[Update] Did someone say shenanigans? It appears the solar panel created from human hair is among many things in this world too good to be true. According to a debunking website, human hair could never be used in such a fashion to generate the kind of voltages as being shown and the author of the debunking site suspects a silicon based solar panel or a battery is hidden within the human hair solar panel. Thanks to our readers who picked up on the hoax and let us know about it. We never want to pass along bad info from other news sources, but occasionally it happens.
Also for the people of Nepal, my apologies. Geography has never been my strong suit and the article has been corrected to show Nepal is not part of India.
Well here is someone using their cranium to literally solve a problem. Milan Karki, a teenager from Nepal, may have stumbled onto a way to make cheaper solar power by using a material that grows naturally on almost everyone in the world – human hair.
Karki found that melanin, the stuff in human hair that gives it color, is light sensitive and can also act as a conductor to electricity. As he sees it, melanin could replace more expensive silicon components in commercially made solar panels making them easier to afford for villages that have no access to power.
Karki’s solar panel (pictured above) cost £23 (approximately $39) to manufacture and can generate almost 9 volts of electricity which is capable of charging a mobile phone or a pack of batteries that could provide light. It also seems that Milan got his not-so-hair-brained idea for his hair based solar panel from a book written by Stephen Hawking that talked about creating static energy from human hair.