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Here's Today's Feel-Good Story:
Scientists have discovered a way to cool a house without air-conditioning involving the same kind of protection that a beetle has with its shell.
A beetle's shell captures light and sends it bouncing around separating it into different wavelengths.
This can be used on a house by pasting the same nanostructure to the outside of a house and can keep it 7.2 degrees cooler during the day and 20 degrees cooler at night.
“The usual way to generate a color is dye, but dye will absorb light and heat up, and that counteracts the cooling effect,” Qingchen Shen, a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge. “We wanted to make it cheap, that’s why we used cellulose-based materials. Cellulose nanocrystals can be extracted from wood or cotton. Cellulose is the most abundant polymer in nature.”