Find out what improvements can help you start saving energy today. Stanford University Professor Shanhui Fan and his team of research students are working on a device that could not only help address the problem, but also harness the sun’s power to generate electricity. The Shanhui Fan team has made significant strides in harvesting the free energy implicit in the temperature difference between space, which is very cold, and the Earth. Welcoming the news of a successful experiment of the device prototype, which was the size of a pie plate, professor of electrical engineering at the University of California’s Berkeley campus and director of the Center for Energy Efficient Electronic Science, Eli Yablonovitch, says: "This is a further development in harvesting free energy from the sun. The device, tested on the roof of a Stanford University building, comprised traditional semiconductor materials used in solar panels and an innovative multi-layered material that Fan, and two other academic colleagues, had been working on for years.