{"id":3579,"date":"2009-09-10T03:00:48","date_gmt":"2009-09-10T08:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=3579"},"modified":"2009-09-10T03:00:48","modified_gmt":"2009-09-10T08:00:48","slug":"a-hairy-proposition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/3579","title":{"rendered":"A Hairy Proposition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/sciencetech\/article-1212005\/Teenager-invents-23-solar-panel-solution-developing-worlds-energy-needs-human-hair.html\">Teenager invents \u00a323 solar panel that could be solution to developing world&#8217;s energy needs &#8230; made from human hair<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Color me skeptical.  The story, of course, is very skimpy on the science, but let&#8217;s look at this.  The claim of  &#8220;9 V (18 W)&#8221; is really hard to believe, because P=IV means 2 A of current flowing through the hair, though that will be divided up.  Still, the diameter of a hair is thinner than AWG 32 wire (at about 200 microns), which has a current limit of less than 0.1 A for power transmission, and that&#8217;s for a good conductor.  Hair?  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rafischer.com\/hairpg2.htm\">Not so much<\/a>.   The pictures show a grid of interconnected hair, which doesn&#8217;t have all that much area, so capturing any more than a small fraction of the few hundred W\/m^2 of insolation is not in the cards.  A 20 x 20 grid at less than 0.2mm per hair is just a few square mm of hair  \u2014 it can only get you a fraction of a Watt.<\/p>\n<p>Question:  why don&#8217;t we have our hair generating electricity like this while it&#8217;s attached to our heads?<\/p>\n<p>At best, somebody dropped a prefix representing several orders of magnitude somewhere.  At worst it&#8217;s a scam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Teenager invents \u00a323 solar panel that could be solution to developing world&#8217;s energy needs &#8230; made from human hair Color me skeptical. The story, of course, is very skimpy on the science, but let&#8217;s look at this. The claim of &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/3579\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,16,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antiscience","category-environment","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}