Phonebloks: Explained! Solar cell hits new world record with 44.7 percent efficiency. Researchers at the German Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems have achieved a new world record for the conversion of sunlight into electricity using a new solar cell structure with four solar subcells. It took three years of research on this particular solar technology to hit the new world record of 44.7 percent, an efficiency that is getting the world of solar tech tantalizingly close to 50 percent.
Just four months ago in May 2013, the group of researchers at the institute were able to achieve an efficiency of 43.6 percent with the technology. This type of solar cell is used in concentrator photovoltaics (CPV). Phys.org reports, "The terrestrial use of so-called III-V multi-junction solar cells, which originally came from space technology, has prevailed to realize highest efficiencies for the conversion of sunlight to electricity.
The solar cells developed in the Fraunhofer labs are manufactured by Soitec. Robots: The Next Generation. High-Speed Robot Hand. Autonomous robot swarm takes over farm work. Big Dog. A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors. Mind Over Mechanics. Robot Bees Designed To Take Over for Real Dying Bees. Super Fast FANUC Robot Sorting Robots. Avian-Inspired Grasping For Quadrotor Micro Aerial Vehicles. Mind Blowing Science Fiction Technologies | Think Tank. How salty is that seawater? Ask the Aquarius satellite. Some 600 kilometres above the Earth, Nasa satellites are watching you. They're not actually interested inyou or anything you do, of course -- they're just making measurements of environmental variables like temperature or cloud cover.
While most people equate space agencies like Nasa or the ESA with the exploration of extraterrestrial destinations, a critical part of their mission is to study our own planet from the unique orbital point of view. The advantages are obvious: rapid coverage of large areas using the same instrument and continuous data collection. But there are challenges, too. It's not exactly cheap to get the instrument up there, and if a component breaks, it's game over.
Then there's the not insignificant task of finding a way to measure the thing you're interested in from hundreds of kilometres away. One of the newest members of the Earth-observing club is Aquarius (along with its friends aboard the SAC-D satellite). This story originally appeared on ars technica. The humanoid robot ARMAR-III. Robot sees itself for first time. Robot Makes Scientific Discovery All by Itself | Wired Science. For the first time, a robotic system has made a novel scientific discovery with virtually no human intellectual input. Scientists designed “Adam” to carry out the entire scientific process on its own: formulating hypotheses, designing and running experiments, analyzing data, and deciding which experiments to run next. “It’s a major advance,” says David Waltz of the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University. “Science is being done here in a way that incorporates artificial intelligence. It’s automating a part of the scientific process that hasn’t been automated in the past.”
The demonstration of autonomous science breaks major ground. Meanwhile, some software programs can analyze data to generate hypotheses or conclusions, but they don’t interact with the physical realm. Adam’s British designers, led by Ross King at Aberystwyth University in Wales, acknowledge that the robot’s discoveries have been “of a modest kind” thus far. See Also: Image: Jen Rowland. The Consequences of Machine Intelligence - Moshe Y. Vardi. If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do? The question of what happens when machines get to be as intelligent as and even more intelligent than people seems to occupy many science-fiction writers.
The Terminator movie trilogy, for example, featured Skynet, a self-aware artificial intelligence that served as the trilogy's main villain, battling humanity through its Terminator cyborgs. Among technologists, it is mostly "Singularitarians" who think about the day when machine will surpass humans in intelligence. It is fair to say, I believe, that Singularitarians are not quite in the mainstream. Perhaps it is due to their belief that by 2045 humans will also become immortal and be able to download their consciousness to computers. It was, therefore, quite surprising when in 2000, Bill Joy, a very mainstream technologist as co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote an article entitled "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" for Wired magazine.
Dr. Michio Kaku: "The World in 2030". The Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (Andrew Ng, Stanford University, STAN 2011) Paralyzed man moves robotic arm with his thoughts. Bionic hand gives a new lease of life. Amazing technology: Mind-controlled robotic arm. Terminator Arm: Most Advanced Prosthetic Ever - SourceFed : SourceFed. Sophie Morgan: The £90,000 'robolegs' that got me out of my wheelchair. By Alice Smellie Published: 21:00 GMT, 6 October 2012 | Updated: 10:49 GMT, 7 October 2012 It is an extraordinary sight.
From the waist up, 27-year-old Sophie Morgan is every inch the pretty blonde girl-next-door. But from the waist down, with her legs encased in £90,000 of motorised carbon-fibre, she is RoboCop. Sophie’s thumb manipulates a joystick built into the armrests of her suit, causing the legs to hiss and whirr into life, before she takes three slow but sure steps. Her face breaks into a broad grin. Five minutes earlier, Sophie was in her wheelchair. Positive step: Sophie in the robotic exoskeleton Rex, with her wheelchair in the background Today, though, she is one of the first people in the world to benefit from a robotic exoskeleton called Rex, the first major advance in the treatment of paralysis in decades.
Sophie first tried Rex in May. Her boyfriend Tom, 28, a chef, whom she met five years ago, says: ‘It was the first time I’ve seen her standing up.’ So what’s next? TED 2013: SpaceTop 3D see-through computer revealed. "Intelligent knife" tells surgeon if tissue is cancerous. In the first study to test the invention in the operating theatre, the “iKnife” diagnosed tissue samples from 91 patients with 100 per cent accuracy, instantly providing information that normally takes up to half an hour to reveal using laboratory tests. The findings, by researchers at Imperial College London, are published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The study was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Imperial Biomedical Research Centre, the European Research Council and the Hungarian National Office for Research and Technology.
In cancers involving solid tumours, removal of the cancer in surgery is generally the best hope for treatment. The surgeon normally takes out the tumour with a margin of healthy tissue. However, it is often impossible to tell by sight which tissue is cancerous. One in five breast cancer patients who have surgery require a second operation to fully remove the cancer.
Zeitgeist - Transportation Of The Future. Fastest Train in the World: 581km/h. Japan JR-Maglev. Inside A Google Auto-Driving Car. Shelley, Stanford's Robotic Car, Hits the Track. Self-Driving Car Test: Steve Mahan. SKYTRAN@NASA. Evacuated Tube Transport could take you around the world in just 6 hours. $10,000 Car - AirPod - That Runs On Air. Evacuated Tube Transport ™ Inside the Hyperloop: the pneumatic travel system faster than the speed of sound. Who Killed The Electric Car. TROM: [3](A) Technology. David Graeber: On Bureaucratic Technologies & the Future as Dream-Time / 01.19.2012 @ SVA. Buckminster Fuller & Technology.
Future Cities. Jacque Fresco - Engineering the Impossible (2002) 16 year old builds tiny home to guarantee mortgage-free future. Poynton Regenerated. Intermedical Eco-city. Graphene paint could power homes of the future. Farms of the Future. BIG IDEAS: Dickson Despommier's Vertical Farming. What is Aquaponics. TEDxWarwick - Charlie Price - Aquaponics - Getting More out of Less. Hydroponics for Beginners. Hydroponic Farming Micco Florida. The Doctor Now Show :: Vertical Farms :: South Korea moving towards vertical farming. Designing the vertical farm - economist.com/video. First commercial vertical farm opens in Singapore. Singapore now has its first commercial vertical farm, which means more local options for vegetables. The technique uses aluminium towers that are as tall as nine metres, and vegetables are grown in troughs at multiple levels. The technique utilises space better -- an advantage for land-scarce Singapore. Sky Greens farm first started working on the prototype in 2009, and has opened a 3.65-hectare farm in Lim Chu Kang.
It produces three types of vegetables which are currently available only at FairPrice Finest supermarkets. They cost 10 to 20 cents more than vegetables from other sources. Despite the higher prices, the greens have been flying off supermarket shelves. Ms Ivy Lim, a customer, said: "(The price) is not a very big difference, it's just marginal... But prices may drop as the farm ramps up supply. The farm's expansion is expected to cost some S$27 million. 27 Science Fictions That Became Science Facts In 2012. 2045: Man becomes machine. Peter Diamandis - The best way to predict the future.
Zeitgeist Addendum II Energy Resources on Earth. UK Economy Will Fare Better With More Wind Power Than Natural Gas: Report. A new report funded by WWF-UK and Greenpeace takes a look at the future of the UK economy through 2030 under two scenarios, more offshore wind power or more natural gas and little growth in wind power. Wind power comes out ahead, by a nose, Renewable Energy World reports. Assuming that there is steady growth in offshore wind power through 2030, the report finds that UK GDP is 0.8% higher than in the scenario where there is no new offshore wind power after 2020 and significantly more natural gas is used than now for electricity generation. That comes out to an increase in GDP of £20 billion ($32 billion) by 2030. The offshore wind power growth scenario also shows that the nation would save £8 billion ($13 billion) each year on natural gas imports through 2030.
The wind power scenario also results in a two-thirds lower carbon emissions, compared to the natural gas scenario. It's a choice between a stable climate and a destructively unstable one. British economy would be £20bn-a-year better off with focus on wind power, says think tank - UK Politics - UK. The British economy would be £20bn-a-year better off by 2030 if it favoured offshore wind over gas-fired generation as the driver of an essential overhaul of the country’s energy infrastructure over the next two decades to replace aging power plants and keep the lights on, according to Cambridge Econometrics, the think tank. Paul Ekins, professor of resources and environmental policy at University College London (UCL) said: “Much of the debate around the choice between gas-fired and offshore wind electricity generation in the years post-2020 assumes wind is more expensive.
This study represents powerful evidence to the contrary.” The report calculates that, as well as increasing Britain’s gross domestic product by 0.8 per cent by 2030, carbon emissions from the UK’s power sector would be two-thirds lower under the wind-based scenario, bringing country’s overall carbon footprint down by 13 per cent. Wireless Electricity Is Almost Here!?! Geothermal Energy. 2012-06-23 - ONE NEWS - TOKELAU TO BE ENTIRELY SOLAR POWERED. Solar Energy 101 | GCEP Symposium 2010. Saphon Energy Story. Innovative £3 light powered by sand and gravity. Two London-based designers have come up with a simple and sustainable solution to lighting remote areas -- a cheap lamp powered by gravity and sand. The GravityLight aims to reduce reliance on kerosene in the developing world in areas without electricity by offering a money-saving alternative.
The target cost is less than $5 (around £3). "We wanted to make a device that could provide power for light, as and when it was required, with no limit to the run time in any given night, at a price that will be affordable," designer Jim Reeves told Co.Design. "It's the affordable part that has been the challenge. " GravityLight is charged by attaching a bag filled with around 9kg of material -- sand, earth or rocks would all work -- to the device, which gradually descends, generating around 30 minutes-worth of light.
The GravityLight project has already met its Indiegogo funding target but further donations will help the team develop an even more efficient version. We'll Never Run This Economy On Renewables (We'll Never Have To) SHAREConference/CC BY-SA 2.0 Whenever we talk about pushing for 100% renewables, naysayers start arguing that we can never run our current economy without energy intensive fossil fuels. But they forget one simple thing: We don't have to. In a world where you can address a conference from your own bedroom, or order your groceries or even publish a book without ever getting dressed, the old way of doing things just seems, well, increasingly old. Cheap Fossil Fuels Shaped Our WorldviewThe economy of today is structured the way it is because it was built on the false assumption of cheap fossil fuels. If we choose to take responsibility for the true cost of those fossil fuels (admittedly this is still a big "if"), the economics of how we organize our lives will start to look radically different.
Don't Replace Fossil Fuels. Just because the dinosaur economy is coming to an end does not mean we can, or will, return to a pre-fossil fuel economy. Let's use some intentionality in how we shape it. The Venus Project-Energy. Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity. The Singularity: Promise and Peril. The Long Tail - Wired Blogs. Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:46:19 “Priced and Unpriced Online Markets” by Harvard Business School professor Benjamin Edelman. Discusses tradeoffs in market such as email, IP addresses, search and dial-up Internet.
“Reminiscent of the old adage about losing money on every unit but making it up in volume, online markets challenge norms about who should pay, when, and why.” I found this typically academic: dated, dry and pretty unilluminating. But it got published in The Journal of Economic Perspectives. Mon, 31 Aug 2009 01:53:50 From Mashable: “Freezly is a lot like Tweetmeme in that it finds link and tweets and shows you their popularity based on retweets. Fri, 28 Aug 2009 02:08:25 From Cellular News. Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:54:23 From the LA Times: “Industry insiders estimate that since 2007, revenue for most adult production and distribution companies has declined 30% to 50% and the number of new films made has fallen sharply. Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:07:00 Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:09:38 Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:37:31. Michio Kaku: Can Nanotechnology Create Utopia?
Will Minecraft and Makerbot Usher in the Post-Scarcity Economy? | Idea Channel | PBS. Transcendent Man: Accelerating Technology.