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Transparency builds trust. The phrase has become so axiomatic in corporate relations that it's inching perilously close to cliché. And while virtues of openness and transparency are well-established in the corporate world, they're even more essential when applied to the operation of city governments. A recent Knight Foundation/Pew Research study shows how important, demonstrating that if citizens believe their city governments behave in a transparent manner and make information easily accessible, they tend to think more highly about their town and its civic institutions.

UCLA researchers have developed a new transparent solar cell that is an advance toward giving windows in homes and other buildings the ability to generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside. Their study appears in the journal ACS Nano.   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. They made the device from a photoactive plastic that converts infrared light into an electrical current

Conventional silicon-based rigid solar cells generally found on the market are not suitable for manufacturing moldable thin-film solar cells, in which a transparent, flexible and electrically conductive electrode collects the light and carries away the current. A woven polymer electrode developed by Empa has now produced first results which are very promising, indicating that the new material may be a substitute for indium tin oxide coatings.