Solar energy stocks continued their march upward Wednesday after Chinese silicon wafer manufacturer ReneSola () beat analysts’ first-quarter sales and profit forecasts.

For the quarter that ended March 31, ReneSola said earnings doubled from the year-ago period to 28 cents per share, nearly 22% over the average estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.

Sales more than tripled to $123 million, 17% over views.

ReneSola also raised its outlook for the second time in a month.

The company now expects sales of $570 million to $590 million for 2008, while it earlier had guided for $530 million to $550 million. The new guidance smashed analysts’ estimates of $533.8 million.

Shares rose as high as 13% Wednesday before falling sharply late in the day to close at 22.30 a 3% gain.

That’s about triple the price of its lows in March and well ahead its initial offering price of $13. Leading solar stocks also rose. SunPower () climbed 4%, First Solar () was up 1%, and Suntech Power Holdings () increased 4.5%.

Solar stocks have surged this week amid growing optimism about worldwide green energy demand and the ability of companies to pass on higher prices to customers. IBD’s “Energy-Other” group which includes most solar firms climbed nearly 5% Tuesday and Wednesday.

Canadian Solar, () another Chinese solar company, smashed first-quarter estimates Tuesday as sales climbed 879% on rising demand for solar products.

“I think Canadian Solar yesterday was a big shocker,” said Jesse Pichel, an analyst with Piper Jaffray.

Another possible factor: speculation that the U.S. House of Representatives is close to a deal that would extend federal tax subsidies for solar energy. Previous legislative efforts have fallen short.

“It’s very difficult to know what’s going to come out of Washington,” Timothy Arcuri, an analyst with City Investment Research, said in an interview Wednesday. “There is some support for trying to get this done, and even trying to get this done (over) multiple years vs. just a single year.”

There is also growing optimism that Spain, a key growth market, could buoy its incentives longer than expected, says Piper Jaffray’s Pichel.

ReneSola doesn’t make the final solar-panel products that go on rooftops and into utility-grade solar power plants. It uses the popular solar raw material, polysilicon, to create thin solar wafers. Then companies such as Suntech or JA Solar () buy the wafers to make solar cells and panels, or modules.

The demand for polysilicon, the raw material used to make wafers, has created a severe industry shortage, which could have eaten into ReneSola’s gross margins.

Instead, the company’s margins grew 2 percentage points to 22%. Pichel expected 18%.

The company says it boosted efficiency by wringing more out of its production lines. For example, it used 6.3 grams of polysilicon per watt of generation capacity vs. 6.5 grams in the previous quarter.

“They are emerging as a tier-one supplier,” Pichel said.

At the same time, the company raised prices for its products.

ReneSola wants to further boost efficiency by expanding into polysilicon production. The company doubled its estimates for its in-house polysilicon production plant, which will begin next year.

ReneSola is one of the few solar companies to go public on the U.S. market this year after a crush of initial public offerings by solar firms in 2006 and 2007, according to Sam Snyder, an analyst with Renaissance Capital. ReneSola shares traded in London before its U.S. debut.

ReneSola now has a market value of more than $2 billion putting it ahead of older stock names such as Solarfun Power Holdings () and Canadian Solar.

“The stock prices have reflected confidence returning to this space,” Snyder said.

Attention all parents and caregivers: Before manhandling your monster blue bin to the curb this week, you may first want to lighten its load. After all, there’s treasure stashed in that trash.

Take the discarded egg carton, for example. Cut it into separate eggcups and have your kids decorate each with glue and coloured tissue paper. Then push pipe cleaners through the bottom, plop them into an empty jar (jelly, pasta, etc.) and, voila, you’ve got a beautiful bouquet of flowers.

This is eco-art. If you have yet to try it, now is an appropriate time as we prepare to celebrate Earth Day on Tuesday.

MaryAnn Kohl is a Washington-based, award-winning author and publisher of several art books for kids, including Good Earth Art, which concentrates on open-ended art activities that use recycled materials and items found in nature.

Just about any bit of trash can be transformed into a treasure, she says, including: envelopes, cardboard boxes and containers, soup cans, jars, yarn/ribbon/sewing trims, foil, scrap cards and gift wrap, sandwich baggies, wax paper, wood shavings, pizza boxes, pizza circles, wood scraps, magazines, six-pack rings, card decks, broken crayons and newspapers and magazines.

Eco-art is a win-win-win activity for parents, kids and the environment.

For parents, it’s thrifty splashy, pre-packaged crafts are insultingly expensive.

For kids, it stimulates the imagination to see well beyond the obvious. A broken crayon, for example, can be carved into shavings and used in place of sparkles. Reusing materials also teaches the valuable lesson that not everything needs to be bought new.

Elementary schoolteacher Tanya Krynen has her 7- and 8-year-old students reuse polystyrene trays for print-making by etching designs into the soft plastic and then colouring on top with markers. As the kids stamp their designs on recycled paper, Krynen explains that these trays, which typically package meat and take-out food, never break down.

Recycled materials can also be incorporated into other subject areas like math and science. Krynen, who teaches Grade 2 at Artesian Drive Public School in Mississauga, is always on the lookout for water bottle caps and bread ties. “They are great counters,” she says. (These are unsuitable for younger children, as small items pose a choking hazard).

As for the positive impact reusing materials has on the environment, the numbers do the talking: Last year, over a 41/2-month period, Toronto sent approximately 11,735 tonnes of solid waste a day to the Green Lane Landfill.

Eco-art sounds great until you consider the potential for organizational chaos. But here too, Kohl has creative suggestions. “Plastic bins are good, but I think shoe boxes are even better because you’re reusing. It’s nice if the boxes are of similar size. Label them on the ends and then place them on a low shelf that’s accessible to children.”

For corralling smaller items, Krynen recommends plastic storage containers formerly used for cottage cheese, yogurt, margarine, etc. Reused plastic containers should be labelled and accessible.

Reusing materials is not only fun, but also inherently educational and creative. Says Kohl, “It’s a joy for children to sort through recyclables, find things, and think, `Hmmm, how can I use this?’ Then they come up with their own strategy and follow it through.”

According to the City of Toronto website, polystyrene will now be accepted at Community Environment Day events and at some City Drop-off Depots. For more information go to the website «toronto.ca».

While we may never know what it looks like inside a black hole, astronomers recently obtained one of the closest views yet. The sighting allowed scientists to confirm theories about how these giant cosmic sinkholes spew out jets of particles travelling at nearly the speed of light.

Ever since the first observations of these powerful jets, which are among the brightest objects seen in the universe, astronomers have wondered what causes the particles to accelerate to such great speeds. A leading hypothesis suggested the black hole’s gigantic mass distorts space and time around it, twisting magnetic field lines into a coil that propels material outward.

Now researchers have observed a jet during a period of extreme outburst and found evidence that streams of particles wind a corkscrew path away from the black hole, as the leading hypothesis predicts.

“We got an unprecedented view of the inner portion of one of these jets and gained information that’s very important to understanding how these tremendous particle accelerators work,” said Boston University astronomer Alan Marscher, who led the research team. The results of the study are detailed in the April 24 issue of the journal Nature.

The team studied a galaxy called BL Lacertae (BL Lac), about 950 million light years from Earth, with a central black hole containing 200 million times the mass of our Sun. Since this supermassive black hole’s jets are pointing nearly straight at us, it is called a blazar (a quasar is often thought to be the same as a blazar, except its jets are pointed away from us).

The new observations, taken by the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope, along with NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer and a number of optical telescopes, show material moving outward along a spiral channel, as the scientists expected.

These data support the suggestion that twisted magnetic field lines are creating the jet plumes. Material in the center of the galaxy, such as nearby stars and gas, gets pulled in by the black hole’s overwhelming gravity and forms a disk orbiting around the core (the material’s inertia keeps it spiraling in a disk rather than falling straight into the black hole). The distorted magnetic field lines seem to pull charged particles off the disk and cause them to gush outward at nearly the speed of light.

“We knew that material was falling in to these regions, and we knew that there were outbursts coming out,” said University of Michigan astronomer Hugh Aller, who worked on the new study. “What’s really been a mystery was that we could see there were these really high-energy particles, but we didn’t know how they were created, how they were accelerated. It turns out that the model matches the data. We can actually see the particles gaining velocity as they are accelerated along this magnetic field.”

The astronomers also observed evidence of another phenomenon predicted by the leading hypothesis ? that a flare would be produced when material spewing out in the jets hit a shock wave beyond the core of the black hole.

Atheros () is one of the latest chipmakers to help GPS navigation device makers in their quest to put their devices in more cars, cell phones and pockets.

Late last year, Atheros Communications entered the GPS chips market when it bought privately held u-Nav Microelectronics. Though the purchase was for a modest $54 million, it propels Atheros into a fast-growing market.

“Our sense is GPS is a technology that will become more and more important,” Atheros Chief Executive Craig Barratt said in an interview.

By bouncing signals off satellites, users of GPS devices now often included in cell phones and cars can know their location, direction, speed of travel and the time of day, among other things. The Global Positioning System was created by the U.S. government to help the military determine their geographic locations while in the field. Now, just about everyone is using them.

Atheros will face tough competition. The growth market has attracted such bigger rivals as Texas Instruments () and Qualcomm. ()

“With so many companies competing, it will drive the price of GPS devices down,” said iSuppli analyst Tina Teng. And that means lower GPS chip prices.

Teng says others besides Atheros will be attracted to the GPS market, drawn in part by laws that mandate that all new cell phones have e-911 services. Including GPS in a mobile phone is one way to provide e-911, which tells authorities the exact location of a cell phone user who dials the 911 emergency phone number, for quicker emergency response.

“As a result, you’ll see a lot of connectivity-specialized companies like Atheros coming to this market,” Teng said. “They’ll compete with big vendors like Texas Instruments and Qualcomm.”

A maker of wireless and networking chips, Atheros will have to trudge uphill.

“It’s going to be tough for them in the initial years,” as it takes on established players in GPS, Teng said.

For now, Teng says there’s only modest demand by consumers for GPS in cell phones, though she expects demand to rise in coming years.

Dean Freeman, an analyst with research firm Gartner, says Atheros buying u-Nav is part of the trend in the increasingly competitive chip industry.

Chip firms with less than $200 million in annual revenue are targets for larger companies.

For Atheros, he says, it was easier to buy u-Nav and its GPS chip designs rather than build them.

“Companies are looking to find ways to strengthen their position in difficult times,” Freeman said. “It could be by mergers or by cutting off a piece of the business to raise money, or finding some sort of partnership.”

Just since December, for example, STMicroelectronics () said it would buy Genesis Microchip, and ON Semiconductor () said it would buy AMI Semiconductor.

The chip industry always has been volatile, but the pace of mergers is picking up, Freeman says.

“It’s getting more expensive to do business in the chip industry,” he said. “You have to find ways to do business more economically. One way to do that is to join forces.”

While we may never know what it looks like inside a black hole, astronomers recently obtained one of the closest views yet. The sighting allowed scientists to confirm theories about how these giant cosmic sinkholes spew out jets of particles travelling at nearly the speed of light.

Ever since the first observations of these powerful jets, which are among the brightest objects seen in the universe, astronomers have wondered what causes the particles to accelerate to such great speeds. A leading hypothesis suggested the black hole’s gigantic mass distorts space and time around it, twisting magnetic field lines into a coil that propels material outward.

Now researchers have observed a jet during a period of extreme outburst and found evidence that streams of particles wind a corkscrew path away from the black hole, as the leading hypothesis predicts.

“We got an unprecedented view of the inner portion of one of these jets and gained information that’s very important to understanding how these tremendous particle accelerators work,” said Boston University astronomer Alan Marscher, who led the research team. The results of the study are detailed in the April 24 issue of the journal Nature.

The team studied a galaxy called BL Lacertae (BL Lac), about 950 million light years from Earth, with a central black hole containing 200 million times the mass of our Sun. Since this supermassive black hole’s jets are pointing nearly straight at us, it is called a blazar (a quasar is often thought to be the same as a blazar, except its jets are pointed away from us).

The new observations, taken by the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope, along with NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer and a number of optical telescopes, show material moving outward along a spiral channel, as the scientists expected.

These data support the suggestion that twisted magnetic field lines are creating the jet plumes. Material in the center of the galaxy, such as nearby stars and gas, gets pulled in by the black hole’s overwhelming gravity and forms a disk orbiting around the core (the material’s inertia keeps it spiraling in a disk rather than falling straight into the black hole). The distorted magnetic field lines seem to pull charged particles off the disk and cause them to gush outward at nearly the speed of light.

“We knew that material was falling in to these regions, and we knew that there were outbursts coming out,” said University of Michigan astronomer Hugh Aller, who worked on the new study. “What’s really been a mystery was that we could see there were these really high-energy particles, but we didn’t know how they were created, how they were accelerated. It turns out that the model matches the data. We can actually see the particles gaining velocity as they are accelerated along this magnetic field.”

The astronomers also observed evidence of another phenomenon predicted by the leading hypothesis ? that a flare would be produced when material spewing out in the jets hit a shock wave beyond the core of the black hole.