Nepal Human Hair Solar Panel Hoax (CraigHyatt)

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.

mhb2• 17 years ago

...one of these days somebody is going to have a real breakthrough and the public will react with 'meh', just another hoax.

http://xkcd.com/570/ and its title attribute.

biohacker42• 17 years ago

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

spoiledtechie• 17 years ago

Any chance you can throw out info on that chat server?

igorhvr• 17 years ago

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...

joe_bleau• 17 years ago

Good point--I couldn't tell either. After I replied and questioned some of his comments in that thread, I began to wonder if I'd been trolled.

jacquesm14• 17 years ago

Not sure why you got voted down.

Anyway, the problem with this particular case is that like most good hoaxes it is partially truthful.

If I had to make a stab at how all this happened it would be something like this:

Melanin really has some photo electric properties. They must have read that somewhere, decided to build a 'science fair' project around it.

After figuring out they couldn't get it to work they may have been tempted to fake it (since that is pretty easy).

The the press picked it up and they could no longer back out, maybe still believing that they could make it work, that they had just rigged the demo to cover the fact that somehow their implementation was faulty, instead of the basic principle.

If Pons & Fleischman could fall for that temptation I'm sure a bunch of kids can fall for that.

Same subject, after all. Cheap, free energy, the world a much better place and you in the spotlight.

edit: what made me especially suspicious was the source (I would expect to read this in a different spot first, rather than the dailymail, which has a bit of a reputation) and the fact that hair is not a semiconductor, which is something you will need in order to direct the stream of electrons excited by the photo-electric effect. Without a diode at the most fundamental level in the circuit somewhere all the free electrons will simply use the path of least resistance to restore the balance.

pbhjpbhj3• 17 years ago

Hair per se may not be a semiconductor but melanin, particulalry eumelanin (the melanin in darker hair) is! Indeed there's even been successful semi-c devices built using melanin. Such research a priori lends credence to this type of announcement.

hair is a well structured layered tube and this could provide a good scaffold for the eumelanin - but it seems not sufficient to create a photoelectric device.

electromagnetic3• 17 years ago

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).

jacquesm14• 17 years ago

Ok, I buy it.

You could have fooled me though ;)

Konarka is one of the few parties that make dye sensitized cells today, you wouldn't happen to be working for them ?

fnid3• 17 years ago

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.

electronslave• 17 years ago

A lot of people ignore common sense for platitudes. Sensationalist pro-greenwash caterwauling is just another trend among many that persists across generations, since before our modern era of lulz-inducing post-pamphleteers (Wells, Chesterton, etc.)

HN isn't special, and it attracts all kinds. QED.

Tichy• 17 years ago

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

cracki2• 17 years ago

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.

colinprince• 17 years ago

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.

jacquesm14• 17 years ago

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

ars2• 17 years ago

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.

jacquesm14• 17 years ago

That, and hope. A good rule is that if it looks too good to be true then it probably is. Check and check again before you make a fool of yourself in such cases.

I really don't blame these kids, I blame their teacher and the dailymail.

swwu2• 17 years ago

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.

ars2• 17 years ago

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.

jhancock2• 17 years ago

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.

cracki2• 17 years ago

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

jhancock2• 17 years ago

"hoax - something intended to deceive; deliberate trickery intended to gain an advantage"

I know we all like to think that every 18 year old Nepali kid has at least a master's in electrical engineering and a PhD in materials science. However, It could simply be they are 18 year old kids and are wrong. I have seen no evidence of fraud.

tlb2• 17 years ago

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.

tlb2• 17 years ago

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.

swwu2• 17 years ago

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.

Nepal Human Hair Solar Panel Hoax (CraigHyatt)

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