Tech

New solar cells could increase the maximum efficiency of solar panels by over 25%, according to scientists from the University of Cambridge.

Scientists from the Cavendish Laboratory, the University's Department of Physics, have developed a novel type of solar cell which could harvest energy from the sun much more efficiently than traditional designs. The research, published today in the journal Nano Letters, could dramatically improve the amount of useful energy created by solar panels.

Visitors to Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building may have experienced a curious acoustic feature that allows a person to whisper softly at one side of the cavernous, half-domed room and for another on the other side to hear every syllable. Sound is whisked around the semi-circular perimeter of the room almost without flaw. The phenomenon is known as a whispering gallery.

To make a silicon solar cell, you start with a slice of highly purified silicon crystal, and then process it through several stages involving gradual heating and cooling. But figuring out the tradeoffs involved in selecting the purity level of the starting silicon wafer — and then exactly how much to heat it, how fast, for how long, and so on through each of several steps — has largely been a matter of trial and error, guided by intuition and experience.

Now, MIT researchers think they have found a better way.

A green thumb is required where plants are to grow abundantly – that also applies to watering them in dry areas. If they are watered too much, then the soil becomes saline; if the plants receive too little moisture, they let their leaves droop and, in the worst case, they wither. In the future, sensors in the soil, a central unit and an associated app will supplement the green thumb: one look at the smart phone and the farmer will know what moisture content the soil has. Which plants need water, which do not?

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama praised the potential of the country's tremendous supply of natural gas buried in shale. He echoed the recommendations for safe extraction made by an advisory panel that included Stanford University geophysicist Mark Zoback. The panel made 20 recommendations for regulatory reform, some of which go well beyond what the president mentioned in his address.

MANHATTAN, KAN. -- Think of it as cooking with carbon spaghetti: A Kansas State University researcher is developing new ways to create and work with carbon nanotubes -- ultrasmall tubes that look like pieces of spaghetti or string.

The great paradox of global health efforts is that regions of the world most plagued by poverty, poor infrastructure and rampant disease are often the most difficult to deliver care to. In addition, when development and public health agencies focus their efforts on one individual disease or another, instead of taking a unified approach, their programs can work at cross-purposes, contributing to rising costs and lost lives.

One area of intensive research at the nanoscale is the creation of electrically conductive meshes made of metal nanowires. Promising exceptional electrical throughput, low cost and easy processing, engineers foresee a day when such meshes are common in new generations of touch-screens, video displays, light-emitting diodes and thin-film solar cells.

Standing in the way, however, is a major engineering hurdle: In processing, these delicate meshes must be heated or pressed to unite the crisscross pattern of nanowires that form the mesh, damaging them in the process.

For the first time, a group of chemists, physicists, and engineers has developed crystalline materials that allow an optical fiber to have integrated, high-speed electronic functions. The potential applications of such optical fibers include improved telecommunications and other hybrid optical and electronic technologies, improved laser technology, and more-accurate remote-sensing devices. The research was initiated by Rongrui He, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemistry at Penn State University.

Scientists at the University of Southampton, in collaboration with Penn State University have, for the first time, embedded the high level of performance normally associated with chip-based semiconductors into an optical fibre, creating high-speed optoelectronic function.

The potential applications of such optical fibres include improved telecommunications and other hybrid optical/electronic technologies. This transatlantic team will publish its findings in the journal Nature Photonics this month.

University of British Columbia researchers have discovered the molecular pathway that enables receptors inside immune cells to find, and flag, fragments of pathogens trying to invade a host.

The discovery of the role played by the molecule CD74 could help immunologists investigate treatments that offer better immune responses against cancers, viruses and bacteria, and lead to more efficient vaccines.

The findings are published in this week's edition of Nature Immunology.

Older people feel that their health problems pose a challenge to their sense of independence, dignity and identity and sometimes the health care they are given makes things worse.

According to research funded by UK Research Councils' New Dynamics of Ageing programme (NDA), healthcare providers must avoid taking a 'blanket view' of how to help older people cope with the ageing process.

A preference for fatty foods has a genetic basis, according to researchers, who discovered that people with certain forms of the CD36 gene may like high-fat foods more than those who have other forms of this gene.

The results help explain why some people struggle when placed on a low-fat diet and may one day assist people in selecting diets that are easier for them to follow. The results also may help food developers create new low-fat foods that taste better.

Smartphones and tablets are some of the big sellers of the past year. Mobile Internet usage has increased rapidly with the sales success: according to a study of the industry association VATM, in 2011 the average data volume per mobile Internet user increased by 82 percent in Germany. In contrast to its predecessor UMTS, with the new LTE mobile radio standard, the clearly higher data rates and the shorter signal transmission times, providers want to cover the expected traffic. That is why the expansion of the LTE network is being pursued aggressively.

Mars may have been arid for more than 600 million years, making it too hostile for any life to survive on the planet's surface, according to researchers who have been carrying out the painstaking task of analysing individual particles of Martian soil. Dr Tom Pike, from Imperial College London, will discuss the team's analysis at a European Space Agency (ESA) meeting on 7 February 2012.The researchers have spent three years analysing data on Martian soil that was collected during the 2008 NASA Phoenix mission to Mars.