LED light bulbs appear to be the future of lighting our homes, cars, offices, sidewalks, and etc. They are more expensive, but the upside is that they are a lot more energy efficient than say the incandescent bulbs that were introduced back in the day. However the downside is that LED bulbs have been accused of being less “warm” in terms of aesthetics.
So does this mean that we’d have to sacrifice “warmth” for energy savings? That might seem like the case, but researchers at MIT might have come up with a solution. According to the paper published in Nature Nanotechnology (via Popular Science), the researchers have created an incandescent bulb that is capable of “eating” the heat that it generates, thus in a way powering itself, and in turn making it more energy efficient than a regular incandescent bulb.
How this works is that what researchers have done is kept the technology relatively the same, except that the bulb is surrounded by a new kind of crystal filter that lets the light out, but at the same time reflect the infrared wavelengths of light back towards the filament, which is then reabsorbed and emitted as light, and repeats itself until shut off.
Now before you get too excited about these bulbs, note that this exists merely as a proof-of-concept, meaning that you won’t be able to go out and purchase one from the stores anytime soon. However the researchers claim that the prototype is apparently as efficient as some LED and fluorescent bulbs in the market today, which is pretty optimistic.
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