Robot researcher Mark Yim offers a look inside the promising field of modular reconfigurable robotics — bots that can shift form to tackle an array of tasks.
Robots designed to self-construct
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This compact solar concentrator could be the perfect daylight harvesting device for Singapore’s underground spaces.
Scientists have discovered two supermassive black holes, locked together in a final, terrible spiral. They’re about to collide. And when they do, it will shake the fabric of spacetime itself.
Combing through decades of radio telescope observation data, a team of Caltech astronomers discovered a radio pattern from the deep sky unlike anything ever observed before. It was a flickering point of light, a blazar some nine billion light-years away. Every five years, it waxed and waned in brightness in a perfect sine wave, like clockwork. But that’s not what made it special. What made it special is where the signal diverged from the pattern. Over nearly fifty years, this point of light had obeyed a clockwork cycle of five-year pulses — except for the twenty years where it didn’t.
Five other observatories confirmed the readings, including the University of Michigan Radio Astronomy Observatory, MIT’s Haystack Observatory, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Metsähovi Radio Observatory in Finland, and NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space satellite. This was no error.
Understanding how we use our brain to make decisions is a daunting task, given our brain’s extensive webs of neural wiring and circuitry. Now, JAX researchers Erik Bloss and Kourtney Graham are using a surprising tool to investigate goal-directed behaviors: the rabies virus.
It’s easy to get caught up in the doom-and-gloom predictions about artificial intelligence wiping out millions of jobs. Here’s a reality check.
Developed by a Chinese-Swedish research group, the device is an ultra-thin chip that could be integrated into electronics such as headphones, smartwatches and telephones. It combines a Molecular Solar Thermal Energy Storage System (MOST) with a micro-fabricated system that includes a thermoelectric generator (TEG) with a low-dimensional material-based microelectromechanical system (MEMS).
The 204-megawatt solar park in the northern Greek town of Kozani was built by Greece’s biggest oil refiner Hellenic Petroleum.
Hellenic Petroleum is one of the largest oil companies in the Balkans but claims to be undergoing a transformation into clean energy. It has installed the largest solar park in Greece and also hints that it may add battery storage too.
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In a lab at the University of Washington, robots are playing air hockey.
Or they’re solving Rubik’s Cubes, mastering chess or painting the next Mona Lisa with a single laser beam.
As the robots play, the researchers who built them are learning more about how they work, how they think and where they have room to grow, said Xu Chen, one of those researchers and an associate professor of mechanical engineering at UW.
A German research team has developed a tandem solar cell that reaches 24 percent efficiency – measured according to the fraction of photons converted into electricity (i.e. electrons). This sets a new world record as the highest efficiency achieved so far with this combination of organic and perovskite-based absorbers. The solar cell was developed by Professor Dr. Thomas Riedl’s group at the University of Wuppertal together with researchers from the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Cologne and other project partners from the Universities of Potsdam and Tübingen as well as the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschng in Düsseldorf. The results have been published today (April 13, 2022) in Nature under the title “Perovskite/organic tandem solar cells with indium oxide interconnect.”
Conventional solar cell technologies are predominantly based on the semiconductor silicon and are now considered to be “as good as it gets.” Significant improvements in their efficiency – i.e., more watts of electrical power per watt of solar radiation collected – can hardly be expected. That makes it all the more necessary to develop new solar technologies that can make a decisive contribution to the energy transition. Two such alternative absorber materials have been combined in this work. Here, organic semiconductors were used, which are carbon-based compounds that can conduct electricity under certain conditions. These were paired with a perovskite, based on a lead-halogen compound, with excellent semiconducting properties. Both of these technologies require significantly less material and energy for their production compared to conventional silicon cells, making it possible to make solar cells even more sustainable.