Technology Review has reported many times that the cost of solar panels needs to come down for the technology to be widely adopted. In light of that, I was dismayed to hear on the radio on Monday morning that California has a thriving black market for solar cells. KQED, a public radio station here in San Francisco, reported that as the cost of scrap metal has fallen thieves have turned to solar panels. According to the story, California has over 34,000 solar installations and one of the highest solar-panel theft rates in the nation. Many wineries have the systems--it certainly makes a nice blurb on the label--and they've become favored targets. These agricultural installations are easy pickings. One vintner interviewed in the story was burgled twice before installing a security system that alerted the police when thieves targeted his solar installation a third time.

Solar-cell theft is such a big problem that Congressman Mike Thompson, who represents Napa Valley, one of California's major wine-making regions, added a provision to the Solar Technology Roadmap Act that would create a national registry of solar panels and require the secretary of energy to come up with a plan to deal with theft. (The House has passed the bill; the Senate has not.) And startups that provide security systems that alert the owner when a panel is disconnected are blossoming.

Presumably the thieves are motivated by the demand for solar coupled with the inability of people to pay for it given the tanking economy and the technology's expense. (Or, as a Fast Company story suggests, maybe the thieves are motivated by something else--a free source of power for the lamps used to grow another one of California's biggest cash crops, marijuana.) But their actions could create a vicious circle. If it's necessary to include a security system with each solar installation, that will just make solar even more expensive and accessible to fewer companies and people.

The National Electric Drag Racing Association (NEDRA) is out to change the perception of electric vehicles (EVs).

"EVs are more than glorified golf carts," says Chip Gribben, the NEDRA's PR Director. "Our whole mantra has been to dispel the myth that EVs are slow and we have been pretty successful."

Founded in 1997, NEDRA organizes drag racing competitions to show off the speed that vehicles powered by electricity can reach. As interest in electric vehicles has grown in recent years, so has the popularity of NEDRA's drag racing competitions.

This isn't only reflected by growing crowds. Gribben cites major sponsorship deals and notes that several NEDRA drivers have begun getting sponsorship from battery companies. NEDRA was also recently invited to the NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series in July. "The fact that we have been invited means that the racing community is beginning to take a serious look at electric drag racing and NEDRA," he says.

Check out some videos of electric vehicles burning rubber at various NEDRA competitions below.

In last September's competition, the "KillaCycle" set a new NEDRA record by going a quarter of a mile in 7.864 seconds (reaching 169 miles per hour).

At the same competition, another electric bike, the ElectroCat, set a new NEDRA record for a 48-volt street-legal motorcycle by an eighth of a mile in 13.24 seconds (reaching 52.97 miles per hour).

The video above shows a Tesla roadster racing an in OBS junior dragster in a competition held earlier this year.

In this race, a Tesla roadster goes up against an electrified 1972 Datsun 1200, called White Zombie.

In this clip another electric drag bike, AGNS, makes a run.

Silicon solar cells built on a nanostructured substrate (top left) have a surface patterned with nanoscale domes (top right). The scale bar in both electron-microscope images is 500 nanometers. The diagram shows the layers of the device, from bottom to top: a quartz substrate, a reflective layer of silver, a transparent conducting oxide, the active layer of amorphous silicon, and another oxide layer. Credit: ACS/Nano Letters

The accumulation of dust on the surface of a solar cell can block light and cut into cell efficiency. Researchers at Stanford have demonstrated that solar cells patterned at the nanoscale with domed structures absorb more light and, as a bonus, are self-cleaning.

The nanoscale patterning is not just on the surface of the cell but is applied to every layer. The cells are built on a substrate patterned with nanoscale cones. The bottom layer is a film of silver 100 nanometers thick that acts as an electrical contact and a light reflector; atop this is a film of amorphous silicon sandwiched between transparent conducting layers. Though the substrate is jagged, the accumulation of layers results in domed structures that happen to resemble the mushroom-like structures other researchers have been developing for self-cleaning surfaces. An added layer of hydrophobic molecules makes the cells nearly superhydrophobic: water droplets roll along the surface, pulling dust away with them.

These nanodome structures not only repel water, but help trap light. Because they're so small--about 500 nanometers in diameter--the nanodomes interact with light in a cool way, absorbing 94 percent of all light from the infrared to the ultraviolet. A flat solar cell made from the same materials absorbs only 65 percent of light in the same broad spectrum. So far the overall power conversion efficiency of the cells is 5.9 percent. The lead researcher, Stanford materials science professor Yi Cui, says these patterning techniques could be applied to other solar materials. This work is described online in the journal Nano Letters.