VIDEO: If the history of Earth was on a timeline from Los Angeles to New York, the American Revolution would have been fought 8 inches ago.
Researchers at Rice University have shown how they can hack the brains of fruit flies to make them remote controlled. The flies performed a specific action within a second of a command being sent to certain neurons in their brain.
The team started by genetically engineering the flies so that they expressed a certain heat-sensitive ion channel in some of their neurons. When this channel sensed heat, it would activate the neuron – in this case, that neuron caused the fly to spread its wings, which is a gesture they often use during mating.
The heat trigger came in the form of iron oxide nanoparticles injected into the insects’ brains. When a magnetic field is switched on nearby, those particles heat up, causing the neurons to fire and the fly to adopt the spread-wing pose.
Now, researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed a prototype for fully scalable all–perovskite tandem solar modules. They were able to scale up individual perovskite cells with a power conversion efficiency of up to 23.5% at an aperture area of 0.1 square centimeters to all-perovskite tandem solar modules with an efficiency of up to 19.1% with an aperture area of 12.25 square centimeters.
The aperture area is the usable part of the surface that is not covered by electrodes, frames, or fasteners. At approximately five percent, the loss of efficiency when upscaling is relatively low. “This is the first report of an all-perovskite tandem solar module worldwide,” says Dr. Bahram Abdollahi Nejand, lead author of the publication and team leader for all-perovskite tandem solar modules.
The KIT researchers claimed this remarkable result is the first of its kind reported worldwide. To obtain this, the team increased the efficiency by optimizing the light path and reducing reflections in the solar cell architecture. They implemented an efficient layout for tandem solar modules using high-throughput laser scribing that enables the production of functional tandem solar mini-modules with two-terminal interconnected cell strips. Lastly, they used coating processes (blade coating and vacuum deposition) that are already established in industrial practice.
Astronomy 101: Neutron stars
Posted in space
In this video, explore the various superdense remnants of massive stars, which hold between 1 and 3 times the Sun’s mass and are so dense that a teaspoon of their matter weighs about a billion tons.
We live in an increasingly connected world, a fact underscored by the swift spread of the coronavirus around the globe. Underlying this connectivity are complex networks—global air transportation, the internet, power grids, financial systems and ecological networks, to name just a few. The need to ensure the proper functioning of these systems also is increasing, but control is difficult.
Now a Northwestern University research team has discovered a ubiquitous property of a complex network and developed a novel computational method that is the first to systematically exploit that property to control the whole network using only local information. The method considers the computational time and information communication costs to produce the optimal choice.
The same connections that provide functionality in networks also can serve as conduits for the propagation of failures and instabilities. In such dynamic networks, gathering and processing all the information necessary to make a better decision can take too much time. The goal is to diagnose a problem and take action before it leads to a system-wide issue. This may mean having less information but being timely.
A recent study from the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and published in Wa | Chemistry And Physics.
This study is intriguing since one of the results of climate change is increasing water temperatures, so removing phosphorus from such waters will prove invaluable in the future, with this study appropriately being referred to as a “future-proof” method.
Since phosphorus in fresh water often results in algal blooms, removing it from wastewater prior to it being released into fresh water is extremely important. This is because algal blooms drastically reduce oxygen levels in natural waters when the algae die, often resulting in the delivery of high levels of toxins, killing organisms in those waters.
While traditional removal methods result in a large volume of inert sludge that requires treatment and disposal afterwards, this new SCELSE-developed method does not involve chemicals, most notably iron and aluminum coagulants. Using this new method, the research team was successful in removing phosphorus from wastewater at 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) and 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit).
Flipkart-owned Cleartrip, a flight booking platform, said that it suffered a major data breach in its internal systems.
In an email to customers, the company stated, “This is to inform you that there has been a security anomaly that entailed illegal and unauthorised access to a part of Cleartrip’s internal systems.”
However, the travel company assured them that no sensitive information pertaining to a user’s account had been compromised due to this incident, apart from a few personal details.
Shockwaves caused by asteroids colliding with Earth create materials with a range of complex carbon structures, which could be used for advancing future engineering applications, according to an international study led by UCL and Hungarian scientists.
Published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team of researchers has found that diamonds formed during a high-energy shock wave from an asteroid collision around 50,000 years ago have unique and exceptional properties, caused by the short-term high temperatures and extreme pressure.
The researchers say that these structures can be targeted for advanced mechanical and electronic applications, giving us the ability to design materials that are not only ultra-hard but also malleable with tunable electronic properties.
New research led by University of Massachusetts Amherst assistant professor Jinglei Ping has overcome a major challenge to isolating and detecting molecules at the same time and at the same location in a microdevice. The work, recently published in ACS Nano, demonstrates an important advance in using graphene for electrokinetic biosample processing and analysis, and could allow lab-on-a-chip devices to become smaller and achieve results faster.
The process of detecting biomolecules has been complicated and time-consuming. “We usually first have to isolate them in a complex medium in a device and then send them to another device or another spot in the same device for detection,” says Ping, who is in the College of Engineering’s Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department and is also affiliated with the university’s Institute of Applied Life Sciences. “Now we can isolate them and detect them at the same microscale spot in a microfluidic device at the same time—no one has ever demonstrated this before.”
His lab achieved this advance by using graphene, a one-atom-thick honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms, as microelectrodes in a microfluidic device.