Liter of Light’s solar-powered, DIY lamp made from a plastic bottle is transforming lives Shine on: a ‘Liter of Light’ plastic bottle provides illumination in the Granizal area of Antioquia, Colombia Despite what Back to the Future fans would have you believe, "where’s my hoverboard?" isn’t a shoe-in for the motto of 2015. "Let there be light" is a strong contender, thanks to this being Unesco’s International Year of Light. The opening ceremony in Paris this week celebrated seminal moments in the history of illumination. It is, I learn, 1,000 years since the great Arabic scientist, Ibn al-Haytham, released his magnum opus on optics, 150 years since James Clerk Maxwell came up with the electromagnetic theory of light, and 50 years since the development of fibre optics. All of which enlightening anniversaries provide a handy springboard for Unesco to promote light-based technologies throughout the year. For those of us who spend our lives surrounded by artificial light, bathed in floods of the stuff in our homes and workplaces and on our streets, it might seem something so mundane as not to require, well, the spotlight. But today, more than a quarter of the world’s population lives in darkness. According […]
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