Björk - you either lover her or hate her. But, she is on a science+Apple apps binge, so I think she is worth watching. The first single from her science-based and iPad-composed album Biophilia (to be released Monday) is “Crystalline,” and was actually released earlier this summer. Subjects of the rest of the album reportedly include (each partnered with a new app) dark matter, tectonic plates, lightning, gravity, DNA, viruses and lunar cycles. The second video is a demonstration of the Crystalline app.

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With the Nobel Prize announcements starting soon, it is all too easy to overlook the 2011 Ig Nobel laureates (awarded at Harvard U. last Thursday). The event honors (presumably) the International Year of Chemistry.

The 2011 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

Physiology: Anna Wilkinson (UK), Natalie Sebanz (Netherlands, Hungary, and Austria), Isabella Mandl (Austria) and Ludwig Huber (Austria) for their study, “No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise.”

Chemistry: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami (Japan), for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency), and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm.

Medicine: Mirjam Tuk (Netherlands and UK), Debra Trampe (Netherlands) and Luk Warlop (Belgium) and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman (US), Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff (Australia) for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things—but worse decisions about other kinds of things—when they have a strong urge to urinate.

Psychology: Karl Halvor Teigen (Norway), for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.

Literature: John Perry of Stanford University (US), for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.

Biology: Darryl Gwynne (Canada, Australia, UK and US) and David Rentz (Australia and US) for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle.

Physics: Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne and Bruno Ragaru (France), and Herman Kingma (Netherlands), for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don’t.

Mathematics: Dorothy Martin (US) who predicted the world would end in 1954, Pat Robertson (US) who predicted the world would end in 1982, Elizabeth Clare Prophet (US) who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim (Korea) who predicted the world would end in 1992, Credonia Mwerinde (Uganda) who predicted the world would end in 1999, and Harold Camping (US) who predicted the world would end on Sept. 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on Oct. 21, 2011, for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

Peace: Arturas Zuokas (mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania), for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.

Public Safety: John Senders (Canada), for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him.

If you have a half hour (or three), you can view the entire shebang below:

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At top, domains with opposite electrical polarization, averaging about 140 nanometers wide and separated by walls 2 nanometers thick, form a well-aligned array in a thin film of bismuth ferrite. When illuminated, electrons collect on one side of the walls and holes on the other, driving the current at right angles to the walls. Voltage increases as excess electrons accumulate stepwise from domain to domain. Credit: LBL

A news release out of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab reports that “the average installed cost of residential and commercial PV systems completed in 2010 fell by roughly 17 percent from the year before, and by an additional 11 percent within the first six months of 2011.” The information is from a recent LBL report (pdf), “Tracking the Sun IV: An Historical Summary of the Installed Cost of Photovoltaics in the United States from 1998 to 2010.”

The cost reductions are attributed to reductions in the cost of PV modules and to nonmodule costs, like labor, marketing, business overhead and nonmodule system components. The report authors note that the drop in nonmodule costs is significant because they can be influenced easily by policies intended to reduce market barriers and expedite deployment. Module cost reduction, however, is R&D dependent and more difficult to influence timewise.

One aspect of module cost reduction is to develop more efficient photovoltaic materials. High efficiency in solar cells is a function of voltage and current, and more (of both) is better.

Ferroelectric materials have very high photovoltaic responses to illumination, but the mechanism has been unknown. Some new research, also out of LBL, describes a model for the high voltages seen in thin-film bismuth ferrites (BFOs), which may provide some insight to developing more efficient PV materials. BFOs themselves are not candidate PV materials because they respond only to a very small slice of the solar spectrum (blue and near ultraviolet).

BFO thin films have a highly periodic domain structure (regions where the electrical polarization orients in different directions). Joel Ager, the lead researcher said in a press release, “When we illuminated the BFO thin films, we got very large voltages, many times the band gap of the material itself.”

The question is, why? The voltage measured across the film increased as the number of domains between electrodes increased, showing researchers that somehow the domain walls were involved.

The press release describes the charge-transport model that was developed:

The model presented a surprising, and surprisingly simple, picture of how each of the oppositely oriented domains creates excess charge and then passes it along to its neighbor. The opposite charges on each side of the domain wall create an electric field that drives the charge carriers apart. On one side of the wall, electrons accumulate and holes are repelled. On the other side of the wall, holes accumulate and electrons are repelled.

While a solar cell loses efficiency if electrons and holes immediately recombine, that can’t happen here because of the strong fields at the domain walls created by the oppositely polarized charges of the domains.

“Still, electrons and holes need each other,” says Ager, “so they go in search of one another.” Holes and electrons move away from the domain walls in opposite directions, toward the center of the domain where the field is weaker. Because there’s an excess of electrons over holes, the extra electrons are pumped from one domain to the next - all in the same direction, as determined by the overall current.

“It’s like a bucket brigade, with each bucket of electrons passed from domain to domain,” Ager says, who describes the stepwise voltage increases as “a sawtooth potential. As the charge contributions from each domain add up, the voltage increases dramatically.”

Ager expects that the mechanism will apply to all materials with “sawtooth” potentials, which opens the possibility of developing new PV materials with high voltage and high current.

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I used to imagine a lot of the bio-inspired ideas, such as flying maple seed pods (above) and artificial jellyfish arose on Thursday or Friday afternoons around happy hour time by brain-fried engineers. You know: It’s easy to imagine sensor, battery, propulsion and aeronautics wonks knocking down a few IPAs and hatching a new scheme to bemuse a project manager.

In this case, it turns out the wild idea didn’t come from engineers letting their hair down, but from ambitious bio-inspired engineering students under the guidance of some encouraging University of Maryland professors impressed with the structural and sensory architecture found in nature.

The above video was shot last week at the AUVSI show where Lockheed Martin got to show off their latest iteration of the UM student’s work original work (see video below).

While both the UM and Lockheed Martin versions show prop propulsion, Gizmag also has a schematic of what appears to be a version powered by a tiny thruster jet.

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Tubohotel in village of Tepoztlan, Morelos, Mexico. Credit: Luis Gordoa/gordoafotografia; Tubohotel.

Via Gizmag, and originally from archdaily:

“The idea came when we built Cafe Five, where we saw the need to adapt an inexpensive room for users. In our search for solutions, we found Desparkhotel, the work of the architect Andreas Strauss in 2006, using recycled concrete pipes for hotel rooms. Our client decided to make a hotel with the same characteristics as the Desparkhotel on a ground that is located on the outskirts of Tepoztlan, with excellent panoramic views of the Sierra del Tepozteco. Located in a wooded setting of unusual features, the surrounding environment provides an unique natural environment and for our project.”

Rentals go for 500 pesos (about $43) per night.

Also, some great construction photos can be seen at T3Arc.

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