It may seem like a while since the great state of New Jersey made a valuable contribution to modern science, unless of course you count the under-the-influence antics of Snooki, The Situation and Paulie D, testing the utter limitations of human consumption. However, researchers at Rutgers University, New Jersey’s flagship institution, claim to have discovered new cellular properties with the potential to lead to less expensive plastic solar cells.According to the research, energy-carrying particles generated by packets of light can travel 1,000 times further in carbon-based semiconductors than previous reports indicated. What does this mean? The essential benefit manifests in that these new cells can be created in plastic sheets as opposed to the silicon standby. It doesn’t take a scientist or plastic surgeon to understand the basic price differential between the two materials. Plastic solar cells designed with these advancements in mind could ultimately replace the expensive traditional model of silicon solar cells in the photovoltaic process. The end result would not only offer solar energy conversion an new cost lows but also heightened levels of performance, perhaps one day making silicon solar cells obsolete entirely. Read the rest of this entry »