A Startup’s Nanowire Ink Lifts Solar Cell Efficiency

Sol Voltaics plans to make a nanowire-laden ink to boost solar panel efficiency using a rapid manufacturing process. 

 

   Ink filled with microscopic semiconductors called nanowires could make solar power cheaper by boosting the efficiency of solar panels by 25 percent, without adding much cost to manufacturing, says Sol Voltaics, a startup that has raised $11 million, and which this week announced its intention to commercialize the ink.
The ink is based on two advances from Lund University in Sweden. Professor Lars Samuelson demonstrated that nanowires can improve the efficiency of solar cells, and he developed a new way to manufacture nanowires that could make them practical to use.

AT&T Researchers Set a Long-Haul Data Record

 New optical technology paves the way for more efficient ocean-spanning transmissions.

 

    Researchers at AT&T have devised a way to increase the distance that large amounts of data can travel through a fiber-optic connection. The technique should allow 400-gigabit-per-second signals to travel for a distance of 12,000 kilometers—four times the previous distance possible—and it promises faster ocean-crossing transmission without adding more equipment. The feat is like sending 170 HD movies 12,000 kilometers—half-again as far as the distance from San Francisco to Tokyo.

A Cheap and Easy Plan to Stop Global Warming

Here is the plan. Customize several Gulfstream business jets with military engines and with equipment to produce and disperse fine droplets of sulfuric acid. Fly the jets up around 20 kilometers—significantly higher than the cruising altitude for a commercial jetliner but still well within their range. At that altitude in the tropics, the aircraft are in the lower stratosphere. The planes spray the sulfuric acid, carefully controlling the rate of its release. The sulfur combines with water vapor to form sulfate aerosols, fine particles less than a micrometer in diameter. These get swept upward by natural wind patterns and are dispersed over the globe, including the poles. Once spread across the stratosphere, the aerosols will reflect about 1 percent of the sunlight hitting Earth back into space. Increasing what scientists call the planet’s albedo, or reflective power, will partially offset the warming effects caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases.

Facebook’s Real “Home” May be the Developing World

                     The new Facebook-centric Android app for smartphones builds on other efforts to court mobile users internationally.

Facebook Home, a new collection of apps that makes the social network dominate Android phones, might have limited appeal to users already besieged with smartphone options—but it could fit nicely into Facebook’s efforts overseas, where the focus is on capturing first-time users.
The app lets Facebook lock the screens of Android smartphones and create a “cover feed” that fills those screens with status updates from Facebook friends. Strictly speaking, it is neither a “Facebook phone” nor a Facebook operating system, but it does create a Facebook-centric phone experience.

Some smartphone owners might roll their eyes (see “The Facebook Phone Is Finally Here, But Who Wants It?”), but Facebook’s real target may be those markets in which smartphone adoption is at an earlier stage of growth.

A Flexible Keyboard with Buttons That Feel Clickable

              Transparent, shape-changing plastics could make touch screens and keyboards that stimulate users’ sense of touch. 

A very thin keyboard that uses shape-changing polymers to replicate the feel and sound of chunky, clicking buttons could be in laptops and ultrabooks next year. Strategic Polymers Sciences, the San Francisco-based company that developed the keyboard, is working on transparent coatings that would enable this feature in touch screens.

The Paper-and-Pencil Cosmological Calculator

Ever struggled with the problem of converting redshift into parsecs, your worries are over thanks to a new cosmological distance chart based on the very latest data......

Examine the light from a distant galaxy and you’ll notice that it is significantly different to light from nearby stars: its wavelength will be increased or shifted towards the red part of spectrum. This so-called redshift is the result of an object’s movement away from us–you can hear the same effect in the pitch of police car sirens when they move past us at speed.

Bill Gates Spreads his Battery Bets on Aquion

Aquion Energy lands $35 million to commercialize its novel grid-storage battery, bringing in Bill Gates as investor. 

                                            

When it comes to disruptive battery startups, one of the best endorsements you can get comes from software tycoon Bill Gates.

Aquion Energy has raised $35 million in a series D round, which brings Gates as a new investor. It’s at least the third energy storage startup that he has invested in. Others include Ambri, which is making a liquid metal battery, and LightSail Energy, which is using compressed air to store energy. If there’s a common thread to them, it’s that each company has taken a truly novel approach and are targeting grid-level storage, a technology considered crucial to using wind and solar at large scale.

Device Finds Stray Cancer Cells in Patients’ Blood

             A microfluidic device that captures circulating tumor cells could give doctors a noninvasive way to diagnose and track cancers. 

Doctors typically diagnose cancer via a biopsy, which can be invasive and expensive. A better way to diagnose the disease would be to detect telltale tumor cells floating in the bloodstream, but such a test has proved difficult to develop because stray cancer cells are rare, and it’s difficult to separate them from the mélange of cells in circulation.
Now researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School say they’ve built a microfluidic device that can quickly grab nearly any type of tumor cell, an advance that may one day lead to simple blood tests for detecting or tracking cancer.

The Microsoft CEO explains the strategy behind his company’s most ambitious and strangest major product.

 

Windows 8, the most recent version of Microsoft’s operating system, is the most ambitious and the strangest major product ever released by the software giant. Designed to run on smartphones, tablet computers, laptops, servers, and even supercomputers, Windows 8 presents its users with the same interface, with only minor variations, on any device. In order to demonstrate to customers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) the possibilities of the new interface, which is radically different from any previous version of Windows and optimized for touch, Microsoft was compelled to develop its first computer, the Surface tablet. The response has been mixed: some critics guardedly welcomed Windows 8, praising its gorgeous graphic design and daring indifference to Microsoft’s past; still others were baffled by the attempt to impose a single user experience onto all types of computers (see our own review, “Windows 8: Design over Usability,” by Simson Garfinkel). Jason Pontin, MIT Technology Review’s editor in chief, spoke to Microsoft’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, about the new operating system and the future of his company.

Seeing the same graphical user interface across platforms is a wondrous thing, but it’s also a little like seeing a bear on a bike. Why do it at all?
For the first time, Windows PCs, tablets, and phones, as well as Xbox, all share the same look and feel and iconic live tiles. A common visual language makes a lot of sense and helps unify the experiences people have across the devices and services they use daily. Increasingly, people access the same content and services from multiple devices or use more than one device at a time. SmartGlass is really magical in this way. You can cue a movie from your Windows tablet to play on the TV connected to your Xbox, or navigate the Web on the TV screen with your Windows Phone. The same look and feel shortens the learning curve and creates a more seamless user experience. Beyond just sharing the same look, more and more we’re sharing technology across all Windows devices and Xbox. They all connect to SkyDrive—our cloud storage solution—and IE, and for the first time, Windows Phone now shares the same core as Windows PCs and tablets. We see incredible benefits for our customers and developers with this approach.#
 More questions after the cut.....

Facebook Home: A Social Smartphone Makeover

      A modified version of Android puts social networking, and Facebook, at the heart of a device. 

SOURCE: MIT Technology

 

MIT Technology Review editor Rachel Metz live-blogged Facebook’s announcement from its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Read her blow-by-blow account of the event after the cut.