Right now, there are all sorts of flowers in bloom here, such as roses, hydrangeas and azaleas, peaking out of planter boxes and slim spaces between buildings. People are travelling for hours just to see some wysteria in a small shrine's precints. The flowers in Tokyo are probably no prettier than they are anywhere else, but because they're such a rare sight in Tokyo, you can't help but stop and stare when you spot some, and you feel like those flowers are the most beautiful things you've ever seen.

The University of Delaware has inched up the record for solar cell efficiency with a new device that can convert 42.8 percent of the light that strikes it into electricity.

That beats the old record of 40.7 percent hit in December. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has been funding research to get efficiency up to 50 percent.

The cell, created by Christina Honsberg and Allan Barnett of UD, splits incoming light into three buckets: high energy, low energy, and medium energy light. The light is then directed to different materials, which then extract electrons out of the photons that make up sunlight.