Solar power is literally everywhere, just not at night. But it's free to capture, if you have the means. Plenty of folks have been trying to capture enough solar energy to power cities or cars or whatever gadget you can think of, but sunlight just isn't as convenient as we'd like it to be. Solar energy is still going to become a larger and larger contributor to the mix of energy resources, and even as oil prices remain low, it looks like some companies are still committed to investing in it. Go, solar power, go....

• The world's largest coal supplier, Shenhua Group Corp, is partnering with SolarReserve to build 1,000 megawatts of solar power facilities in China for a couple billion bucks. This is just one step towards China building solar power plants capable of generating 10,000 megawatts of electricity by 2020. [url]
• Ivanpah is a huge solar energy farm with about 350,000 computer controlled mirrors redirecting sunlight at a tower in the middle of a California-Nevada border desert. A few of its mirrors were aimed incorrectly and damaged its operations, but this kind of solar farm design might not be very economical for very long, anyway. [url]
• New solar energy capturing materials could help harvest sunlight during the day and release the energy at night -- or at any other time, on demand. Chemically-based storage materials -- aka solar thermal fuels (STF) -- have been around for a while, but the development of inexpensive, durable solid (transparent) materials with this ability might be more practical and lead to smarter windows and surfaces that can absorb light and emit heat. [url]

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There's no shortage of new man-made materials being developed, and they come in all different shapes, sizes and purposes. Sometimes it's about making something old in a new way, or giving something common an extremely uncommon property — or just producing something in previously unimaginable quantities. Here are some new developments from the world of synthetics.

• Concrete is a significant but often-overlooked source of greenhouse gas emissions, but what if you could replace it with a new material made from those very emissions themselves? Researches have found a way to turn captured carbon dioxide into a new construction material they've dubbed CO₂NCRETE, though it's currently only at the proof-of-concept stage. [url]
• Transparent wood has been created at the microscopic level, but now researchers are demonstrating a new form that could be mass-produced. Wood has endured as one of the most reliable and useful building materials, and a transparent version could be an ideal material for solar cells, among other things. [url]
• Bolt Threads is a startup that just raised $50 million in funding to "brew" spider silk and other insect fibres in huge quantities. Spider silk is an incredible material limited primarily by the fact that it is extremely difficult and expensive to farm, but these new methods could completely change that within the next few years (and change the face of the global textile market in the process). [url]

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Sometimes, the key to kicking off a whole new world of technology is a brand new material. The discovery and/or creation of new materials with useful properties is pursued in engineering, chemistry and physics — sometimes with world-changing results, and other times producing only curiosities. Lately, it seems like a lot of the most interesting material advances have to do with flexibility in one way or another, like these four creations that might end up enabling the devices of the future:

• An elastic material that goes from matte to shiny when stretched could have future applications in flexible displays. But there are a lot of tests to be done to see if that's really a possibility — for now, it looks like this substance might be more useful as a passive strain sensor for other materials. [url]
• MIT researchers have taken very early steps towards creating "fabric" that can capture images like a camera lens. The system captures images with a distributed fabric mesh, though all it's captured so far is a rudimentary smiley face. [url]
• "Flexiramics" is an ultra-thin, foldable and flexible material that shares a lot of key properties with ceramics and might help create flexible circuit boards. It's non-conductive and can withstand over 24 hours in a 1,200°C oven. [url]
• This newly-created metallic glass is both hard and elastic, thanks to an almost-completely-disorganized atomic structure. It has the highest impact resistance of any material in its class, and goes by the not-so-memorable name of SAM2X5-630. [url]

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Plastics are everywhere. It's hard to imagine all the modern conveniences that exist because of the existence of plastic and polymers, and it would be difficult to continue living a modern lifestyle without plastics. Maybe we're starting to try not to use plastic bags to carry groceries home in some places, but the bad environmental reputation of plastic might have some solutions. Plastics could be made to be easier to recycle. Also, we could replace some of the more problematic plastics with more environmentally-friendly materials.

• Biodegrading polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles might be more feasible now that Japanese researchers have discovered bacteria (Ideonella sakainesis) that can grow on this common commercial polymer. Maybe this isn't much better than melting down the plastic and recycling it into new bottles, or maybe our ecosystem will adapt to consuming all of our waste. Thanks, Mother Nature! [url]
• If fungus can be grown quickly enough, perhaps it'll make sense to replace some plastic products with fungus? We've seen a few other examples of fungus as a building material before, and the possibilities are expanding with fungus-based materials that can be stiff, rubbery or flexible like leather. [url]
• Some commercial plastics, like thermoset polymers, aren't easy to recycle. It's the reason why old tires get stacked up and burned. Making more recyclable thermoset plastics could have significant environmental benefits, allowing tons and tons of our disposable products to find new uses instead of a place in a landfill. [url]

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Comic book superheroes have all kinds of incredible abilities. There are a few wall-crawling heroes, but the wall-climbing ability of a "Gecko Man" hasn't really captured as many fans as Spider-Man has. A bite from a radioactive spider might not be the most realistic way to obtain the power to climb walls with ease, but science also suggests that there needs to be a bit more than "spider" or "gecko" power for a person to crawl up a wall. Look on the wall! It's Velcro Man? Vacuum-Assisted Man?

• Gecko feet rely on van der Waals forces to stick to surfaces so that they can climb smooth vertical walls. However, these forces are too weak to support animals much bigger than geckos without comically large feet. Spiders and insects are small enough to take advantage of the gecko effect, but humans would need a size 114 shoe (or about 80% of the front side of our body area) to climb up a wall. [url]
• Some engineers who really wanted to build something to climb walls made a vacuum-powered contraption to scale a wall like a spider-man. It's not exactly a stealthy way to move up a wall, but if you don't mind sounding like a leaf blower.... [url]
• You can also just rent a velcro wall (and wear a velcro suit) if you just want to "stick" to a wall. You might remember David Letterman stuck to a wall of industrial-strength velcro -- but he couldn't really move up or down the wall on his own. [url]

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Plastics are incredibly useful materials. Unfortunately, being extremely durable also means plastics are annoyingly persistent in the environment as pollution. Less than 10% of plastic gets recycled, so the rest either ends up in landfills -- or floats into waterways to the ocean. We'll probably figure out some way to make use of landfill materials someday, but it'll be much harder to clean up the oceans if we continue at the rate we're going.

• By 2050, we could have more plastic by weight in the ocean than fish. Perhaps more disturbing is the estimate that nearly all of the world's seabirds have already consumed some plastic. Apparently, about a third of all plastic escapes from proper disposal and containment and ends up in the ocean (or in the mouth of a seabird). [url]
• Every so often, there's some optimistic kid who thinks there's a tech solution for cleaning up the ocean's garbage. However, it's probably better to tackle the root causes and stop polluting -- rather than trying to track down literally billions of pounds of plastic floating all over the ocean. [url]
• Recycling is great -- especially if recycling plastic can be done in an economically reasonable manner that actually helps people. Recycled plastic could be turned into low-cost building materials, and about 2 tons of waste plastic could be turned into low-income housing in Mexico in about a week for a few hundred bucks. [url]
• A mealworm, the larvae form of the darkling beetle, can actually digest a diet of Styrofoam and other forms of polystyrene. Waxworms, the larvae of Indian mealmoths, can digest polyethylene, too. So maybe there could be a way to engineer some critters to decompose our plastic pollution problem, and hopefully no one will get the bright idea of trying to genetically modify these things to eat everything in their path.... [url]

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Toys have really become much more advanced than the yo-yos and etch-a-sketches of the past. Sure, kids will always like to play with the big cardboard boxes instead of the toys that came in them, but older kids have amazing remote-controlled drones and paper planes (that they might need to register with the FAA someday). If you've been looking for some cool RC cars that can climb walls and drive on the ceiling, there are a bunch of toys to choose from.

• Disney Research has a wall-climbing robot car called the VertiGo. This looks like a cool prototype for a toy -- and maybe someday there will be a Star Wars droid that rolls on ceilings and walls a bit better than BB-8 can. [url]
• If a small robot car can drive around on the ceiling and walls, it's usually done with vacuum suction or propellers to get the tiny vehicle to defy gravity. Researchers have a solution that doesn't sound like a tiny vacuum cleaner or helicopter -- using gecko-like materials that are electrically activated. Electroadhesion probably won't be available on kids' toys in the near future, but it would be a much better toy for kids to play with quietly. [url]
• Takara Tomy already makes a remote-controlled car with tiny helicopter propellers that can fly... and maneuver on water. Okay, it probably doesn't do too well on ceilings or walls, but it looks cooler than some other wall/ceiling-driving RC toy cars. [url]

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Diamond is a fascinating material. We haven't quite perfected how to make diamonds, so they're still rare -- and somewhat valuable, depending on the eye of the beholder. One aspect of diamond that everyone learns in school is that it is really, really hard. However, the title of "hardest" material might have to be awarded to other exotic substances.

• Diamond is the standard for comparing the upper end of the hardness scale -- and it's a naturally occurring mineral that defines what "ultra-hard" materials are. A newly discovered form of carbon called Q-carbon is harder than diamond (pending verification), and it can be made at room temperature and pressure with lasers (though currently only as a film up to 500 nanometers thick). This synthesis method can also produce diamond-like films, too. [url]
• A material called ultrahard fullerite is difficult to synthesize, but researchers are still looking for better methods to make this stuff. Ultrahard fullerite, made of a 3D polymer of connected fullerenes, can be twice as hard as natural diamond. Similar synthesis methods might also lead to aggregated diamond nanorods -- the least compressible known material (so far). [url]
• Diamond was once the hardest known naturally occurring material, but lonsdaleite (aka hexagonal diamond) was first identified in meteorites in 1967 -- and could be harder than diamond. There are a few other "harder than diamond" candidates, too, but they're not naturally occurring. Lonsdaleite is "theoretically" harder than diamond, but natural samples vary in quality and many are softer than diamond. [url]

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The history of materials once correlated highly with the development of civilization: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, ... the Silicon Age.... However, we seem to have gotten away from huge advances depending on the discovery of new materials. Or maybe we just haven't discovered how to make the right materials yet (e.g., room temperature superconductors, nanotubes, etc). Here are just a few interesting materials that might change the world (if we can make them).

• Diamond nanothread is a stable form of one-dimensional diamond, and it could be a very useful material if we figure out how to make it reliably in large quantities -- with just enough defects to prevent it from being too brittle. Graphene is a similar "wonder material" that promises breakthrough properties, if only we could manufacture it correctly. So far, diamond nanothread can only be made a couple of cubic millimeters at a time, but it could someday make ultra-strong materials for space elevator tethers and other applications that currently remain in the realm of science fiction. [url]
• The potential of graphene has been held back by the expense of manufacturing it, but that might change in the near future. Researchers claim that large-area graphene sheets can be made about 100 times cheaper than ever before, using commercially-available copper foil. Billions are being spent to crack graphene production issues, so we're presumably going to see graphene-based products in our lifetimes. [url]
• A modified buckminsterfullerene molecule called a "buckybomb" (or dodecanitrofullerene) could be a new class of high energy nanomaterials. This stuff actually needs to be synthesized first to determine if it's actually as explosive as the simulations predict it will be, but if anyone dares to make this molecule in significant quantities, it could be many orders of magnitude more powerful than TNT. [url]

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There's going to be a point where Moore's law stops -- because the things we build can only get so small before quantum physics starts to really mess with how circuits behave. Still, researchers keep pushing technology to make smaller and smaller devices. Molecular electronics aren't practical just yet, but the development of nanoscale components isn't completely ridiculous. Here are just a few examples.

• Origami and kirigami (aka origami that allows for cutting) could be useful in designing electronics from sheets of conductive materials like graphene. Flexible and bendable gadgets could be good for wearable or implantable devices, but it might take a while before graphene is ready for consumer electronics. [url]
• A single molecule diode made from a single symmetric molecule, an ionic solution and two gold electrodes has set a performance record, beating previous molecule-sized diodes by a factor of 50. Clearly, no one is going to be using this diode outside of a lab, but it could help design better fundamental devices with extremely small dimensions. [url]
• A team of scientists has created a field-effect transistor (FET) from a single molecule -- but it requires a scanning-tunneling microscope (STM) to function. This isn't the first single molecule transistor, and it probably won't be the last. However, it's still going to be tricky to find a way to make these nanoscale components useful for practical purposes. [url]

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