The Hollywood Liberal

Kim Jong-Il Dies
Three years after suffering a stroke, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has died at the age of 69, state-run television announced. Kim Jong-il has been the dictatorial leader of the impoverished communist country since the death of his father Kim Il-sung in 1994.

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Kim Jong Il Is Dead
North Korea’s current dictator has died. State television gives the cause of death as—and this is not a joke—exhaustion from working too hard. Kim succeeded his father in 1994 and has indicated that his third son is to take over the responsibility of oppressing the North Korean people.  —PZS BBC: Mr Kim, who has led the communist nation since the death of his father in 1994, died on a train while visiting an area outside the capital, the announcement said. […] The announcement came in an emotional statement read out on national television. The announcer, wearing black, said he had died of physical and mental over-work. Read more

North Korea’s current dictator has died. State television gives the cause of death as—and this is not a joke—exhaustion from working too hard. Kim succeeded his father in 1994 and has indicated that his third son is to take over the responsibility of oppressing the North Korean people.? —PZS

BBC:

Mr Kim, who has led the communist nation since the death of his father in 1994, died on a train while visiting an area outside the capital, the announcement said.

[…]

The announcement came in an emotional statement read out on national television.

The announcer, wearing black, said he had died of physical and mental over-work.

Read more

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Chart from Emanuel Sachs of MIT with data that is already two years old.  Recent discoveries hold the promise of keeping the cost reductions going past 2020.

New research on solar energy conversion finds, “the efficiency of conventional solar cells could be significantly increased.”  The research was led by chemist Xiaoyang Zhu at The University of Texas at Austin.  Their news release explains:

… it’s possible to double the number of electrons harvested from one photon of sunlight using an organic plastic semiconductor material.

“Plastic semiconductor solar cell production has great advantages, one of which is low cost,” said Zhu, a professor of chemistry. “Combined with the vast capabilities for molecular design and synthesis, our discovery opens the door to an exciting new approach for solar energy conversion, leading to much higher efficiencies.”

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Advances like this one hold the promise of even further reductions post-2020.  The study itself in Science, “Observing the Multiexciton State in Singlet Fission and Ensuing Ultrafast Multielectron Transfer” (subs. req’d) is pretty technical stuff.

Here’s a more digestible version of the finding from the news release:

The maximum theoretical efficiency of the silicon solar cell in use today is approximately 31 percent, because much of the sun’s energy hitting the cell is too high to be turned into usable electricity. That energy, in the form of “hot electrons,” is instead lost as heat. Capturing hot electrons could potentially increase the efficiency of solar-to-electric power conversion to as high as 66 percent.

Zhu and his team previously demonstrated that those hot electrons could be captured using semiconductor nanocrystals. They published that research in Science in 2010, but Zhu says the actual implementation of a viable technology based on that research is very challenging.

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• Exploiting the dark shadow state to produce double the electrons could increase solar cell efficiency to 44 percent.

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