, used by Palaeolithic man in the Arctic, was discovered on the island of Bolshoy Lyakhovsky, off the north coast of Siberia.

• The horn was uncovered by paleontologists searching for mammoth remains on the Arctic island.

• This find helps our understanding of how far north people penetrated in the Palaeolithic Era.

• The spear could have been used to kill woolly mammoths and rhinos, both of which became extinct thousands of years ago in Siberia.

A way to hide large objects from sight at Rochester university called cloaking

• Previous cloaking methods have been complicated, expensive, and not able to hide objects in three dimensions when viewed at varying angles.
• The system developed at Rochester university uses four lenses,with basic,readily available optics
• This provides three-dimensional, continuously multidirectional cloaking.
• The researchers have cloaked a hand, a face, and a ruler - making each object appear "invisible" while the image behind the hidden object remains in view.
• However this not too expensive says the founders.

Earth water is older than sun

The sun, at 4.6 billion years old, predates all the other bodies in our solar system. But it turns out that much of the water we swim in and drink here on Earth is even older.

A new model of the chemistry of the early solar system finds that up to half the water now on Earth was inherited from an abundant supply of interstellar ice as our sun formed. That means our solar system’s moisture wasn’t the result of local conditions in the proto-planetary disk, but rather a regular feature of planetary formation — raising hopes that life could indeed exist elsewhere in the universe.

For more:http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/09/25/earths-water-is-older-than-the-sun/#.VCYbAha7NHM

Google glass risks drivers.

• The first scientific study of driving while texting with Google Glass found that the hands-free eyewear is no safer to use on the road than a smartphone.

• "When you look at how fast people react to an unexpected traffic event – how fast they slam on their brakes, we didn’t find a statistically significant difference between Google Glass and smartphones"said psychological researcher Ben Sawyer at the University of Central Florida.

• That, he said, is critical for certain drivers whose safety can depend on information obtained on the road, including military and emergency personnel. 

Solar cell powers water-to-hydrogen conversion

A class of materials that has quickly become the rising star of the solar cell world could enable production of hydrogen fuel using sunlight.

Michael Grätzel a chemist in in Switzerland, and colleagues built a photovoltaic device using cheap and abundant materials called perovskites.

Grätzel’s group describes a device that uses sunlight to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas with 12.3 percent efficiency. That figure puts the device above the 10 percent benchmark for useful solar-to-hydrogen conversion. Hydrogen holds promise as clean fuel to power cars or produce electricity.