That's the real crime
sm1dger
joined 1 year ago
The money is a means to an end. It would be more efficient to steal the drugs themselves. As a first guess, threaten a doctor to steal the drugs and write out a detailed rota of what to take and when for you. Depending on the means used to coerce, leave the country afterwards. Or just live in a country with socialised healthcare
I dont know this work, but have had a hand in some solar cell research (nanomaterials development), so can give a little context. This is a "one off" in so much as it will be centimeters sized lab based sample, although it has been repearedto verify. The current cost difference is astronomical versus mainstream (silicon) panels, but that's typical of new discoveries. To be more exact, this is TRL 4 (technology readiness level 4) which is a scale that goes up to 9. Things only start getting cheap as you get towards the top. As for what the expected price of these materials would be, we don't usually know for sure, although as this is a tandem cell it must be more expensive than mainstream as it literally builds a perovskite cell on top of a silicon one. They will never be used for mainstream - this is a specialist material.
The perovskite itself might make it as a general use solar cell. They have good efficiencies and you don't have to make pure silicon (which is a bitch) and can in theory make them cheap and easy. As for time frame, I'm a bit of a skeptic it will ever be really used as there are a couple of issues this tech needs to address before it's viable (#1, they degrade in air and encapsulating them adds new issues) and we already build silicon factories so that is soooo cheap versus building new factories to make long-term-cheaper cells. Factories are expensive. But in theory, anyone could push it to the mainstream within a decade.