
Nepal Human Hair Solar Panel Hoax (CraigHyatt) - jacquesm
http://sites.google.com/site/edwardcraighyatt/hairsolarpanelnepal
======
igorhvr
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...

~~~
electromagnetic
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).

~~~
fnid
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.

~~~
pg
_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.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
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.

[http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/09/white-
house-...](http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/09/white-house-blames-
media-for-scare-resulting-from-coast-guard-exercise.html)

~~~
fnid
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...

~~~
jacquesm
There are several 'classes' of bloggers.

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.

------
ars
It happens all the time that people do not realize what the actual driver is
in an experiment. (The cuprous oxide vs the hair mat.)

For example look at: <http://www.physorg.com/news171643486.html>

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.

~~~
swwu
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.

~~~
ars
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.

------
mhb
It's instructive to review the comments from the original posting on HN (e.g.,
_The science is rather sound on this..._ ):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813103>

~~~
jacquesm
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.

And if the dailymail will issue a retraction.

~~~
biohacker42
For what it's worth, I recall the top HN comment initially being something
about the paper printing hoaxes.

~~~
jacquesm
you are correct.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813116>

------
jhancock
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.

~~~
cracki
what? if you agree that such a device can't work, how can that "news article"
NOT be a hoax?

~~~
tlb
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.

~~~
lutorm
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.

------
jacquesm
If anybody wants to get involved in DIY renewable energy then probably
<http://www.fieldlines.com/> is a good place to start.

------
tlb
_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.

~~~
swwu
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.

------
colinprince
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.

~~~
jacquesm
Static != 2A current through a bunch of hair.

In fact, the whole reason hair will build up static is _because_ it is such an
excellent insulator.

edit: about the conductivity of hair:

<http://www.rafischer.com/hairtest.htm>

edit2: why people think hair conducts well:

Thomas Edison is often quoted as having said the first working filament was a
human hair.

He did try one, but it didn't work, what did work was a filament made from a
small strip of carbonized bamboo (effectively a 'carbon wire resistor').

This thread was 'thinner than a human hair'.

Thus reinforcing the words hair and filament together again.

much interesting reading on:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb>

------
Tichy
What I don't quite get: what is the point in making up such a thing?

~~~
cracki
media exposure to underdeveloped countries?

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.

------
onreact-com
This is a follow up on this submission:

"Teenager invents solar panel made from human hair (dailymail.co.uk)"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813103>

------
onreact-com
Yeah. Read here as well:

[http://community.discovery.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/9701967776...](http://community.discovery.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/9701967776/m/39719686201)

The Museum of Hoaxes is lagging a little:

[http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/permalink/solar_pa...](http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/permalink/solar_panel_made_from_human_hair/)

