When most people think of gold, they think of Fort Knox, or a phat set of grillz. The exceptionally nerdy -- like some people at popsci.com -- automatically recall gold's atomic number of 79. But no one suspected gold's role as nature's nanotechnological answer for purifying air, except for a team of researchers from the Queensland University of Technology.

It doesn’t take a stellar imagination to figure out the main downside of solar power. For years, the question of how to store the energy generated when the sun is shining for use at night has prevented solar power from becoming a viable alternative energy source. However, a new breakthrough may have overcome that storage problem, opening the door for solar energy on a grand scale.

When I was eight years old, my uncle told me that I’d get a solar-powered car for my sixteenth birthday – and that it would be affordable. When I turned 16 in 2002, though, solar power was still inefficient and expensive, and I landed a bike instead. It's taken impossibly high fuel costs, global warming, and some serious engineering developments, but six years later, solar power is finally becoming a viable alternative to oil.

Hardly a week goes by these days without a new solar panel technology development in the news. You would think the country was plastered in solar sheets with all the work currently being done. Let's hope the stories soon turn to how we're going to make this all affordable enough to support widespread installations. In the meantime, today's innovation.

If you've been following our recent series of articles on solar cells, you've likely noticed the focus falls roughly into two categories: how to make the panels thinner, lighter and more flexible; and how to make the cells more efficient.