As a 13 years old boy from New York was looking at trees, he observed that there was a pattern to how branches were positioned. Enquiring further, he found they follow a fibonacci sequence … Nothing extraordinary so far, this is a fact already known, except that few thirteen years kids will figure that out 🙂 … The extraordinary thing is that he then thought of comparing how solar cells placed using that pattern compare to a regular flat array of photovoltaic cells, and found that they generated 20-50% more power !!! Through natural selection, trees have apparently evolved over millions of yrars to adopt that configuration and increase the amount of energy they capture, but no-one had thought of using this for solar panels before.
This is such a refreshing story … One of curiosity, intelligence, and one that proves again that there is no limit to understanding more and more of the world around us, and use the learnings to improve our lives !
To read the paper written by that boy, Aidan Dwyer, himself, follow this link.