Re: Discover article - \"Goodbye, Mr. Edison\"
awww man.
it contained such hilites as the following 5 quotes:
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To get from Kathmandu to the tiny buddhist village of Thulo Pokhara in Nepal, Dave Irvine-Halliday drove for several hours until the roads ran out, then hiked southeastward through the countryside for two days. When he arrived, he found villagers working and reading around battery-powered lamps equipped with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs—the same lamps he had left there in 2000.
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The reasons for the rapid switchover are simple. Incandescent bulbs have to be replaced annually, but LED traffic lights should last five to 10 years. LEDs also use 80 to 90 percent less electricity than the conventional signals they replace. Collectively, the new traffic lights save at least 400 million kilowatt-hours a year in the United States.
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Compact, white-light LEDs are improving quickly and should reach 75 lumens per watt by 2007, according to George Craford, chief technology officer at Lumileds, a joint venture between Philips Lighting and Agilent Technologies. Furthermore, LEDs emit almost no waste heat, so they do not add to the strain on summer air conditioners. The Optoelectronics Industry Development Association in Washington, D.C., predicts that white LEDs could cut in half the amount of electricity used for lighting in this country by 2020, saving $100 billion and reducing carbon emissions from energy generation by 28 million tons each year.
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Anil Duggal, from the light-energy conversion program at the General Electric Global Research Center, is working on OLEDs—LEDs made from organic polymers rather than the usual semiconductors. Current versions are too short-lived and power hungry for commercial use. But OLEDs have the potential to be extremely cheap and bendable. "You could have LED wallpaper and put it anywhere you want. You could even wrap it around a telephone pole," Duggal says.
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For the residents of Thulo Pokhara, the benefit of LED illumination is not a matter of some far-off technological debate. If not for the better lightbulb, they would have no electric light at all.
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*Opening paragraph of the article
**Closing paragraph of the article
