Innovalight™ Silicon Inks for Selective Emitter Solar Cells. UCLA produces transparent solar cells that harness infrared light. A UCLA team has developed a new type of solar cell that is nearly 70 percent transparent to the naked eye.
The plastic cells, which use infrared instead of visible light, are also more economical than other types of cells because they are made by an inexpensive polymer solution process and nanowire technology, potentially paving the way for cheaper solar windows. Solar panels are great. The only problem is that they take up quite a bit of space. To run a building off of solar panels you’d pretty much have to cover it with them. China working on uranium-free nuclear plants in attempt to combat smog. China is developing a new design of nuclear power plant in an attempt to reduce its reliance on coal and to cut air pollution.
In an effort to reduce the number of coal-fired plants, the Chinese government has brought forward by 15 years the deadline to develop a nuclear power plant using the radioactive element thorium instead of uranium. A team of researchers in Shanghai has now been told it has 10 instead of 25 years to develop the world's first such plant. "In the past, the government was interested in nuclear power because of the energy shortage. Scientists Discover Gold Literally Growing on Trees in the Outback.
In the future we could use plants to mine the Earth for us. Three-photon energy-time entanglement : Nature Physics. Affiliations Institute for Quantum Computing and Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, N2L 3G1, Canada L.
K. Shalm, D. R. Hamel, Z. Contributions L.K.S. and D.R.H. carried out the experiment. Competing financial interests The authors declare no competing financial interests. Chomsky: How America's Great University System Is Getting Destroyed. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons/jeanbaptisteparis The following is an edited transcript of remarks given by Noam Chomsky via Skype on 4 February 2014 to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, PA. The transcript was prepared by Robin J. Sowards and edited by Prof. Chomsky. Quantum Communications Finds Many Paths to Comercialization.
Marie Freebody, Contributing Editor, marie.freebody@photonics.com From quantum repeaters and single-photon detectors to space satellites, photonics promises to bring quantum encryption to the mainstream.
Quantum communications has already been proved possible over short distances. Via fiber optics, quantum key distribution (QKD) has been demonstrated over 250 km; for free-space transmission, the longest demonstrated distance has been more than 144 km. The problem is that experts don’t expect these distances to extend to more than a few hundred kilometers with current technologies. Science Creates A Quantum Link Between Photons that Don’t Exist at the Same Time. Image credit: NASA/Sonoma State University/Auore Simonnet Physicists have created a quantum link between photons that don’t exist at the same time.
You read that right, scientists have entangled two photons together that didn’t exist at the same time. Yep, it’s officially official – quantum mechanics is a freaky weird place. Firstly, a recap on quantum entanglement. New evidence that plants get their energy using quantum entanglement. Biophysicists theorize that plants tap into the eerie world of quantum entanglement during photosynthesis.
But the evidence to date has been purely circumstantial. Now, scientists have discovered a feature of plants that cannot be explained by classical physics alone — but which quantum mechanics answers quite nicely. The fact that biological systems can exploit quantum effects is quite astounding. In a way, they’re like mini-quantum computers capable of scanning all possible options in order to choose the most efficient paths or solutions.
For plants, this means the ability to make the most of the energy they receive and then deliver that energy from leaves with near perfect efficiency. Ancient Amazon Actually Highly Urbanized. In 1925 British adventurer Colonel Percy Fawcett disappeared into the wilds of the Amazon, never to be heard from again after going there in search of a lost city he called Z.
But decades later, a city of sorts—actually a series of settlements connected by roads—has been found at the headwaters of the Xingu River where Fawcett went missing in an area previously buried beneath the dense foliage in what is now Xingu National Park. View slideshow here. Anthropologist Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida teamed with the local Kuikuro people in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to uncover 28 towns, villages and hamlets that may have supported as many as 50,000 people within roughly 7,700 square miles (20,000 square kilometers) of forest—an area slightly smaller than New Jersey. The larger towns boasted defensive ditches 10 feet (three meters) deep and 33 feet (10 meters) wide backed by a wooden palisade as well as large plazas, some reaching 490 feet (150 meters) across.
Foldit and Why This is Really Nothing New. This has been making the rounds recently so I imagine a lot of you have already seen this, but if not, have a neat little news tidbit that one of our most ardent commenters, Bamos, reminded me of: Basically, a bunch of researchers created a puzzle game, called Foldit, which is designed to simulate actual protein folding.
The idea was that human players could come up with more interesting solutions to real life problems than the AI could. This was recently proven true when scientists decided to put a particularly tricky puzzle in the game– a puzzle with an answer that had been evading researches for a decade. Ten days later, it was solved. Global ocean currents explain why Northern Hemisphere is the soggier one. News - Up to the minute news and features from Science. I Fucking Love Science. Science News, Articles and Information. Contrail Science.