Word: thinness
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What parents, who suffer all this pain by proxy, must realize is that they are never going to change the hard realities of schoolyard taunts and a thin-obsessed culture. What they must do instead is teach their kids to value those things less--and value other things more. Kelly Lowry, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, says the key lies in accentuating the positive. "Parents need to emphasize health behaviors, not the numbers on a scale," she says...
Mike Gering, CEO of the start-up 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...
...high tech than high school chemistry lab, and Global Solar's days in this cramped Tucson, Ariz., facility are history. The company is shifting production to a sparkling factory just a few miles down the road. The new facility is fast enough to churn out 40 megawatts' worth of thin-film solar panels a year, more than 10 times Global Solar's previous capacity...
...story being repeated throughout the solar world, from the Southwest to Silicon Valley to Germany. Everywhere you look, thin-film solar companies are opening new, more efficient factories. The thin in thin film refers to the skinny layers of photoactive chemicals needed for the technology, as compared with the thicker films used in crystalline-silicon solar modules. Though thin-film photovoltaics are cheaper than the crystalline ones on most rooftop solar panels, the technology has proved maddeningly difficult to mass-produce, which had kept it from going mainstream. But today thin film is the hottest part of the fastest-growing...
That evolution hasn't occurred overnight. Thin film is a relatively young technology, and moving it from the laboratory to mass production has been tricky. Even some of the best-funded thin-film start-ups--like Miasolé, based in Santa Clara, Calif.--have been plagued with production disruptions. "Going from R&D to manufacturing is always fraught with gotchas," says Joseph Laia, Miasolé's CEO. "There are a whole series of things you didn't see because no one has really done this at scale." Since the industry is still small, for example, companies can't always count on easy...