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Published online 11 October 2005 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news051010-7
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Wave energy gets to the point
Water lens' might help to harness the ocean's energy.
Attempts to harness wave power for clean energy generation could be helped by building posts at sea, say researchers who have taken a lesson from optics and applied it to the ocean.
Xinhua Hu and Che Ting Chan of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology say that a forest of pillars standing in orderly rows in shallow water can bend ocean waves by refraction - the same phenomenon that makes a pencil immersed in a beaker of water look kinked.
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