The brainwave for a high-performance, three-dimensional (3D) solar panel came to Jeff Grossman not while burning the midnight oil in his laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but as he looked up at trees on a hike with his family near Lake Tahoe in California.
“Trees optimise a lot more than just generating energy, but I kept zeroing in on what the shape of their canopies — the spirals, the internal angles — had to do with this,” says Grossman.
“I
