If climate change, nuclear weapons or Donald Trump don’t kill us first, there’s always artificial intelligence just waiting in the wings. It’s been a long time worry that when AI gains a certain level of autonomy it will see no use for humans or even perceive them as a threat. A new study by Google’s DeepMind lab may or may not ease those fears.
Scientists have discovered that a certain type of mineral has the right properties to extract energy from multiple sources at the same time — turning solar, heat, and kinetic energy into electricity.
The mineral is a type of perovskite — a family of minerals with a specific crystal structure — and this is the first time researchers have identified one that can convert energy from all three sources at room temperature.
Since the first perovskite solar cell was invented back in 2009, these minerals have been positioned as the ‘next big thing’ in renewable energy technology.
Young Bae of Advanced Space and Energy Technologies in Tustin, California, has improved his photonic laser thruster. was developed with NASA funding. His thruster works because light exerts pressure when it hits something. In theory, it is possible to move an object like a CubeSat by nudging it with a laser beam. In practice, however, the pressure which light exerts is so small that a device able to do a useful amount of nudging would require a laser of unfeasibly large power.
Dr Bae has overcome this limitation by bouncing light repeatedly between the source laser and the satellite, to multiply the thrust. In his latest experiments, Dr Bae has managed to amplify the thrust imparted by a single nudge of the laser by a factor of 1,500, which is big enough to manoeuvre a CubeSat as well as a conventional thruster would. This brings two advantages. First, since no on-board propellant is required, there is more room for instruments. Second, there being no fuel to run out, a CubeSat’s orbit can be boosted as many times as is desired, and its working life prolonged indefinitely.
A suitable laser is required to provide the thrust. Dr Bae thinks it could be in orbit as well. The laser would be powered by solar cells and shepherd a veritable flock of CubeSats, providing the propulsion needed to move and arrange them as required.
Nice forum on QC Crystal Superconduction in Mar.
From March 8–10, 2017, an International Conference on Crystal Growth is to be held in Freiburg under the auspices of the German Association of Crystal Growth DGKK and the Swiss Society for Crystallography SGK-SSCR. The conference, jointly organized by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, the Crystallography department of the Institute of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University Freiburg and the University of Geneva, is to be held in the seminar rooms of the Chemistry Faculty of the University of Freiburg. Furthermore, the Young DGKK will hold a seminar for young scientists at Fraunhofer ISE on March 7, 2017.
“Whether for mobile communication, computers or LEDs, crystalline materials are key components of our modern lifestyle,” says Dr. Stephan Riepe, group head in the Department of Silicon Materials at Fraunhofer ISE. “Crystal growth has a long tradition and today is still far from becoming obsolete. Materials with special crystalline structure are being developed for applications in high-temperature superconductors through to low-loss power transmission. Artificial diamonds are a favorite choice for building quantum computers. At the conference, the production of silicon, III-V semiconductors and most currently perovskite layers for cost-effective high efficiency tandem solar cells will also be discussed.”
In Freiburg, a close cooperation exists between the Fraunhofer Institutes and the University of Freiburg. For example, at Fraunhofer ISE a doctoral thesis of the University of Freiburg was carried out which investigated how impurities can be minimized during multicrystalline silicon production. In the production process, liquid silicon is melted in a quartz crucible and subsequently solidified. Similar to flour’s function when sprinkled in a baking form, silicon nitride powder acts as a separating agent between the crucible and the silicon. Here the aim is to reduce impurities on the scale of parts per billion, or ppb, to achieve the highest solar cell efficiencies. On a regular basis, student and doctoral degree theses are carried out to address such questions.
New Graphene based flash memory card coming.
Dotz Nano (ASX: DTZ) has successfully completed a proof of concept research study into the use of Graphene Quantum Dots (GQDs) in flash memory devices with the Kyung Hee University in South Korea.
GQDs are being developed for use in various applications including medical imaging, sensing, consumer electronics, energy storage, solar cells and computer storage.
Dotz Nano is in advanced negotiations to sign a full licensing agreement with Kyung Hee University related to this technology.
In Brief
When you imagine what the cities of the future will look like, it’s hard to think that we can do more than what some nations have already achieved. For instance, Dubai, Japan, and Singapore feature some of the world’s most impressive modern architectural marvels; Helsinki is pioneering a future in data transparency; Brazil is setting the standard for efficient and sustainable mass transportation and eco-consciousness; and Korea is defining an urban landscape anchored on digital connectivity.
But architects and urban planners are letting their imaginations run wild — after all, where else can we go but toward our most outlandish, exciting, and sometimes even dystopian imaginings of the future?
In what could be called a classic “Eureka” moment, UC Santa Barbara materials researchers have discovered a simple yet effective method for mastering the electrical properties of polymer semiconductors. The elegant technique allows for the efficient design and manufacture of organic circuitry (the type found in flexible displays and solar cells, for instance) of varying complexity while using the same semiconductor material throughout.
“It’s a different strategy by which you can take a material and change its properties,” said Guillermo Bazan, a professor of chemistry and materials at UCSB. With the addition of fullerene or copper tetrabenzoporphyrin (CuBP) molecules in strategic places, the charge carriers in semiconducting materials—negative electrons and positive “holes”—may be controlled and inverted for better device performance as well as economical manufacture. The discovery is published in a pair of papers that appear in the journals Advanced Functional Materials and Advanced Electronic Materials.
In the realm of polymer semiconductors, device functionality depends on the movement of the appropriate charge carriers across the material. There have been many advances in the synthesis of high-mobility, high-performance materials, said lead author Michael Ford, graduate student in materials, but the fine control of the electrons and holes is what will allow these sophisticated polymers to reach their full potential.
