Word: gallium
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...Global Solar, picks his way along his factory floor, tracing the convoluted path that his thin-film solar panels follow from birth to shipping truck. The raw materials the workers carry are ultra-thin sheets of flexible plastic, which are then coated with a series of chemicals--indium, gallium, diselenide--that allows the module to turn sunlight into electricity...
...soon followed up the blue LED with the first bright green and white LEDs. An LED is a semiconductor that generates light, but very little heat, when an electric current is passed through it. Different semiconductor materials produce different colors; Nakamura used gallium nitride, which generates blue and white light. The resulting LEDs use as little as one-seventh the energy as an incandescent bulb and can last about 100 times as long, up to 100,000 hours. If they were widely used, LEDs could lead to enormous energy savings and carbon-emissions reductions. In the developing world, LEDs paired...
Finding any kind of neutrino is a neat trick. The Baksan detector consists of four tanks filled with 30 tons of the element gallium, which liquefies at about room temperature. If a solar neutrino of the right energy interacts with the material in the tanks, a feat of atomic alchemy will transmute some of the gallium into germanium, another metallic element...
First scientists must eliminate other sources of radiation that may trigger false signals in the gallium. (To shield the experiment from cosmic rays, the detectors are installed in an underground tunnel, beneath a mile of rock.) About the only thing harder than proving that solar neutrinos passed through the gallium-filled tanks is proving that they didn...
...step too far. Not only does the 16-processor Cray-3 contain four times as many central calculating units as the Cray-2 (an increase that more than quadruples its complexity), but it relies on an as-yet-unproved technological advance: replacing silicon chips with faster ones made of gallium arsenide. Add to Cray's headaches the fact that his new computer is so compact that assembly by hand is difficult. Before production could begin, he would have to endow robots with the manipulative skills of a jeweler or watchmaker...