Photovoltaics market prospect.

The robust 40% increase for the global photovoltaic (PV) market is likely to slow down in 2009, and may even decline. This is partly due to the worldwide recession that has slowed planned projects and forced down prices, but an even bigger factor is that Spain's huge boom of 2008 won't be repeated this year. The 2.5GW of PV installations in Spain last year were close to half of the world's total of 5.5GW, according to the European PV Industry Association (EPIA), but that surge was somewhat of a fluke.

While Spain did want to spur PV last year, the feed-in tariffs offered were miscalculated by officials, so that new installations could be paid off in as little as a year. This led to explosive growth which won't be repeated in 2009 because Spain capped installations it will support at 0.5GW. That means that somehow the world market would have to make up that 2GW shortfall to match last year, which is unlikely industry observers believe.

Italy is a wild card in this year's market, however. GSE, the state-run power agency, wants to jump-start its PV industry, so it is offering feed-in tariffs similar to Spain's. The agency's goal is to more than double the number of installations this year, reaching a total of 900MW to 1GW. GSE expects to support some 70,000 new projects, mostly roof-mounted PV panels in northern Italy. GSE is projecting its market to grow to 1500GW in 2010, achieving an increase of 135% from 2006 to 2010, according to Johan Trip of Solarplaza. This would move Italy up to #2 in Europe behind only Germany. The German market is somewhat similar to Italy in that 40% of its installed PV is for systems <10kw.>1MW ground-based utility installations.

The surge in Spain enabled the global PV market to reach $37.1B in 2008, more than double the 2007 total of $17.2B. The 5.5GW installed last year brought the cumulative global total of PV capacity to 15GW. Spain led the world with 2.5GW, followed by Germany with 1.5GW. The top five also including the US (324MW), South Korea (247MW), and Italy (260MW. By 2013, with appropriate policies and feed-in tariffs, total installed PV capacity could reach 22GW, according to the association's projections.

A European Renewable Energy Directive requires that 20% of the total energy output in Europe in 2020 comes from renewable sources. Each member state of the Common Market will have to specify how it intends to reach the 20% goal in its own country.

In Italy, with attractive feed-in tariffs along with module costs about half what they were last year, according to Solarplaza, a market boom is developing with more than 600 companies participating. Developers in southern Italy are aiming for more large-scale power plants rather than the smaller rooftop panels sprouting all over northern Italy. One player is Premier Power Renewable Energy, El Dorado Hills, CA, which in May reported it acquired privately held Arco Energy, an Italian solar project developer. Initially the partners say they will concentrate on large-scale green-field solar farms, but later they intend to move into the rooftop and then building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) installations all over Italy. By 2011, some believe, grid electricity may become so costly that incentives will not be needed to make solar installations profitable. Premier indicates that it believes that by 2016 Italy may reach 3GW of installed capacity.

But reaching this year's target of 900MW will be a stretch, believe some in the industry, because of the lack of infrastructure. More likely would be about 500MW, but that still would double last year's installations.

While the bulk of PV installations use crystalline silicon modules, thin film is about 10% of the market. This could grow to 30% by 2013, according to Andy London, global manager of Heraeus' photovoltaic business unit in West Conshohocken, PA -- but with a caveat. Commercial thin-film installations use cadmium telluride (CdTe) cells, although a bright future is also expected for copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) cells because of the better match of their response to the solar spectrum. There could be a hitch, however, London pointed out -- due to the toxicity of cadmium, it may be banned in the future in the European Community.

While the global PV market may stall this year, analysts expect it to resume its strong growth in 2010 and beyond as prices rise for fossil fuels and growing world economies compete for a limited supply.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn -- by far the largest of the giant planet's many rings.

The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material.

Saturn's newest halo is thick, too -- its vertical height is about 20 times the diameter of the planet. It would take about one billion Earths stacked together to fill the ring.

"This is one supersized ring," said Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. "If you could see the ring, it would span the width of two full moons' worth of sky, one on either side of Saturn." Verbiscer; Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland, College Park; and Michael Skrutskie, of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, are authors of a paper about the discovery to be published by the journal Nature.

The ring itself is tenuous, made up of a thin array of ice and dust particles. Spitzer's infrared eyes were able to spot the glow of the band's cool dust. The telescope, launched in 2003, is currently 107 million kilometers (66 million miles) from Earth in orbit around the sun.

The discovery may help solve an age-old riddle of one of Saturn's moons. Iapetus has a strange appearance -- one side is bright and the other is really dark, in a pattern that resembles the yin-yang symbol. The astronomer Giovanni Cassini first spotted the moon in 1671, and years later figured out it has a dark side, now named Cassini Regio in his honor.

Saturn's newest addition could explain how Cassini Regio came to be. The ring is circling in the same direction as Phoebe, while Iapetus, the other rings and most of Saturn's moons are all going the opposite way. According to the scientists, some of the dark and dusty material from the outer ring moves inward toward Iapetus, slamming the icy moon like bugs on a windshield.

"Astronomers have long suspected that there is a connection between Saturn's outer moon Phoebe and the dark material on Iapetus," said Hamilton. "This new ring provides convincing evidence of that relationship."

Verbiscer and her colleagues used Spitzer's longer-wavelength infrared camera, called the multiband imaging photometer, to scan through a patch of sky far from Saturn and a bit inside Phoebe's orbit. The astronomers had a hunch that Phoebe might be circling around in a belt of dust kicked up from its minor collisions with comets -- a process similar to that around stars with dusty disks of planetary debris. Sure enough, when the scientists took a first look at their Spitzer data, a band of dust jumped out.

The ring would be difficult to see with visible-light telescopes. Its particles are diffuse and may even extend beyond the bulk of the ring material all the way in to Saturn and all the way out to interplanetary space. The relatively small numbers of particles in the ring wouldn't reflect much visible light, especially out at Saturn where sunlight is weak.

"The particles are so far apart that if you were to stand in the ring, you wouldn't even know it," said Verbiscer.

Spitzer was able to sense the glow of the cool dust, which is only about 80 Kelvin (minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit). Cool objects shine with infrared, or thermal radiation; for example, even a cup of ice cream is blazing with infrared light. "By focusing on the glow of the ring's cool dust, Spitzer made it easy to find," said Verbiscer.

These observations were made before Spitzer ran out of coolant in May and began its "warm" mission.

Tamiflu boosts Roche sales figures

Roche, the Swiss pharmaceuticals group best known for its Tamiflu influenza treatment and its powerful cancer drugs, raised guidance for full-year sales in 2009 after turnover in the first nine months came in significantly higher than expected.

The sales figures – Roche publishes no profits at the nine-month stage – were boosted by bumper demand for Tamiflu amid persistent fears about a global flu pandemic. Tamiflu sales of SFr2bn ($1.9bn) in the first nine months were more than four times ahead of the same period last year. In the third quarter, sales reached SFr994m – nearly 10 times more than in the same period last year.

The increase in orders prompted Roche to raise its full-year sales target for the anti-viral treatment from SFr2bn to SFr2.7bn and almost double its 2010 estimate from SFr400m to SFr700m.

The group, which successfully completed the $47bn acquisition of its majority owned Genentech operation in the US and is integrating the two companies, said sales in both drugs and diagnostics – its two core divisions – had risen strongly, and well above market rates.

As a result, Roche raised its forecast for sales growth in pharmaceuticals – its dominant division – to “at least high single-digit growth” for the year. The group sales estimate was also tweaked upwards, with Roche now predicting sales to rise “well ahead” of the market, compared with just “ahead” previously.

Analysts welcomed the figures and revised targets. The Tamiflu sales figures were more than 50 per cent above expectations, and easily outweighed slight disappointment about sales growth for some of the group’s top cancer drugs. Diagnostics also performed more strongly than expected.

In late morning trading, Roche shares were down just over 1.5 per cent at SFr166.90 on profit taking.

Group sales in the first nine months rose by 9 per cent to SFr36.4bn. Drug sales climbed by 11 per cent to SFr29bn, while diagnostics were 4 per cent higher at SFr7.4bn.

“The Roche group continued to perform very strongly in the third quarter ... Based on this performance, we expect another very good full-year result,” noted Severin Schwan, chief executive.

Roche said integration with Genentech was now achieving “substantial productivity gains” and should be largely completed by the end of the year. The group noted that, by 2011, it expected annual pre-tax synergies of about SFr1bn from the deal.

Strong operating cash flow meant that Roche expected to reduce the significant debt it assumed for the Genentech purchase, and return to a position of positive net cash by 2015.

2009 Nobel Prize in Physics

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for two scientific achievements that have helped to shape the foundations of today’s networked societies. They have created many practical innovations for everyday life and provided new tools for scientific exploration.

In 1966, Charles K. Kao, a Director of Engineering at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK and later Vice-Chancellor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, made a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fiber optics. He carefully calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers. With a fiber of purest glass it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers, compared to only 20 meters for the fibers available in the 1960s. Kao's enthusiasm inspired other researchers to share his vision of the future potential of fiber optics. The first ultrapure fiber was successfully fabricated just four years later, in 1970.

Today optical fibers make up the circulatory system that nourishes our communication society. These low-loss glass fibers facilitate global broadband communication such as the Internet. Light flows in thin threads of glass, and it carries almost all of the telephony and data traffic in each and every direction. Text, music, images and video can be transferred around the globe in a split second.

If we were to unravel all of the glass fibers that wind around the globe, we would get a single thread over one billion kilometers long – which is enough to encircle the globe more than 25 000 times – and is increasing by thousands of kilometers every hour.

A large share of the traffic is made up of digital images, which constitute the second part of the award. In 1969 Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (Charge-Coupled Device). The CCD technology makes use of the photoelectric effect, as theorized by Albert Einstein and for which he was awarded the 1921 year's Nobel Prize. By this effect, light is transformed into electric signals. The challenge when designing an image sensor was to gather and read out the signals in a large number of image points, or pixels, in a short time.

The CCD is the digital camera's electronic eye. It revolutionized photography, as light could now be captured electronically instead of on film. The digital form facilitates the processing and distribution of these images. CCD technology is also used in many medical applications, e.g. imaging the inside of the human body, both for diagnostics and for microsurgery.

CCD technology, which transforms patterns of light into useful digital information, is the basis for many forms of modern imaging.

Leveraging pioneering foundational work in both the transistor and solar cell technologies, both of which were invented at Bell Labs, Doctors Boyle and Smith designed and developed the first CCD in 1969. By 1970, the Bell Labs researchers had built the CCD into the world’s first solid-state video camera. In 1975, they demonstrated the first CCD camera with image quality sharp enough for broadcast television.

Since its invention, the CCD has spawned significant new industries and markets by enabling a wide range of products including digital cameras, camcorders, HDTV, security monitoring, medical endoscopy, modern astronomy, and video conferencing to name a few. The insights behind CCDs also played a crucial role in the emergence of optical networking, which is the underlying transport technology for both the Internet and all other core communication networks today.

Beginning in 1983, telescopes were first outfitted with solid-state CCD cameras, which enabled astronomers to study objects thousands of times fainter than the most sensitive existing photographic plates, and enabled scientists to image in seconds what would have taken hours before. Today, most optical observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope, rely on digital information systems built around “mosaics” of ultra sensitive CCD chips. CCD-enabled cameras also are used in satellite observations of the earth for environmental monitoring, surveying, and surveillance.