346: environmentally friendly fridges

As the world becomes more concerned about climate change, there is a definite trend emerging whereby 'old' technologies with lower environmental impacts are re-examined. Now, one of Einstein's abandoned concepts is up for scrutiny. As today's linked article from the UK's Observer newspaper reports, Einstein and Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard patented a design for a refrigerator back in the 1930s, which used ammonia, butane and water to keep things cold and had no movable parts. Today's fridges generally use freons, particularly potent manmade greenhouse gases. Though Einstein's and Szilard's design was inefficient at the time, engineers from Oxford are working to improve it and they think they will have a working version of the fridge - powered by solar panels rather than mains electricity - in a month or so. If they manage that, the implications are potentially very exciting - not only would a fridge of this type be better for the Earth's atmosphere, it could also be used in areas where there's no electricity (very useful when transporting vaccines or other medical supplies, for example). Cool idea, or what? (Image from the Observer.)