10 ms·

Solar-panel "trees" really are inferior

650 points by DevX101 15y ago

DevX101 15y ago
This article was posted last night, but taken down by this morning. I recovered it from google cache.
- bhousel 15y ago
  The author is exactly right. There's no way that a tree array of panels that are half not even pointing at the sun will outperform a linear array of panels that are mostly pointing at the sun. Panels efficiency is measured in Watts, and this kid is not going to be able to record their efficiency with a simple probe DMM. In order to get a full picture of what's going on with his arrays, he would need to hook both arrays up to a load and measure throughout the day, or better yet a battery array / charge controller and measure at the end of the day which array produced more power. I kind of wanted to say something yesterday, but really didn't want to pile on the kid, and everyone here just wanted so badly for the kid to be a genius. The few comments that pointed out that he was wrong were voted down. This is something that really bothers me about science fairs. Back when I was 13 years old, I did a school project to redesign a local troublesome intersection. I just made a model of what it might look like and people loved it and they even wrote about it in the paper and displayed my model in the municipal building, and talked about what a bright young kid I was. Now that I'm older, this bothers me a lot because in doing the project I didn't do any real research, I didn't talk to any traffic engineers, I didn't learn about intersection designs.. I didn't learn anything really. As an adult, I can see that my plan for the intersection was silly and unworkable. I kind of wish that schools emphasized mentorship programs rather than science fairs. Kids would learn far more by partnering with knowledgeable adults to do their experiments, rather than having these silly competitions where nobody learns anything and the winner is the kid who puts the most work into having the nicest presentation.
  - babebridou 15y ago
    > There's no way that a tree array of panels that are half not even pointing at the sun will outperform a linear array of panels that are mostly pointing at the sun. While this is so very true in the theoretical sense of the term, I gave this a very short thought, and there might be edge conditions that could indeed lead to "better power with tree-shaped panels" (1), now that I think about it. There is a term that you are (rightfully) neglecting: the size of the system, and incurred energy loss due to Joule Effect. If the distance between panels arranged in a linear way is large, then it might be more efficient to place additional panels closer to the output circuit, maybe above it, in such a way that it doesn't overlap and yep, maybe even with a different orientation, just to optimize the distance between producer and consumer, and thus reduce resistance and energy losses. But that would probably only be valid for specific sets of distances, positions, hour of the day (seasons, voltage, quality of the conductor material...), but that's only because the studied system shifts to be more of that of an Energy Transmission System than that of an Energy Production System (1) or sphere-shaped or pyramid-shaped or pokemon-shaped for that matter...
    - waterlesscloud 15y ago
      Genuine (if idle) question- why do plants have leaves which permanently face away from the sun? It's not zero-cost to the plant to produce such leaves...so why does it?
      - DevX101 15y ago
        My educated guess is that there is some benefit to having a uniform distribution of solar power over the course of a day. If all leaves pointed in one optimal direction, then more energy would be directed at the tree in a single day, but it would collect this energy in a narrow time span. It's possible a tree could not efficiently process this energy in this time span, similar to how you would not be able to eat a deer in one sitting. By having a generally spherical orientation of leaves, the tree is always receiving power throughout the day. Again, this is all just my hypothesis.
- pixcavator 15y ago
  The article was oulined here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902684 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902684.
- w1ntermute 15y ago
  Here's a PDF mirror in case the cache goes down:　http://ompldr.org/vOXppeQ/solar_trees.pdf http://ompldr.org/vOXppeQ/solar_trees.pdf
raganwald 15y ago
I didn’t find it that harsh. He was direct and took pains not to ridicule a thirteen year-old for making an entirely age-appropriate mistake in measuring the results. Instead, he asked the perfectly valid question of how this becomes news without critical thought. In that, the critique seemed hopelessly ignorant of how the news works. Why should science fair projects be treated any differently than crime, the personal lives of celebrities, politics, or economics? News outlets publish first and ask questions later or not at all. They have gone to court to defend their right to publish things they know to be false. How did a confused science project become international news? Why, the same way that almost any overnight sensation becomes international news, by being digestible, by being something people want to be true, by appealing to their preconceived biases. A commenter pointed out that this is the value of a peer-review process. And indeed, this result was published without peer review. So who is the fool here? The journalist for publishing without review? Or the reader who knowingly accepts the result despite it being published without peer review and/or corroboration?
- ugh 15y ago
  He could have been more polite but one can always be more polite.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  I disagree, but I really believe he didn't do it intentionally. He was ridiculing the MSM and the people who jumped on the bandwagon without doing any analysis. Unfortunately, nobody will see it that way. People will see it as him/her attacking Aidan Dwyer (the boy who did the experiment). He doesn't help his case by never referring to Aidan by name, instead using a fairly pejorative sounding "the kid. If Aiden was my kid, I would try not to let him read the article, though I would explain the article and what went wrong within a teaching framework that included pointing out when other scientists did similar thing (don't know any off the top of my head, but I've no doubt the stories are out there). It is sad, too, because this article needed to be written, but instead of writing it to help Aiden succeed in spite of the fanfare, the author has likely hurt Aiden. There is every reason to tell kids they are wrong when they are wrong, but there are appropriate ways and inappropriate ways to do it. This was inappropriate. Finally, I've flagged this submission. Since the author took down the original, it is obvious he is rethinking whether the article was a good idea. Yes, the internet is forever, but people's wishes should count for something.
llambda 15y ago
It's refreshing to see a counterpoint to the MSM's enthusiasm for over-dramatization and poor fact-checking; this wasn't a breakthrough in the science of photovoltaics, as some headlines seemed to read. And I'm particularly happy that the author took great care to not target the boy. He should be encouraged to continue this kind of scientific pursuit and not be dissuaded by mistakes in the research. In fact this is a good example of how peer-reviewed research actually functions. That said, I feel the MSM only does him a disservice by misrepresenting the implications of his project as something more than it might be.
- mpclark 15y ago
  Journalists aren't all Woodward and Bernstein. In fact, most of them aren't. They are, in the main, reporters. They report what they've been told, pausing only to package it up and make it more digestible to the reader. To hold the media in general to some higher 'you must be a domain expert to write about this subject' standard is to have a starry-eyed view of the world. <bracing myself for the downvotes>
  - chrishenn 15y ago
    We all know what we see on T.V. and from places like CNN suck, but that doesn't mean it's journalism. Journalism is talking to as many people as you can about a story, then putting it together in a really straightforward, no bullshit report. It's just sad that popular news organizations are calling themselves journalists when in reality they are just advertising for someones beliefs.
  - Goladus 15y ago
    Science writers should have some understanding of the field they're writing about, though. If they don't understand the scientific details and none of their domain expert contacts are able to help, they should at least able to recognize the difference between a peer-reviewed article and a blog entry. Spotting unverified claims doesn't require any science knowledge at all. <bracing myself for the downvotes> Don't be lame.
  - blasdel 15y ago
kubrickslair 15y ago
A bigger point here is how we all mistook the results. There is always a struggle between extreme peer review, which leads to insularity, and going by the net real impact- 'don't publish, build'. In the latter approach, the winner often forgets whose shoulders he stands on. In the former, you cannot stand too high from your peers' shoulders, and there are few real winners- 'everybody is great, everybody wins /s'.
- dramaticus3 15y ago
  all ? speak for yourself
  - kubrickslair 15y ago
    You missed the point of what I am saying, if you are debating on this minutiae.
    - pingswept 15y ago
      It could be the case that 95% of the readers who encountered the original article on HN thought it was bunk, but didn't want to spend the time to correct it. Or maybe it's the reverse-- maybe 95% of us believed it was a brilliant invention. I can't think of a way to estimate which is true.
      - kubrickslair 15y ago
        Yes, but my comment was much more general than this particular event or invention. I only posted it because it seemed like a good context.
      - dennisgorelik 15y ago
        I personally suspected that something is likely to be wrong with that "solar battery tree", but didn't have time to dig deeper. I quickly took a look into comments, didn't find any heavyweight names there, didn't find any solid comments and quit without upvoting the article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902329 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902329 Unfortunately 630 other people upvoted it. I do upvote this "Debunk" article http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906538 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906538 Important conclusion: In news ranking I would clearly prefer to rely on subset of Hacker News readers. Not on the full set. I actually would prefer not to see articles that are upvoted by the same people who upvoted junk science article.
skrebbel 15y ago
I don't think you can put this out there any less harsh than this. Plus, all the harshness that's there is towards stupid journalists, not to the kid. And, well, they deserve it.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
I voted this up -- it read very well -- but I am a little uncomfortable about voting up an article the author clearly wanted to delete.
randomanonymous 15y ago
You listened to the comments in the last post's comments (the one with only a couple comments). This is MUCH healthier for a 13 year old, title wise, and article wise.
robryan 15y ago
I wonder, if this idea come from a someone older without any real experience or qualifications in solar would it have been fact checked a little better before it ended up everywhere? I would want to encourage young people as much as possible, it's just that some of the things you heard about are only considered impressive when those doing the story have factored age into it. If the person was say 30 it wouldn't even be a story.
- nikster 15y ago
  The idea had apparently been around for a while, since 2008 or so, there were other, similar studies. I don't know if they were similarly flawed or not though. I also would not completely dismiss the premise - trees are probably very good at converting solar energy. And to add to that, I don't buy the counter argument that a tree arrangement can't be better than a flat panel - why not? The sun moves around so the flat panel might be optimal at one point in the day, but will certainly be sub-optimal at other times. This isn't a clear cut argument at all. There are many variables in play. Cloud cover; seasons; etc. Keep in mind the experiment was done in a cold climate.
  - daemonize 15y ago
    I would imaginr that the flat panel could be hooked to a servo and a control loop be used to optimize poiting attitude in real time to compensate for the sun's natural cycle.
    - shabble 15y ago
      This is already extremely common, with significant efficiency gains. As ever, the downside is added complexity and cost. See https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Solar_tracker https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Solar_tracker
jshort 15y ago
Regardless of Aiden's findings about solar energy his ability to see a pattern in tree branches and ten to attempt to answer the question why is impressive in my books.
- sqrt17 15y ago
  The problem is: there are plenty of 13-year-olds that apply the same astuteness to ants, pet rabbits, pocket calculators and other things that are not really interesting to the mainstream. So the reason why everyone is excited about it is that there's a hope to get a contribution towards a socially relevant problem. Except there's not, because no one is there to explain to the kids how to design an evaluation for their solution that makes it possible to relate it back to the important problem. As a comparison, consider a cake baking contest in which only the participant himself/herself is allowed to taste the cake where everyone else can only look. This would not be a recipe to develop good-tasting cakes, even though you probably get some very beautiful cakes made out of styrofoam by people who believe that styrofoam tastes great. Besides giving up the claim that science fairs are more relevant to science than high school orchestras are to music (because, reasonably, a high school orchestra delivering a crappy performance of a virtually unknown piece may still make some kind of contribution), another possibility would be that somewhere between regional and state levels, participants get expert advice on their creation and formally have to factor in the expert advice into a revised version of their experiment.
  - lurker19 15y ago
    Ironically, your example is reality! Cake artists use fondant to make gorgeous high-price wedding and party cakes with intricate and beautiful decorations, but that taste awful. It makes one wonder why we have an industry of cake art instead of wedding sculpture. I guess people appreciate the time-limitedness of the artwork for some reason.
waterlesscloud 15y ago
This doesn't address what I thought was the insight, which is about finding optimal placement and facing for stationary solar panels when the light source (the sun) is not stationary. Neither throughout the day or through out the year. It doesn't seem impossible that some placements are better than all-in-one-direction, especially over time, and that's what I thought the experiment was about. Am I misunderstanding something basic? EDIT: Going back and reading the kid's writeup at http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2011/aidan.html http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/201... shows some interesting details. He's not using voltage as a proxy for power, he's using it as a proxy for "sunlight collected". There's two voltage graphs on that page that are machine drawn, not hand drawn. The point of interest in the two graphs is that the Standard graph has narrower peaks of voltage, whereas the Tree graph is broader. This represents the idea that the Tree was generating electricity over a longer period of time. NOT that it was generating more power, but that it was collecting sunlight for a longer period. The 20% and 50% pie charts indicate this same idea. The percentages are hours, not watts or volts. 12.5 hours vs 8 hours in one timeframe, 13.5 vs 11 in another. Hours. Not volts, not watts. Time, not power.
- ghaff 15y ago
  Yes. If you subdivide a solar panel into, say, 10 pieces and orient each of those 10 pieces in an orientation different from the orientation that produces the maximum power output over the course of the day for a single panel, the sum will still be less.
  - aptwebapps 15y ago
    But a distributed layout might have higher minimums than a single orientation. For an actual tree, at least, that might be important. The sun doesn't just move during the day, it changes its course over the year, so it might be very beneficial to the tree to ensure that it get's at least a certain amount of juice each day. There might be other reasons than optimal solar exposure. Maybe structural reasons, or, I don't know, sap distribution ... Finally, maybe the Fibonacci sequence gets selected in nature a lot because it's easy to select. What I mean is, the very best algorithms are not necessarily the ones that get selected - the ones that actually get tried and are good enough to survive are the ones that appear. My theory is that organisms stumble into stuff like the Fibonacci sequence or that fern fractal because they are likely to and because they work well enough for whatever purpose.
EGreg 15y ago
Wait a second bro. Trees don't rotate to face the sun. In order to have an optimal angle throughout the whole day, it would have to keep facing the sun, i.e. rotate. I believe he may have missed this point. As for the voltage measurement being the wrong metric -- agree.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  Many plants actually do rotate throughout the day to face the sun.
- uberalex 15y ago
  Trees have leaves on all sides so that catch the sun throughout the day.
  - EGreg 15y ago
    that is the point, trees don't have a flat array that doesn't move.
- gmartres 15y ago
  No, he explains that at the end. I can try to reformulate it. Imagine that you can find the orientation which gives you the maximum amount of power for a day, say E_max. If you have N panels, the total energy produced at the end of the day will be NE_max. If instead, you decide to put each panel in a specific direction, they will all produce energy E_i < E_max at the end of the day. So the total energy produce will be E_1 + E_2 + ... + E_N < NE_max. The flat array is the more efficient design.
  - EGreg 15y ago
    that assumes the power of the sun absorbed by the panel has a linear relationship to the angle to the panel, or some similar assumption. It may not be the case
realou 15y ago
I think the point here is that Aidan's system has no moving parts and does not track the sun. If you accumulate the total energy produced by the array over a period of one year in, say, capacitors, then I am not certain at all that his tree configuration would not be better than a fixed array of cells. Of course, the fact that the picture in his paper showed a bright white wall just besides his experimental setup removed credibility to the whole thing. But this prevents no one from repeating the experiment with better control over the variables and who knows...
salem 15y ago
I think one of the comments of the linked article made the best point, his science teacher should have caught the mistake. Education and journalism FAIL...
- glimcat 15y ago
  What you have to understand about middle school science teachers is that they optimistically have less electronics and physics knowledge than a first-year undergraduate in either of those majors - and the same goes for most tech bloggers. But the media should really learn to stop taking anything that's published as being gospel truth. Maybe making this mistake over a 13 year-old will teach them that. (Yeah, right.)
  - lurker19 15y ago
    The media publish what their audience wants to look at. Don't wait on the media, wait on the public, and seek out media outlets not by how much you respect the publisher, but by how much you respect the taste of the audience.
its2010already 15y ago
All I have to say is the guy writes pretty darn well for a 13-year old. Perhaps his experiment is flawed, but I was very impressed by his writing skills, and I know it will serve him well in the future.
snorkel 15y ago
Nonetheless I give the kid credit for exploring Fibonacci and biomimicry. Cool concept.
ramy_d 15y ago
is this like that time when some kid in india found a way to make solar cells out of hair?
Kilimanjaro 15y ago
It is not ridiculing those who fail that we advance science, it is about thinking differently even if we fail, for we learn and improve and someday we will succeed. What if we use solar cells on one side of the leaf and mirrors on the other so they can reflect sunlight when the leaf looks east and the sun is going down west? What if we use a sphere shaped cell? like a mango tree? or a cone shaped cell? like a pine tree? What if we put solar trees on every sidewalk, even if they produce less energy, but are more ergonomic and easier to accomodate in our daily lives? What if we sprinkle some water on that solar tree? What if we make it taller? wider? Go on kid, continue your experiments, listen to those who give you sound advice, ignore the ones who only add noise to the harmonious melody of nature and science.
callenish 15y ago
When the blogger used the phrase "Fibonacci mysticism" it becomes clear he has far too much bias to pay attention to what the kid was actually doing. He points out that voltage in solar cells is essentially boolean. Ok. That means that the kid has shown a way to orient the cells so they get sunlight for a longer period of time. If evolution is anything to go by, his approach likely reveals a local minima for maximizing the time that sunlight is collected. Is that worthless? No, it is not. It may well explain why trees orient their leaves the way they do, and there could well be practical applications. If your solar array produces more than the peak power you need but the cost and energy loss of storing the power are significant, you may well want to use a pattern like this that mimics what trees do. What impresses me is that the kid noticed something in nature he hadn't noticed before, read up on it to see what was known about this pattern, and then went out and measured to see whether what he had read was accurate. Once he had verified what he read, he then figured out how that knowledge might be applied. In doing so, he discovered something that, while obvious in hindsight, is not something that would necessarily have occurred to someone trying to figure out how to maximize the time for solar panels to deliver energy. I think the kudos are appropriate, even if the stories are misleading. An important point here is that in any news story about something that you know a lot about, there are always errors. Always. We should all keep that in mind when we read or watch or listen to the news.
defdac 15y ago
This reminds me of a newspaper in Sweden asking people on the streets 1) Do you care if children have made the merchandise you buy? 2) Do you do anything to follow up on it? Where one woman responded 1) Yes, children have no sense of quality and it shows on the product. 2) No.
raganwald 15y ago
Coming back to this almost eight hours later, I ask: What is the problem here? On HN, we upvote articles that are interesting. My idea of a downvote is an article where I felt I lost IQ for reading it. In the case of the kid’s mistaken result, is there any question his research and theory were interesting? Does anyone honestly feel stupider for having read about it and considered the possibility that he was correct? Quite honestly, almost everything that makes it to the front page of HN is wrong. We talk about software development, startups, muse about whether Apple is brilliant or is lucky enough to have lame competition, argue about Haskell and Erlang... All stuff that is non-empirical and therefore unfalsifiable. How does that stuff get a free pass to be on the front page of HN without peer-reviewed research backing it up? I’ll tell you how: We’re smart enough to know that all of that stuff is probably at least partly wrong, but if there’s something in there that makes us smarter, it’s worth reading and upvoting and discussing. If the kid’s ideas had in them just one thing that made us smarter for having thought about it... That’s a win, that’s worth upvoting and repeating. Why wait for peer review? As long as nobody ran out and dropped a million bucks on manufacturing solar arrays, what’s the harm? If anything is wrong with an article, a day or so later, all of the flaws will be corrected. And thats exactly what has happened here. Thinking about this, I don’t see a problem with the “blogosphere” or with HN upvoting and tweeting and repeating the original article. Thank goodness we don’t put everything through a peer-review first. I’d say things are working just fine, and I encourage every other thirteen year-old kid to experiment and publish. No harm, no foul. There’s nothing in there that’s more wrong than anything I’ve ever said in a blog post or a comment, it’s just easier to prove where empirical science is concerned. But even when they’re wrong, my posts are useful if they help people think, and I suspect his post is useful for the same reason.
- wicknicks 15y ago
  The whole idea behind science is to try out what seems most impossible. That's the whole magic and beauty behind it. What annoyed me was the fact that the author seems to be personally offended over the kid's article and all the hype it got. Considering it was a 13 year old kid doing a science project, it doesn't make much sense to put in so much of hardwork in proving what he did and wrote about was completely wrong or "nonsense" (as he likes to call it).
nknight 15y ago
Absent an explanation of why the author chose to delete this article, I can't bring myself to find it credible. It might be right, or it might be very wrong in a non-obvious way that the author finally realized, causing him to delete it. There are other reasons it might have been deleted, but I have no good way to judge. Given that, I don't think it really adds anything to the overall debate.
earbitscom 15y ago
This post reads to me as if the person took personal offense to Aidan getting "undeserved" recognition. He claims to be angry at the journalists and scientists who didn't do their research before jumping to the conclusion that he had created something amazing, but the tone is just unnecessary. > Some poor 13-year-old kid is all over the news "poor 13-year-old" is hardly the words I use to describe a kid who got a bunch of press because they conducted an interesting science experiment, no matter how incorrect the end results of that experiment were. > blindly parrot the words of this very misinformed (not to blame him, he's an unguided 13 year old) kid. If a 45 year old scientist posted the results of an experiment that challenged the furthest reach of their abilities, and some scientists with more information or a different perspective explained why the experiment was conducted incorrectly or why the results were inaccurate, nobody would call the original person "very misinformed" or "unguided". There are just a lot more ways to tell a 13 year old conducting solar panel experiments using concepts beyond most adults abilities the ways in which they could improve their experiment. The last thing you need to call a kid doing this kind of work is "very misinformed".
cellurl 15y ago
Hey, he has published more than I have ;-) Keep it up kiddo!
njharman 15y ago
> to orienting panels at sub-optimal angles My understanding is tree is not at "sub-optimal" angles. But at varying angles throughout the day and seasons as sun moves. Sometimes those angles < than flat panel and sometimes those angles > than flat panel. And that over time the tree was more often optimal than the flat panel. No one is gonna convince me that millions of years of evolution hasn't resulted in efficient solar collectors. But, from the original announcement the biggest issues I noticed was that actual tree leafs move during day and many trees just give up in winter. Neither of which was replicated in solar tree. Therefor solar tree very likely not as good as nature's trees.
acex 15y ago
walter: am i right? dude: yes walter you're right you're also an asshole.
justsomebloke 15y ago
If the young budding scientist is wrong then why hasn't nature followed our ideal 30 degree angle, he's certainly got me thinking?!

650 points by DevX101 15y ago

DevX101 15y ago

This article was posted last night, but taken down by this morning. I recovered it from google cache.

bhousel 15y ago
The author is exactly right. There's no way that a tree array of panels that are half not even pointing at the sun will outperform a linear array of panels that are mostly pointing at the sun. Panels efficiency is measured in Watts, and this kid is not going to be able to record their efficiency with a simple probe DMM. In order to get a full picture of what's going on with his arrays, he would need to hook both arrays up to a load and measure throughout the day, or better yet a battery array / charge controller and measure at the end of the day which array produced more power. I kind of wanted to say something yesterday, but really didn't want to pile on the kid, and everyone here just wanted so badly for the kid to be a genius. The few comments that pointed out that he was wrong were voted down. This is something that really bothers me about science fairs. Back when I was 13 years old, I did a school project to redesign a local troublesome intersection. I just made a model of what it might look like and people loved it and they even wrote about it in the paper and displayed my model in the municipal building, and talked about what a bright young kid I was. Now that I'm older, this bothers me a lot because in doing the project I didn't do any real research, I didn't talk to any traffic engineers, I didn't learn about intersection designs.. I didn't learn anything really. As an adult, I can see that my plan for the intersection was silly and unworkable. I kind of wish that schools emphasized mentorship programs rather than science fairs. Kids would learn far more by partnering with knowledgeable adults to do their experiments, rather than having these silly competitions where nobody learns anything and the winner is the kid who puts the most work into having the nicest presentation.
- babebridou 15y ago
  > There's no way that a tree array of panels that are half not even pointing at the sun will outperform a linear array of panels that are mostly pointing at the sun. While this is so very true in the theoretical sense of the term, I gave this a very short thought, and there might be edge conditions that could indeed lead to "better power with tree-shaped panels" (1), now that I think about it. There is a term that you are (rightfully) neglecting: the size of the system, and incurred energy loss due to Joule Effect. If the distance between panels arranged in a linear way is large, then it might be more efficient to place additional panels closer to the output circuit, maybe above it, in such a way that it doesn't overlap and yep, maybe even with a different orientation, just to optimize the distance between producer and consumer, and thus reduce resistance and energy losses. But that would probably only be valid for specific sets of distances, positions, hour of the day (seasons, voltage, quality of the conductor material...), but that's only because the studied system shifts to be more of that of an Energy Transmission System than that of an Energy Production System (1) or sphere-shaped or pyramid-shaped or pokemon-shaped for that matter...
  - waterlesscloud 15y ago
    Genuine (if idle) question- why do plants have leaves which permanently face away from the sun? It's not zero-cost to the plant to produce such leaves...so why does it?
    - DevX101 15y ago
      My educated guess is that there is some benefit to having a uniform distribution of solar power over the course of a day. If all leaves pointed in one optimal direction, then more energy would be directed at the tree in a single day, but it would collect this energy in a narrow time span. It's possible a tree could not efficiently process this energy in this time span, similar to how you would not be able to eat a deer in one sitting. By having a generally spherical orientation of leaves, the tree is always receiving power throughout the day. Again, this is all just my hypothesis.
pixcavator 15y ago
The article was oulined here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902684 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902684.
w1ntermute 15y ago
Here's a PDF mirror in case the cache goes down:　http://ompldr.org/vOXppeQ/solar_trees.pdf http://ompldr.org/vOXppeQ/solar_trees.pdf

raganwald 15y ago

I didn’t find it that harsh. He was direct and took pains not to ridicule a thirteen year-old for making an entirely age-appropriate mistake in measuring the results. Instead, he asked the perfectly valid question of how this becomes news without critical thought. In that, the critique seemed hopelessly ignorant of how the news works. Why should science fair projects be treated any differently than crime, the personal lives of celebrities, politics, or economics? News outlets publish first and ask questions later or not at all. They have gone to court to defend their right to publish things they know to be false. How did a confused science project become international news? Why, the same way that almost any overnight sensation becomes international news, by being digestible, by being something people want to be true, by appealing to their preconceived biases. A commenter pointed out that this is the value of a peer-review process. And indeed, this result was published without peer review. So who is the fool here? The journalist for publishing without review? Or the reader who knowingly accepts the result despite it being published without peer review and/or corroboration?

ugh 15y ago
He could have been more polite but one can always be more polite.
SoftwareMaven 15y ago
I disagree, but I really believe he didn't do it intentionally. He was ridiculing the MSM and the people who jumped on the bandwagon without doing any analysis. Unfortunately, nobody will see it that way. People will see it as him/her attacking Aidan Dwyer (the boy who did the experiment). He doesn't help his case by never referring to Aidan by name, instead using a fairly pejorative sounding "the kid. If Aiden was my kid, I would try not to let him read the article, though I would explain the article and what went wrong within a teaching framework that included pointing out when other scientists did similar thing (don't know any off the top of my head, but I've no doubt the stories are out there). It is sad, too, because this article needed to be written, but instead of writing it to help Aiden succeed in spite of the fanfare, the author has likely hurt Aiden. There is every reason to tell kids they are wrong when they are wrong, but there are appropriate ways and inappropriate ways to do it. This was inappropriate. Finally, I've flagged this submission. Since the author took down the original, it is obvious he is rethinking whether the article was a good idea. Yes, the internet is forever, but people's wishes should count for something.

llambda 15y ago

It's refreshing to see a counterpoint to the MSM's enthusiasm for over-dramatization and poor fact-checking; this wasn't a breakthrough in the science of photovoltaics, as some headlines seemed to read. And I'm particularly happy that the author took great care to not target the boy. He should be encouraged to continue this kind of scientific pursuit and not be dissuaded by mistakes in the research. In fact this is a good example of how peer-reviewed research actually functions. That said, I feel the MSM only does him a disservice by misrepresenting the implications of his project as something more than it might be.

mpclark 15y ago
Journalists aren't all Woodward and Bernstein. In fact, most of them aren't. They are, in the main, reporters. They report what they've been told, pausing only to package it up and make it more digestible to the reader. To hold the media in general to some higher 'you must be a domain expert to write about this subject' standard is to have a starry-eyed view of the world. <bracing myself for the downvotes>
- chrishenn 15y ago
  We all know what we see on T.V. and from places like CNN suck, but that doesn't mean it's journalism. Journalism is talking to as many people as you can about a story, then putting it together in a really straightforward, no bullshit report. It's just sad that popular news organizations are calling themselves journalists when in reality they are just advertising for someones beliefs.
- Goladus 15y ago
  Science writers should have some understanding of the field they're writing about, though. If they don't understand the scientific details and none of their domain expert contacts are able to help, they should at least able to recognize the difference between a peer-reviewed article and a blog entry. Spotting unverified claims doesn't require any science knowledge at all. <bracing myself for the downvotes> Don't be lame.
- blasdel 15y ago

kubrickslair 15y ago

A bigger point here is how we all mistook the results. There is always a struggle between extreme peer review, which leads to insularity, and going by the net real impact- 'don't publish, build'. In the latter approach, the winner often forgets whose shoulders he stands on. In the former, you cannot stand too high from your peers' shoulders, and there are few real winners- 'everybody is great, everybody wins /s'.

dramaticus3 15y ago
all ? speak for yourself
- kubrickslair 15y ago
  You missed the point of what I am saying, if you are debating on this minutiae.
  - pingswept 15y ago
    It could be the case that 95% of the readers who encountered the original article on HN thought it was bunk, but didn't want to spend the time to correct it. Or maybe it's the reverse-- maybe 95% of us believed it was a brilliant invention. I can't think of a way to estimate which is true.
    - kubrickslair 15y ago
      Yes, but my comment was much more general than this particular event or invention. I only posted it because it seemed like a good context.
    - dennisgorelik 15y ago
      I personally suspected that something is likely to be wrong with that "solar battery tree", but didn't have time to dig deeper. I quickly took a look into comments, didn't find any heavyweight names there, didn't find any solid comments and quit without upvoting the article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902329 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902329 Unfortunately 630 other people upvoted it. I do upvote this "Debunk" article http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906538 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2906538 Important conclusion: In news ranking I would clearly prefer to rely on subset of Hacker News readers. Not on the full set. I actually would prefer not to see articles that are upvoted by the same people who upvoted junk science article.

skrebbel 15y ago

I don't think you can put this out there any less harsh than this. Plus, all the harshness that's there is towards stupid journalists, not to the kid. And, well, they deserve it.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

I voted this up -- it read very well -- but I am a little uncomfortable about voting up an article the author clearly wanted to delete.

randomanonymous 15y ago

You listened to the comments in the last post's comments (the one with only a couple comments). This is MUCH healthier for a 13 year old, title wise, and article wise.

robryan 15y ago

I wonder, if this idea come from a someone older without any real experience or qualifications in solar would it have been fact checked a little better before it ended up everywhere? I would want to encourage young people as much as possible, it's just that some of the things you heard about are only considered impressive when those doing the story have factored age into it. If the person was say 30 it wouldn't even be a story.

nikster 15y ago
The idea had apparently been around for a while, since 2008 or so, there were other, similar studies. I don't know if they were similarly flawed or not though. I also would not completely dismiss the premise - trees are probably very good at converting solar energy. And to add to that, I don't buy the counter argument that a tree arrangement can't be better than a flat panel - why not? The sun moves around so the flat panel might be optimal at one point in the day, but will certainly be sub-optimal at other times. This isn't a clear cut argument at all. There are many variables in play. Cloud cover; seasons; etc. Keep in mind the experiment was done in a cold climate.
- daemonize 15y ago
  I would imaginr that the flat panel could be hooked to a servo and a control loop be used to optimize poiting attitude in real time to compensate for the sun's natural cycle.
  - shabble 15y ago
    This is already extremely common, with significant efficiency gains. As ever, the downside is added complexity and cost. See https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Solar_tracker https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Solar_tracker

jshort 15y ago

Regardless of Aiden's findings about solar energy his ability to see a pattern in tree branches and ten to attempt to answer the question why is impressive in my books.

sqrt17 15y ago
The problem is: there are plenty of 13-year-olds that apply the same astuteness to ants, pet rabbits, pocket calculators and other things that are not really interesting to the mainstream. So the reason why everyone is excited about it is that there's a hope to get a contribution towards a socially relevant problem. Except there's not, because no one is there to explain to the kids how to design an evaluation for their solution that makes it possible to relate it back to the important problem. As a comparison, consider a cake baking contest in which only the participant himself/herself is allowed to taste the cake where everyone else can only look. This would not be a recipe to develop good-tasting cakes, even though you probably get some very beautiful cakes made out of styrofoam by people who believe that styrofoam tastes great. Besides giving up the claim that science fairs are more relevant to science than high school orchestras are to music (because, reasonably, a high school orchestra delivering a crappy performance of a virtually unknown piece may still make some kind of contribution), another possibility would be that somewhere between regional and state levels, participants get expert advice on their creation and formally have to factor in the expert advice into a revised version of their experiment.
- lurker19 15y ago
  Ironically, your example is reality! Cake artists use fondant to make gorgeous high-price wedding and party cakes with intricate and beautiful decorations, but that taste awful. It makes one wonder why we have an industry of cake art instead of wedding sculpture. I guess people appreciate the time-limitedness of the artwork for some reason.

waterlesscloud 15y ago

This doesn't address what I thought was the insight, which is about finding optimal placement and facing for stationary solar panels when the light source (the sun) is not stationary. Neither throughout the day or through out the year. It doesn't seem impossible that some placements are better than all-in-one-direction, especially over time, and that's what I thought the experiment was about. Am I misunderstanding something basic? EDIT: Going back and reading the kid's writeup at http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2011/aidan.html http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/201... shows some interesting details. He's not using voltage as a proxy for power, he's using it as a proxy for "sunlight collected". There's two voltage graphs on that page that are machine drawn, not hand drawn. The point of interest in the two graphs is that the Standard graph has narrower peaks of voltage, whereas the Tree graph is broader. This represents the idea that the Tree was generating electricity over a longer period of time. NOT that it was generating more power, but that it was collecting sunlight for a longer period. The 20% and 50% pie charts indicate this same idea. The percentages are hours, not watts or volts. 12.5 hours vs 8 hours in one timeframe, 13.5 vs 11 in another. Hours. Not volts, not watts. Time, not power.

ghaff 15y ago
Yes. If you subdivide a solar panel into, say, 10 pieces and orient each of those 10 pieces in an orientation different from the orientation that produces the maximum power output over the course of the day for a single panel, the sum will still be less.
- aptwebapps 15y ago
  But a distributed layout might have higher minimums than a single orientation. For an actual tree, at least, that might be important. The sun doesn't just move during the day, it changes its course over the year, so it might be very beneficial to the tree to ensure that it get's at least a certain amount of juice each day. There might be other reasons than optimal solar exposure. Maybe structural reasons, or, I don't know, sap distribution ... Finally, maybe the Fibonacci sequence gets selected in nature a lot because it's easy to select. What I mean is, the very best algorithms are not necessarily the ones that get selected - the ones that actually get tried and are good enough to survive are the ones that appear. My theory is that organisms stumble into stuff like the Fibonacci sequence or that fern fractal because they are likely to and because they work well enough for whatever purpose.

EGreg 15y ago

Wait a second bro. Trees don't rotate to face the sun. In order to have an optimal angle throughout the whole day, it would have to keep facing the sun, i.e. rotate. I believe he may have missed this point. As for the voltage measurement being the wrong metric -- agree.

Alex3917 15y ago
Many plants actually do rotate throughout the day to face the sun.
uberalex 15y ago
Trees have leaves on all sides so that catch the sun throughout the day.
- EGreg 15y ago
  that is the point, trees don't have a flat array that doesn't move.
gmartres 15y ago
No, he explains that at the end. I can try to reformulate it. Imagine that you can find the orientation which gives you the maximum amount of power for a day, say E_max. If you have N panels, the total energy produced at the end of the day will be NE_max. If instead, you decide to put each panel in a specific direction, they will all produce energy E_i < E_max at the end of the day. So the total energy produce will be E_1 + E_2 + ... + E_N < NE_max. The flat array is the more efficient design.
- EGreg 15y ago
  that assumes the power of the sun absorbed by the panel has a linear relationship to the angle to the panel, or some similar assumption. It may not be the case

realou 15y ago

I think the point here is that Aidan's system has no moving parts and does not track the sun. If you accumulate the total energy produced by the array over a period of one year in, say, capacitors, then I am not certain at all that his tree configuration would not be better than a fixed array of cells. Of course, the fact that the picture in his paper showed a bright white wall just besides his experimental setup removed credibility to the whole thing. But this prevents no one from repeating the experiment with better control over the variables and who knows...

salem 15y ago

I think one of the comments of the linked article made the best point, his science teacher should have caught the mistake. Education and journalism FAIL...

glimcat 15y ago
What you have to understand about middle school science teachers is that they optimistically have less electronics and physics knowledge than a first-year undergraduate in either of those majors - and the same goes for most tech bloggers. But the media should really learn to stop taking anything that's published as being gospel truth. Maybe making this mistake over a 13 year-old will teach them that. (Yeah, right.)
- lurker19 15y ago
  The media publish what their audience wants to look at. Don't wait on the media, wait on the public, and seek out media outlets not by how much you respect the publisher, but by how much you respect the taste of the audience.

its2010already 15y ago

All I have to say is the guy writes pretty darn well for a 13-year old. Perhaps his experiment is flawed, but I was very impressed by his writing skills, and I know it will serve him well in the future.

snorkel 15y ago

Nonetheless I give the kid credit for exploring Fibonacci and biomimicry. Cool concept.

ramy_d 15y ago

is this like that time when some kid in india found a way to make solar cells out of hair?

Kilimanjaro 15y ago

It is not ridiculing those who fail that we advance science, it is about thinking differently even if we fail, for we learn and improve and someday we will succeed. What if we use solar cells on one side of the leaf and mirrors on the other so they can reflect sunlight when the leaf looks east and the sun is going down west? What if we use a sphere shaped cell? like a mango tree? or a cone shaped cell? like a pine tree? What if we put solar trees on every sidewalk, even if they produce less energy, but are more ergonomic and easier to accomodate in our daily lives? What if we sprinkle some water on that solar tree? What if we make it taller? wider? Go on kid, continue your experiments, listen to those who give you sound advice, ignore the ones who only add noise to the harmonious melody of nature and science.

callenish 15y ago

When the blogger used the phrase "Fibonacci mysticism" it becomes clear he has far too much bias to pay attention to what the kid was actually doing. He points out that voltage in solar cells is essentially boolean. Ok. That means that the kid has shown a way to orient the cells so they get sunlight for a longer period of time. If evolution is anything to go by, his approach likely reveals a local minima for maximizing the time that sunlight is collected. Is that worthless? No, it is not. It may well explain why trees orient their leaves the way they do, and there could well be practical applications. If your solar array produces more than the peak power you need but the cost and energy loss of storing the power are significant, you may well want to use a pattern like this that mimics what trees do. What impresses me is that the kid noticed something in nature he hadn't noticed before, read up on it to see what was known about this pattern, and then went out and measured to see whether what he had read was accurate. Once he had verified what he read, he then figured out how that knowledge might be applied. In doing so, he discovered something that, while obvious in hindsight, is not something that would necessarily have occurred to someone trying to figure out how to maximize the time for solar panels to deliver energy. I think the kudos are appropriate, even if the stories are misleading. An important point here is that in any news story about something that you know a lot about, there are always errors. Always. We should all keep that in mind when we read or watch or listen to the news.

defdac 15y ago

This reminds me of a newspaper in Sweden asking people on the streets 1) Do you care if children have made the merchandise you buy? 2) Do you do anything to follow up on it? Where one woman responded 1) Yes, children have no sense of quality and it shows on the product. 2) No.

raganwald 15y ago

Coming back to this almost eight hours later, I ask: What is the problem here? On HN, we upvote articles that are interesting. My idea of a downvote is an article where I felt I lost IQ for reading it. In the case of the kid’s mistaken result, is there any question his research and theory were interesting? Does anyone honestly feel stupider for having read about it and considered the possibility that he was correct? Quite honestly, almost everything that makes it to the front page of HN is wrong. We talk about software development, startups, muse about whether Apple is brilliant or is lucky enough to have lame competition, argue about Haskell and Erlang... All stuff that is non-empirical and therefore unfalsifiable. How does that stuff get a free pass to be on the front page of HN without peer-reviewed research backing it up? I’ll tell you how: We’re smart enough to know that all of that stuff is probably at least partly wrong, but if there’s something in there that makes us smarter, it’s worth reading and upvoting and discussing. If the kid’s ideas had in them just one thing that made us smarter for having thought about it... That’s a win, that’s worth upvoting and repeating. Why wait for peer review? As long as nobody ran out and dropped a million bucks on manufacturing solar arrays, what’s the harm? If anything is wrong with an article, a day or so later, all of the flaws will be corrected. And thats exactly what has happened here. Thinking about this, I don’t see a problem with the “blogosphere” or with HN upvoting and tweeting and repeating the original article. Thank goodness we don’t put everything through a peer-review first. I’d say things are working just fine, and I encourage every other thirteen year-old kid to experiment and publish. No harm, no foul. There’s nothing in there that’s more wrong than anything I’ve ever said in a blog post or a comment, it’s just easier to prove where empirical science is concerned. But even when they’re wrong, my posts are useful if they help people think, and I suspect his post is useful for the same reason.

wicknicks 15y ago
The whole idea behind science is to try out what seems most impossible. That's the whole magic and beauty behind it. What annoyed me was the fact that the author seems to be personally offended over the kid's article and all the hype it got. Considering it was a 13 year old kid doing a science project, it doesn't make much sense to put in so much of hardwork in proving what he did and wrote about was completely wrong or "nonsense" (as he likes to call it).

nknight 15y ago

Absent an explanation of why the author chose to delete this article, I can't bring myself to find it credible. It might be right, or it might be very wrong in a non-obvious way that the author finally realized, causing him to delete it. There are other reasons it might have been deleted, but I have no good way to judge. Given that, I don't think it really adds anything to the overall debate.

earbitscom 15y ago

This post reads to me as if the person took personal offense to Aidan getting "undeserved" recognition. He claims to be angry at the journalists and scientists who didn't do their research before jumping to the conclusion that he had created something amazing, but the tone is just unnecessary. > Some poor 13-year-old kid is all over the news "poor 13-year-old" is hardly the words I use to describe a kid who got a bunch of press because they conducted an interesting science experiment, no matter how incorrect the end results of that experiment were. > blindly parrot the words of this very misinformed (not to blame him, he's an unguided 13 year old) kid. If a 45 year old scientist posted the results of an experiment that challenged the furthest reach of their abilities, and some scientists with more information or a different perspective explained why the experiment was conducted incorrectly or why the results were inaccurate, nobody would call the original person "very misinformed" or "unguided". There are just a lot more ways to tell a 13 year old conducting solar panel experiments using concepts beyond most adults abilities the ways in which they could improve their experiment. The last thing you need to call a kid doing this kind of work is "very misinformed".

cellurl 15y ago

Hey, he has published more than I have ;-) Keep it up kiddo!

njharman 15y ago

> to orienting panels at sub-optimal angles My understanding is tree is not at "sub-optimal" angles. But at varying angles throughout the day and seasons as sun moves. Sometimes those angles < than flat panel and sometimes those angles > than flat panel. And that over time the tree was more often optimal than the flat panel. No one is gonna convince me that millions of years of evolution hasn't resulted in efficient solar collectors. But, from the original announcement the biggest issues I noticed was that actual tree leafs move during day and many trees just give up in winter. Neither of which was replicated in solar tree. Therefor solar tree very likely not as good as nature's trees.

acex 15y ago

walter: am i right? dude: yes walter you're right you're also an asshole.

justsomebloke 15y ago

If the young budding scientist is wrong then why hasn't nature followed our ideal 30 degree angle, he's certainly got me thinking?!