Researchers from Korea claim to have produced the world's first purely white LED (light-emitting diode).
Soo-Young Park, a professor of organic materials for photonics at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Seoul National University in Korea, led the group, which includes researchers from the University of Valencia in Spain.
LEDs are much more energy-efficient than incandescent or compact fluorescent lightng (CFL), but the quality of light they can give a room is up for debate.
Soo-Young Park, professor at Seoul National University.
(Credit: Seoul National University)Because LEDs do not naturally produce white light, getting them to look like they do adds to their production cost, making them much more expensive than your average incandescent or CFL. Many companies have been trying to come up with different LED recipes and components to produce a nice white light, while keeping the consumer cost down.
Park and his group claim to have engineered a molecule with one orange and one blue light-emitting material that produces a white light in the visible light spectrum when put together.
In other words, they say they've invented a white-light-emitting diode.
Repeated laboratory tests apparently showed that the new form of LED molecule is efficient, color stable, and able to be reproduced again and again, making it a legitimate candidate for use in LED lighting.
A detailed explanation of the group's molecular work can be found in the current issue of Journal of the American Chemical Society.
"An ideal material for a white-light source should be cost-effective, stable, robust, emit over the whole visible spectrum, not suffer from self-absorption, and its pure color should be easily reproducible. With this goal in mind, we have successfully synthesized and characterized, for the first time, a white-light-emitting single molecule dyad, consisting of two noninteracting chromophores showing excited-state intramolecular proton transfer," Park and his group said in their paper.
Time Magazine has named 23andMe, one of the first consumer genetic testing services, its 2008 Best Invention of the Year.
(Credit:
23andMe)
23andMe, named for the 23 chromosome pairs every human has, set itself apart from other DNA-testing services, because "it does the best job of making them accessible and affordable," according to Time.
The company offers a $399 DNA test that includes an ancestry analysis, and a health analysis. The health analysis tests for about 90 predispositions ranging from what eye color you'll probably pass on to whether you're likely to get arthritis someday.
Customers are sent a kit by mail that includes a test tube to spit in for the saliva sample and registration materials to log in online. Once the sample is registered and mailed to 23andMe, customers can expect results in about 4-6 weeks.
The company was co-founded by Linda Avey, a biopharmaceutical industry veteran with a background in biology; and Anne Wojcicki, an entrepreneur with experience in healthcare investing and a Yale University degree in biology.
Wojcicki's husband, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, has an additional reason to be proud of Time Magazine's list. The Tesla Roadster, an all-electric sports car made by Tesla Motors, was named runner-up. Brin has given some financial backing to the struggling company.
Other inventions that made it into the top 10 include Hulu.com, the video-streaming site that legally offers free TV shows and movies online; NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter; and the Large Hadron Collider.
The full list of all 50 inventions Time Magazine has named noteworthy for 2008 will appear in the October 31 issue, but it's already been posted to Time's Web site.
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