Sometimes an idea is just so elementally brilliant that you have to step back and wonder why things haven’t been done this way all along. The creative duo of designer Sayalee Kaluskar and copywriter Ramiro Ramirez came up with just such an idea: solar panel-equipped sunglasses called Shama Shades.

We wear sunglasses to protect our eyes from the sun, so they are naturally exposed to plenty of sunlight. Kaluskar and Ramirez, knowing that Ray-Ban wanted people to get more out of their sunglasses, came up with this intuitive but brilliant idea.

The sides of the sunglasses are equipped with solar panels which collect sun power all day. At night, you can take the sides off of the glasses and plug them directly into your iPhone 5 to charge it up for your busy evening of texting and Googling and whatever it is you kids do with your phones these days.

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When you think of a solar cell, you probably picture the big, dark boxy things that adorn rooftops. But the solar cells of the future will look a lot like the incredibly thin fiber above. An international team of bright minds has been working on developing a fiber optic solar cell that is thin, flexible, and can be woven into garments. The new solar cell could eventually be used to make wearable power sources that could keep soldiers connected no matter where they are.

The new type of solar cell is made in a way that is not entirely dissimilar to how traditional planar solar cells are produced. But according to the team, the glass optical fibers remain flexible enough to be woven into textiles without causing any noticeable loss of flexibility in the finished garments. Aside from powering soldiers’ gadgets, the new type of solar cell could charge smartphones or other mobile devices – or even provide power for biomedical devices.

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Can you really blame homeowners and commercial building owners for not putting up more solar panels? They’re big, heavy, and a pretty major expense to install. Not to mention really, really ugly. If we could turn regular transparent windows into energy-generating powerhouses, though, perhaps every home and business would start utilizing solar power. That is the goal of Dr. Mark Bissett‘s ongoing research at Flinders University School of Chemical and Physical Sciences; he has developed a proof of concept solar cell that will produce electricity along with letting some outside light shine in. It’s like functional window tinting. There is a trade-off, though: the more transparent the tinting, the less efficient the solar power collection.

The cells work by sandwiching a single layer of carbon nanotubes between two sheets of electrically conductive glass. Another version of the concept involves spraying the nanotubes onto glass panels, which may mean that existing windows could be utilized as solar collectors after being sprayed. The technology, at the moment, only boasts about 1% efficiency – in order to be competitive it would need to get closer to 20%. Still, the cells are in the development stage and will continue to be tweaked and improved upon. Dr. Bissett thinks that they could be on the market in as little as ten years.

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As much as we’d like to see solar panels everywhere and on everything, they have always been somewhat costly, bulky and uncompromising. A team of engineers at MIT is developing solar cells that can be printed onto a piece of paper with a technique similar to 3D printing. The five layers of material are laid on the paper one at a time in a vacuum chamber, using a method similar to the one used for lining potato chip bags with foil. The manufacturing method is significantly less involved than the one needed for traditional rigid solar cells, but the big advantage of this new breakthrough is that the cells can be folded over and over without losing functionality.

The photovoltaic cells work just as well when printed on thin plastic as they do when printed on paper. The MIT team went so far as to fold one of the paper cells into a paper airplane and, one of the plastic cells was folded over a thousand times. Both cells still functioned normally. Although they are incredibly robust, they aren’t quite miracle power producers just yet: their initial efficiency is a sad one percent. But if the team can improve the efficiency of the lightweight cells, they could revolutionize consumer electronics batteries and make electricity plentiful in developing countries.

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