(via MediaFuturist: Futurist Conversations: The Future of Money (Ross Dawson & Gerd Leonhard Video))
YES!!!
Eden Full is a 19-year-old social entrepreneur who seems to have a knack for solving big problems with simple technologies. Her patent-pending invention, the SunSaluter, maximizes the output of solar panels—a technology that’s notoriously inefficient—simply by rotating them with the sun. Better still, it’s cheap, made of recycled materials and easy to construct, making it truly sustainable. In the past couple of months, Full has won a 20 Under 20 Fellowship (worth $100,000) from the Thiel Foundation and theEcoLiving 2011 Student Leadership Awardfrom Scotiabank. So this fall Full says she’s “stopping out” (not dropping out) of Princeton, where she’s been studying mechanical engineering, for the past two years, to pursue her dream of improving lives and the environment through technology. PopTech caught up with Full to learn more about the SunSaluter and her rise as a young inventor.
PopTech: As a young inventor, why have you chosen to work on solar energy?
Eden Full: There’s so much potential with solar. It’s expected to meet 7 percent of the world’s energy needs by 2020 and 25 percent by 2050. But I believe that if we want to reach the goal of making solar accessible to as many people as possible then the technology has to be simpler. By that I mean that the cells themselves can continue to get more efficient—you can continue to design organic solar cells, cadmium telluride-based solar cells, anything you want—but the core technology that you are actually deploying to the market needs to be a lot simpler.
Awesome
New fuel discovered that reversibly stores solar energy
Alexie Kolpak and Jeffrey Grossman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology propose a new type of solar thermal fuel that would be affordable, rechargeable, thermally stable, and more energy-dense than lithium-ion batteries. Their proposed design combines an organic photoactive molecule, azobenzene, with the ever-popular carbon nanotube
Full Story: Ars Technica
