The UCLA team describes a new kind of polymer solar cell (PSC) that produces energy by absorbing mainly infrared light, not visible light, making the cells nearly 70% transparent to the human eye.

ENGADGET: UCLA creates transparent solar cell, dreams of current generating windows

If the light were not infrared but were instead in the visible spectrum, there was enough of it that the naked eye could have seen a glow, according to Phaedon Avouris , manager of nanometer scale science and technology at IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) Research Laboratories in Yorktown Heights, N.

FORBES: IBM Makes Molecule-Sized Light