Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com.

I'm Cody Goff.

And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about how scientists are using human hair to make better solar panels.

Then you'll learn why people tend to add rather than subtract

when they want to improve something.

With help from university professor and author, Laide Clots.

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

Customers at a barber shop in Brisbane, Australia have helped scientists inch a bit closer to a carbon-free future.

Researchers have turned their hair into carbon dots

that improve the performance of cutting-edge solar panels.

Perov skite solar panels are a new kind of solar panel that researchers have been developing for about a decade.

They're potentially cheaper than silicon panels and they're flexible.

More importantly, they gobble up solar energy like nobody's business.

Researchers are pretty sure that Perovskites are going to play a big role in the future of electricity.

But if they're going to power the world, they have to be easy to make and last a long time. That's where the hair comes in. It turns out that

burning human hair at roughly the maximum temperature of a typical home oven

produces things called carbon nanodots.

These are particles 1,000 times smaller than a red blood cell that can conduct

electricity and emit light which makes them handy when it comes to things like biomedical

imaging and chemical analysis. Scientists have known about carbon nanodots for

about 15 years, but it was just last year that other researchers first made them out of human hair.

The researchers behind this new breakthrough had previously used other nanoscale carbon materials to improve the performance of solar panels.

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