Skyline Solar has designed a solar concentrator that relies on more sheet metal and less silicon to cut costs.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up on Monday introduced its product, called High Gain Solar (HGS) arrays, and said that it has raised an additional $24.6 million from New Enterprise Associates and other investors. It’s one of six companies to get a Department of Energy grant worth $3 million for solar photovoltaics research.

Its arrays, expected to be available later this year, are targeted at commercial customers and utilities looking to generate from about 100 kilowatts to megawatts worth of electricity. The company has a 24-kilowatt demonstration facility at a plant in San Jose,…

Scientists say they are a step closer to developing materials that will render people and other objects invisible.

Researchers say they can redirect light around 3D objects using metamaterials–artificially engineered structures created at a nano scale that contain optical properties not found in nature, according to an Associated Press report.

People see objects as a result of the light reflecting or scattering off them. This new mixture of materials has “negative refractive” properties that keep light from being absorbed or reflected by the object, allowing only the light from behind the object to be seen. Essentially, the material bends visible light in a way that eliminates the creation of reflections or shadows…

While out testing the very stylish Aston Martin DB9 Volante in the Santa Cruz Mountains recently, we ran across the car’s opposite, a Mercedes-Benz F-Cell research car. We caught up with the F-Cell (easily) and followed it to a vista point, where we cornered its driver and started grilling him about the car. It’s not often you see the future of the automobile out in the wild like this.

This F-Cell was from the first generation, built into Mercedes-Benz’s A-class platform, a small vehicle that’s not sold in the U.S. Its 5,000-psi hydrogen tank feeds a fuel cell that produces electricity, in turn powering an 87-horsepower electric motor.

The driver of the…

There have been a lot of resources that have surfaced to help track the newly spreading swine flu.  Tuesday night, Facebook released some interesting data on the conversations taking place around the swine flu outbreak. The company has posted a photo album on Facebook’s official fan page, containing images that detail the growth of the discussion as well as the geographical distribution of people talking about swine flu.

As this image shows us, there is a wide range in the percentage of people talking about swine flu in wall posts from state to state. Texas has 0.82 percent of its Facebook users mentioning swine flu, while Mississippi only has 0.29 percent.…

A witness known only as Kym recently photographed in bright daylight a bizarre, silver airborne disk, flying in the air over the Northern Territory in Australia. The mother-of-three captured an image of the object on her mobile phone after some video footage and multiple other pictures failed to capture anything at all. Kym had the following to say about the phenomenon:

“It’s hard to tell what it is - it’s very strange. There was some lightning at the time but the shape of these lights is different. If it was streaks you’d think it was lightning but these are circles. I thought it could be a street light reflection in the…

For some reason, last weekend saw an unusual amount of UFO sightings, especially in the southern United States. Most of the reports originated in Georgia, Tennessee and Florida.

One witness stated that he recently settled in Alamo, Tennessee, whereupon he began to witness unexplained phenomena in the air. The witness claims to have found a number of strange balls on the ground in the vicinity of his residence; at least one picture has emerged of these eerie findings.

On April 18th, over in Lebanon, Tennessee, another witness observed two objects in the air. Both were rapidly changing direction and speed in an extremely erratic manner. The witness used a pair of 8×50…

The German energy firm, RWE, has announced that a coalition of leading automobile manufacturers and energy companies have come together in order to define a standard plug which will ensure that most electric cars can be recharged at any universal station. The plug has three thick prongs and carries 400 volts, and would be made available at every charging station across the European continent.

The corporations involved in the consensus include General Motors, Fiat, BMW, Volkswagen, Ford, Mitsubishi, Eon, Toyota, Vattenfall, Enel, Endesa, EDF and Npower. The agreement also connotes an ethic of partnership between powerful rival companies, at least in order to ensure the viability of sustainable energy vehicles.

A spokesman…

A physicist named Alan Kostelecký and a graduate student named Jay Tasson recently published a paper in Physical Review Letters (vol 102, p 10402) which suggests that gravity may change seasonally, one of several extremely unlikely-seeming scenarios that may underlie an emerging ultimate theory of the Universe.

The paper explores the premise that relativity and the standard model of particle physics are both incomplete, a well known and frustrating aspect of contemporary theoretical physics. General relativity fails to compute in situations where gravity is extremely strong, such as during the Big Bang, or at the singularity of a black hole. Also, the standard model falls apart when contemplating fundamental particles of…

Those astronomers were just checking out the cosmos one day when they stumbled upon a bizarre human hand formation reaching out to grasp our consciousnesses. They captured it in color, and it offered it up to us as a peculiar specimen. What we’re observing here is a pulsar, known to us as PSR B1509-58. The image depicts an X-ray nebula, and it measures a modest 150 light years around the waist.

According to NASA, “The pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star which is spewing energy out into the space around it to create complex and intriguing structures, including one that resembles a large cosmic hand.”

Those spectral fingers are brought to…