Anyway, the problem with this particular case is that like most good hoaxes it is partially truthful.
If I had to make a stab at how all this happened it would be something like this:
Melanin really has some photo electric properties. They must have read that somewhere, decided to build a 'science fair' project around it.
After figuring out they couldn't get it to work they may have been tempted to fake it (since that is pretty easy).
The the press picked it up and they could no longer back out, maybe still believing that they could make it work, that they had just rigged the demo to cover the fact that somehow their implementation was faulty, instead of the basic principle.
If Pons & Fleischman could fall for that temptation I'm sure a bunch of kids can fall for that.
Same subject, after all. Cheap, free energy, the world a much better place and you in the spotlight.
edit: what made me especially suspicious was the source (I would expect to read this in a different spot first, rather than the dailymail, which has a bit of a reputation) and the fact that hair is not a semiconductor, which is something you will need in order to direct the stream of electrons excited by the photo-electric effect. Without a diode at the most fundamental level in the circuit somewhere all the free electrons will simply use the path of least resistance to restore the balance.
hair is a well structured layered tube and this could provide a good scaffold for the eumelanin - but it seems not sufficient to create a photoelectric device.
Hair is, in fact one of the best organic isolators.
When hair was mentioned as used in the device one thinks "bunkum" or similar. Then one learns that melanin is a semi-conductor and that initial thought is at least tempered with "they may have something of interest; if that device produces that output I'll eat my hat, but perhaps it has some output?".
Chlorophyll is currently being developed as a low cost dye in solar cells (the dye is the photoelectric material sandwiched in the middle that produces the electricity). Melanin itself is currently of interest due to it enabling the standard dyes (silicon dioxide, titanium dioxide, etc) to capture electrons they shouldn't be able to, it somehow takes low-energy light (even infra-red) and kicks it up a notch for the standard dye to capture.
Melanin in itself has a few amazing properties. It's apparently photoelectric right through from IR to Gamma rays, and also alpha, beta and neutrons produce the same effect in it. The IR and UV effects are the best features, making it an efficiency booster in existing solar panels by one means or another. The fact that it can potentially produce electricity through radiation has a whole other interesting factor to it, it creates the potential for a direct radiation->electricity just as solar cells have provided for solar energy (coal, oil and natural gas are just dead plants and animals that harvested solar energy a million years ago, wind is the thermal effect from solar, hydroelectric comes from rivers that came from rain that came from a heated ocean, etc). The two raw power sources we have are solar and nuclear (I suppose technically tidal and geothermal are raw sources too, but neither are developed enough), skipping the middle-men, so to speak, in the process is likely to be crucial in our future.
Melanin photovoltaic cells could enable the direct harvesting of radiation to produce electricity from many sources. Either stray radiation in a nuclear reactor (basically as radiation shielding that makes you money), or as an alternative to RTG's, but currently its greatest use in this field could be harvesting energy from nuclear waste, both the thermal products and the ionizing radiation. It's also of interest for space, as ionizing radiation there is immense, the sun emits vast amounts of x-rays constantly, we're just buried under our planets radiation shields.
The science is there for melanin as I said, but it'll likely take a lot of R&D before a melanin-based cell is on the store front, and it likely won't appear on its own to the general public as the uses of melanin-based cells are likely to be found where civilians are not (IE radioactive places or space).
You could have fooled me though ;)
Konarka is one of the few parties that make dye sensitized cells today, you wouldn't happen to be working for them ?
Solar is becoming popular at a time when interest in biomimicry is also high, I personally believe that copying off nature will give us the needed advantage if we've got a hope to change global warming.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qfYDEi4pVg
Anybody here from Nepal ?
By my guess they've got over 150 cells formed in there (if it's working how I'm suspecting it is), which would easily mean they could get the 9V/18W they're claiming. The 'debunkers' theory on what they're doing is somehow hiding a solar panel under the black craft paper and still getting power, which is absurd, or he's claiming they're using a battery, but the power visibly fluctuates far more than it should from a commercial 9V battery.
The simplest explanation is usually the best, and in this case I believe the simplest explanation is ignorance. Copper + stainless steel + salt = battery.
There are two lessons to be had from this, and the recent facebook fax hoax 1) Traditional Journalism is good because they do fact checking and blogs do not. 2) The real time web is easily hackable.
People don't take the time to do research. They just read and accept. Slower news helps it be more real. Most of what comes into our brains now is just forgotten anyway. It may actually be better for us to read stuff a week or two after it comes out so it has time to be vetted by the community.
We may be doing ourselves a disservice by staying so "up" on the news because we could be polluting our brains with false information. We should be in constant doubt of everything we read on blogs, but unfortunately, we are not.
Btw, the thing was immediately tagged as a hoax on Slashdot, too quickly for me to even think on my own whether it made sense or not...
There's also a saying, "He who says the most in an argument is in the wrong." electromagnetic spoke a lot to "cover his trail." I believe he was hopeful that the hoax was not a hoax. I was had too, I thought, wow, that's clever, if it's true the world will change. I was hopeful.
It's okay to be wrong.
I suppose you could say I believe he was had as well, because of intuition. Intuition is knowing something without knowing how you know it. I don't believe he would have spent so much time supporting the idea if he thought it was a hoax. He even back-peddled a little bit by saying "What I said was true even if this isn't true."
If he believed it was a hoax, why not say, "This is probably a hoax, but here's the science..."
I think that is exactly what makes it more rather than less likely that he's telling the truth. It's an honest admission that could get him some flak.
After all, why admit to this now if it wasn't the truth.
With a moniker like electromagnetic and a fair amount of accurate knowledge at his disposal he threw off enough 'good stuff' to confuse the hell out of me. I had to go to some trouble to get the "'wtf', this guy seems to know what he's talking about, so how come he defends it?" feeling out of my system.
I actually suspected that he was doing it on purpose but I wasn't brave enough to call him out on it. And I don't feel bad for admitting that, I really think that it was a pretty good prank.
When he said 'it is true, even it if isn't true' that is exactly what it is. The basic principle is sound, this implementation is absolutely not.
FWIW, I've been a member of fieldlines for many years and one of our pet activities there is to debunk bullshit renewable energy schemes.
Another thing that threw me off was that they claimed to be using some kind of solvent, but then when I got to the bit where it worked indoors I realized it must certainly be a hoax, or at least a gross misunderstanding of electro-chemical processes. The 'has to be moist' was a pretty bad sign that something else was going on here, the metals another (hair being a pretty much perfect insulator).
So, after all that the only questions remaining are:
How do they do it ?
No way those fluorescent lamps are staying lit without some additional source of energy spliced in there somehow.
Are they themselves still deluded by their invention ? (hard to imagine, given the above)
Are they aware of the basic flaws and are they keeping up a pretense hoping the media attention will die off (that usually doesn't take very long), or are they in too deep now ?
And congratulations to electromagnetic on a pretty good prank, to quote GWB, fool me once ... ;)
What? The original story was published by the Daily Mail, and it appears to have been debunked by a blogger.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/09/white-house-...
The journalistic ethic is going in the toilet because it doesn't spur ratings...
There are those who do their homework, have writing skills and do their utmost to produce quality content, there are the plagiarists that will copy whole blogs verbatim and pass them off as their own, in between there is everything else.
To put all bloggers in the same corner is the same as saying that all people are unethical. The 'majority' may be right, it may be off but my feeling is that there is plenty of excellent content out there and plenty of crap. I wouldn't be so fast to discard the majority, especially in other languages than English the amount of regurgitation is less than you'd expect.
Regurgitators = thinly veiled plagiarism, what in school would be called 'rewriting' instead of 'writing'.
And newspapers that print bloomberg or reuters stories are also regurgitators.
HN isn't special, and it attracts all kinds. QED.