Kids these days--they just keep inventing new technologies to secure our energy future. The latest comes from Milan Karki, an 18-year-old resident of a rural village in Nepal. Karki has purportedly devised a way to dramatically reduce the cost of solar panels by replacing silicon components with human hair.

Silicon is used as a conductor in many solar panels, but the material is expensive and ultimately nonrenewable. Karki discovered, however, that melanin from hair also acts as a conductor. And as you might imagine, human hair is much easier to obtain than silicon. In Nepal, half a pound of hair costs just 25 cents and lasts in Karki's 15- square inch, 18 watt solar panel for months. The panel costs a relatively cheap $38 to produce from raw materials, and the teen inventor claims that anyone can replace the hair.

The panel won't revolutionize the world of solar power--a single human hair-equipped panel can only charge a cell phone or a pack of batteries for evening light--though it could be incredibly useful in developing communities that lack power, especially since the panel requires little maintenance.

That is, if the invention is real. Impressive-sounding solar inventions fall by the wayside all the time--we haven't heard a peep about 12 year-old William Yuan's ultra-efficient 3-D solar cell in a year. And as Treehugger points out, human hair covers just a small piece of Karki's prototype, and it's unlikely that the panel can generate enough juice to charge a phone with that much surface area. We won't know if the panel is a hoax or not until it's verified outside of the UK Daily Mail, but the Mail has been right about implausible-sounding inventions before (the Beanzawave, anyone?)

[Via UK Daily Mail]

UPDATE: This site claims that the human hair story is a hoax. We'll continue to update the story as necessary.