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A new study highlights the successful development of the first flexible perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell with a record efficiency of 22.8%, representing a major advance in flexible solar cell technology.

Although rigid perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells have seen impressive advancements, achieving efficiencies as high as 33.9%, the development of flexible versions of these cells has been limited. The main hurdle is improving light absorption in the ultrathin silicon bottom cells without compromising their mechanical flexibility.

In their pioneering study, a research team led by Dr. Xinlong Wang, Dr. Jingming Zheng, Dr. Zhiqin Ying, Prof. Xi Yang, and Prof. Jichun Ye from the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has successfully demonstrated the first flexible perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell based on ultrathin silicon, with a thickness of approximately 30 µm. By reducing wafer thicknesses and adjusting the feature sizes of light-trapping textures, they significantly improved the flexibility of the silicon substrate without compromising light utilization. Additionally, by capping the perovskite top cells, they enhanced the mechanical durability of the device, thus addressing concerns related to fractures in the silicon surface.

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Plus, Turing also showed that achieving universality doesn’t require anything fancy. The basic equipment of a universal machine is just not more advanced than a kid’s abacus — operations like incrementing, decrementing, and conditional jumping are all it takes to create software of any complexity: be it a calculator, Minecraft, or an AI chatbot.

Likewise, consciousness might just be an emergent property of the software running AGI, much like how the hardware of a universal machine gives rise to its capabilities. Personally, I don’t buy into the idea of something sitting on top of the physical human brain — no immortal soul or astral “I” floating around in higher dimensions. It’s all just flesh and bone. Think of it like an anthill: this incredibly complex system doesn’t need some divine spirit to explain its organized society, impressive architecture, or mushroom farms. The anthill’s intricate behaviour, often referred to as a superorganism, emerges from the interactions of its individual ants without needing to be reduced to them. Similarly, a single ant wandering around in a terrarium won’t tell you much about the anthill as a whole. Brain neurons are like those ants — pretty dumb on their own, but get around 86 billion of them together, and suddenly you’ve got “I” with all its experiences, dreams, and… consciousness.

So basically, if something can think, it can also think about itself. That means consciousness is a natural part of thinking — it just comes with the territory. And if you think about it, this also means you can’t really have thinking without consciousness, which brings us back to the whole Skynet thing.

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Squeeze enough stuff into one spot, space-time itself will pucker up in a sweet cosmic kiss known as a black hole.

As far as Einstein’s sums are concerned, that ‘stuff’ includes the massless glow of electromagnetic radiation. Given E = mc2, which describes the equivalence between mass and energy, the energy of light itself should – in theory – be capable of creating a black hole if enough of it is concentrated in one spot.

Before you crack out the big-gun lasers and punch some holes into the Universe’s floorboards, there’s one thing researchers from the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain and the University of Waterloo in Canada want you to know.

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Scientists at Kyoto University Hospital will conduct the first human trial of the drug from September 2024 to August 2025. In tests on ferrets and mice, the drug worked with no notable side effects, Popular Mechanics reported.

The drug will be used on 30 men between 30–64 who are missing at least one molar. From there, researchers will expand the study to those with partial edentulism, or those missing one to five permanent teeth.

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Centenarians have become the fastest-growing demographic group in the world, with numbers approximately doubling every 10 years since the 1970s.

Many researchers have sought out the factors and contributors that determine a long and healthy life. The dissolution isn’t new either, with Plato and Aristotle writing about the ageing process over 2,300 years ago.

Understanding what is behind living a longer life involves unravelling the complex interplay of genetic predisposition and lifestyle factors and how they interact.

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The solar aircraft is made by a Spanish-American aerospace startup called Skydweller Aero. Based in Oklahoma City, the company raised $32 million in its Series A funding round, led by Italian aerospace firm Leonardo.

“For us, if you’re flying 90 days with one aircraft, that’s two takeoffs and landings versus … hundreds,” Skydweller Aero co-founder John Parkes told Aviation Today. “Being able to fly thousands of miles, persist over an area for 30–60 days and fly back is a differentiator. It’s a huge cost savings to the US government when you look at the whole cost of doing a lot of the national security missions that we have.”

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