New light bulb?

[Dean Hoffman]

The bright boys at MIT think they have a new, really efficient incandescent. From the U.K. Telegraph:

(bad pun intended)

[bob_villain]

Url won't work with ad-blocker.

[Dean Hoffman]

Does this work better?

[Arthur Conan Doyle]

Nope. You should put long URLs inside angle brackets to keep them from breaking:

[Chuck]

We need to ban those energy-hog CFLs and LEDs.

[Don Y]

(sigh) Typical "fluff" story -- media just "retweeting" press releases. Why can't "they" actually investigate things instead of just repeating what someone else (who obviously has a bias/interest) has told them?

E.g., what are the issues standing between "it" and "production"? What are the *likely* costs going to be if it was sold in HUGE volumes, *today*? Of those, which can be improved upon with techological advances and which are "hard limits"?

I.e., how much of a pipe dream *is* this?

[Frank]

No problem with url.

Surprising how inefficient even new lighting sources, CFL and LED, both are.

Lots of room for improvement.

[Don Y]

When I originally set out to add some "heat" to the citrus trees, I naturally thought of using large "power resistors" (being an EE). But, power resistors cost a lot of money (in the kilowatt size).

OTOH, 1000W of "light" at 95% INefficiency does the trick on the cheap!

[they are also handy as cheap "power supplies" -- for certain types of electrical loads]

[trader_4]

Because it's a newspaper and not a technical journal?

You expect a reporter for the Telegraph to do that analysis? The researchers at MIT probably don't even know enough yet to make that evaluation. Did researchers accurately predict that you'd have a 60" LCD TV hanging on your wall for $1000 when LCD technology was first discovered? Was the reporter writing the first article in a general interest newspaper supposed to?

You expect a reporter for the Telegraph to make that judgement?

[Frank]

I did the same years ago for an unheated storage space with pipes in the ceiling.

[Micky]

"Previously researchers have warned that the blue light emitted by modern bulbs could be stopping people from getting to sleep at night and campaigners have expressed concerns about the dangerous chemicals they contain. "

So turn off the light!

[DerbyDad03]

I worked in a locked down, corporate environment with all sorts of ad blockers, prohibited domains, etc. Most image hosting sites, all webmail sites, tinyurl, etc. are blocked.

Both of the OP's url's (the preview and the direct link) went right through without an issue.

Must be something on your end, not the OP's (or ours).

[bob_villain]

...not a concern...ABP on Chrome. (and Telegraph's greed)

[Eagle]

Dean Hoffman used his keyboard to write :

I just changed all My bulbs to LEDs last week. :/

[>>>Ashton Crusher]

On Mon, 11 Jan 2016 21:47:12 -0600, "Dean Hoffman" wrote:

Ever since the EU restricted sales of traditional incandescent light bulbs, homeowners have complained about the shortcomings of their energy-efficient replacements. The clinical white beam of LEDs and frustrating time-delay of ?green? lighting has left many hankering after the instant, bright warm glow of traditional filament bulbs. But now scientists in the US believe they have come up with a solution which could see a reprieve for incandescent bulbs. "The lighting potential of this technology is exciting." Prof Gang Chen, MIT Researchers at MIT have shown that by surrounding the filament with a special crystal structure in the glass they can bounce back the energy which is usually lost in heat, while still allowing the light through. They refer to the technique as ?recycling light? because the energy which would usually escape into the air is redirected back to the filament where it can create new light. "It recycles the energy that would otherwise be wasted," said Professor Marin Soljacic. Your Business: Bright ideas from entrepreneurs An energy efficient light bulb Usually traditional light bulbs are only about five per cent efficient, with 95 per cent of the energy being lost to the atmosphere. In comparison LED or florescent bulbs manage around 14 per cent efficiency. But the scientists believe that the new bulb could reach efficiency levels of 40 per cent. And it shows colours far more naturally than modern energy-efficient bulbs. Traditional incandescent bulbs have a ?colour rendering index? rating of 100, because they match the hue of objects seen in natural daylight. However even ?warm? finish LED or florescent bulbs can only manage an index rating of 80 and most are far less. "This experimental device is a proof-of-concept, at the low end of performance that could be ultimately achieved by this approach," said principal research scientist Ivan Celanovic. "An important feature is that our demonstrated device achieves near-ideal rendering of colours. ?That is precisely the reason why incandescent lights remained dominant for so long: their warm light has remained preferable to drab fluorescent lighting for decades.? Thomas Edison patented the first commercially viable incandescent light bulb more than 130 years ago so that "none but the extravagant" would ever "burn tallow candles.? It works by heating a thin tungsten wire to temperatures of around

2,700 degrees Celsius. That hot wire emits what is known as black body radiation, a very broad spectrum of light that provides a warm look and a faithful rendering of all colours in a scene. Bulb The first prototype Credit: MIT However most of the energy is wasted as heat which is why many countries have now phased out the inefficient technology. The UK government announced in 2007 that incandescent bulbs would be phased out by 2011 however many manufacturers still sell them, using a loophole which says they can be put in industrial buildings. The Energy Saving Trust calculates that typical living room usage of a 60-watt incandescent lightbulb over a year would cost £7.64. Using an equivalent energy efficient fluorescent or ?CFL? lightbulb would cost £1.53 per year, while an LED would cost just £1.27. But if the new bulbs live up to expectations they would cost under 50p a year to run and even improve health. Previously researchers have warned that the blue light emitted by modern bulbs could be stopping people from getting to sleep at night and campaigners have expressed concerns about the dangerous chemicals they contain. Prof Gang Chen, Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT added: "The lighting potential of this technology is exciting.? The research was published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

[Micky]

Someone in Freecycle must have done that last week, because he gave me a bunch of incandescent bulbs. Maybe 20 of them.

[bob_villain]

...what a dolt...and you advertise! ????? ??

[Robert Green]

Grasshopper, you have become very wise. (-:

techological

A good science reporter (may NOT be any at the Telegraph) would find

*someone* who could explain what we're wondering: How do you capture broad spectrum radiation with lots of IR and turn the heat into light? Special dichroic coatings? A sort of "lasing" reflection of the heat energy that (here's the magic) converts the IR light to visible light?

Actually I think there were a lot of people that realized that even using the manufacturing techniques of the time that eventually the would "print" TV's much the same way they use photolithography to make multi-layer chips. I am sure in a PopScience from 50 years ago someboy got some of this stuff right. We've had Star Trek like flip-phones for quite some time.

Nope. Probably a "general assignment" reporter whose next piece will be on the oldest living English veteran or what someone dug up under a parking lot (recently it was the maligned and malformed Richard III).

Nowadays there's always a strong possibility that the article is a hoax cribbed from a growing number of sites dedicated to falsifying news reports.

[Don Y]

Exactly. A fluff piece.

The role of a reporter is to ask the questions his/her *readers* would ask -- not to simply pass "press releases" on to the public. To sort out a realistic way of explaining the issue(s) to the readership. Then, to identify the challenges remaining and likelihood of those challenges being overcome (e.g., some are NOT solely "funding issues" but have technical problems that make the solutions impractical; romm temperature superconductors??)

You can bet your *ss the *researcher* has already thought of these questions as he's, no doubt, asked them, himself. And, is probably the

*most* OPTIMISTIC of a discovery's/invention's potential. Even a naive journalist should be able to ask: "So, how much will it cost?" and "When will we see this being used?" Answers like "it *may* EVENTUALLY be cheaper than current alternatives" should prompt "then why can't we have it TODAY?"

Give an interested 8 year old the "microphone" and he'll NATURALLY ask the questions that the readership is *thinking*.

If you look at these sorts of reports, historically, they are little more than pipe dreams (where's my rollable OLED TV/phone/display? "cold fusion"?)

Or, just filler for an advertisement (space/slot) they couldn't sell...

[Don Y]

Contrast the approach in this piece: