Low-Priced Plastic Photovoltaics

Oct. 22, 2013 — Photovoltaic devices, which tap the power of the sun and convert it to electricity, offer a green -- and potentially unlimited -- alternative to fossil fuel use. So why haven't solar technologies been more widely adopted?

This is an image of the polymer blend morphology without (left) and with (right) nanowires. (Credit: Imperial College/S. Wood & J. Bailey)

Quite simply, "they're too expensive," says Ji-Seon Kim, a senior lecturer in experimental solid-state physics at Imperial College London, who, along with her colleagues, has come up with a technology that might help bring the prices down.
The scientists describe their new approach to making cheaper, more efficient solar panels in a paper in The Journal of Chemical Physics, produced by AIP Publishing.
"To collect a lot of sunlight you need to cover a large area in solar panels, which is very expensive for traditional inorganic -- usually silicon -- photovoltaics," explains Kim. The high costs arise because traditional panels must be made from high purity crystals that require high temperatures and vacuum conditions to manufacture.
A cheaper solution is to construct the photovoltaic devices out of organic compounds -- building what are essentially plastic solar cells. Organic semiconducting materials, and especially polymers, can be dissolved to make an ink and then simply "printed" in a very thin layer, some 100 billionths of a meter thick, over a large area. "Covering a large area in plastic is much cheaper than covering it in silicon, and as a result the cost per Watt of electricity-generating capacity has the potential to be much lower," she says.
One major difficulty with doing this, however, is controlling the arrangement of polymer molecules within the thin layer. In their paper, Kim and colleagues describe a new method for exerting such control. "We have developed an advanced structural probe technique to determine the molecular packing of two different polymers when they are mixed together," she says. By manipulating how the molecules of the two different polymers pack together, Kim and her colleagues created ordered pathways -- or "nanowires" -- along which electrical charges can more easily travel. This enables the solar cell to produce more electrical current, she said.
"Our work highlights the importance of the precise arrangement of polymer molecules in a polymer solar cell for it to work efficiently," says Kim, who expects polymer solar cells to reach the commercial market within 5 to 10 years.

 

Apple unveils thinner, lighter iPad Air,cylindrical Mac Pro

Apple unveils thinner, lighter iPad Air, cylindrical Mac Pro

At launch event today in the US, Apple has announced a bltiz of new products:

Today’s Apple event was expected to focus on the company’s newest generation of iPad tablets. Apple, however, used much of the event to debut new hardware and software for its desktop and notebook computing lineup. In addition to OS X Mavericks and a new line of Macbooks, Apple today announced what longtime Apple fans have been waiting a long time to hear – a newly designed Mac Pro desktop computer.

The new design of the Mac Pro is an odd-looking cylindrical black shape. Apple stated that the new design is one-eighth of the volume of previous Mac Pro towers.
Inside, Apple is packing in serious computing power for professionals who use Macs. The presentation focused heavily on how the new Mac Pro can output video to up to three 4K displays, including one 4K TV. The company also mentioned that its new computers will be well-equipped for 4K video editing.

The new Mac Pros will have Intel Xeon E5 processors, available in quad-, 6-, 8-, or 12-core iterations. Apple is also offering up to 64GB of 1866MHz DDR3 RAM. The new Mac Pro comes with two AMD FirePro GPUs standard, with up to 12GB of GDDR5 VRAM for them. The computer will not have a hard drive, and instead comes with an SSD drive with up to 1TB of storage.
The lowest-end version of the new Mac Pro starts at $2999. That version comes with a 3.7GHz quad-core Xenon processor, 12GB of RAM, Dual FirePro D300 GPUs (with 2GB of RAM on each), and a 256GB SSD. Obviously, upgrades such as a 12-core processor or more SSD drive space for video editing will quickly drive up the cost of the computer. The new Mac Pro will be out sometime before the end of the year, with Apple’s presentation slide showing a December release date.

• iBooks, which gives you instant access to your iBooks library and works seamlessly across your devices;
• Maps, which brings powerful mapping technology to the desktop and lets you plan a trip from your Mac and send it to your iPhone® for voice navigation on the road;
• a streamlined Calendar that estimates travel time between appointments, and provides a map with weather forecast;
• a new version of Safari with Shared Links, which helps you find what’s new on the web by consolidating links shared by people you follow on Twitter and LinkedIn;
• iCloud® Keychain®, which safely stores your website usernames and passwords, credit card numbers and Wi-Fi passwords and pushes them to your trusted devices so you don’t need to remember them;
• enhanced multi-display support, which makes using multiple displays easier and more powerful, with no configuration required;
• interactive Notifications, allowing you to reply to a message, respond to a FaceTime® call or even delete an email without leaving the app you’re using;
• Finder Tabs, which help unclutter your desktop by consolidating multiple Finder windows into a single window with multiple tabs; and
• Finder Tags, a powerful new way to organise and find your files located on your Mac or in iCloud.
• Mavericks also includes new core technologies that boost performance and improve the battery life of your Mac. Timer Coalescing and App Nap™ intelligently save energy and reduce power consumption. Compressed Memory automatically shrinks inactive data to keep your Mac fast and responsive. Mavericks also delivers significant performance enhancements for systems with integrated graphics through optimised OpenCL support and dynamic video memory allocation.

 

 

1st Fully Bionic Man Walks, Talks and Breathes

He walks, he talks and he has a beating heart, but he's not human — he's the world's first fully bionic man.

Like Frankenstein's monster, cobbled together from a hodgepodge of body parts, the bionic man is an amalgam of the most advanced human prostheses — from robotic limbs to artificial organs to a blood-pumping circulatory system.

Million-dollar man
Roboticists Rich Walker and Matthew Godden of Shadow Robot Co. in England led the assembly of the bionic man from prosthetic body parts and artificial organs donated by laboratories around the world.
"Our job was to take the delivery of a large collection of body parts — organs, limbs, eyes, heads — and over a frantic six weeks, turn those parts into a bionic man," Walker told LiveScience during an interview. But it's not as simple as connecting everything like Tinkertoys. "You put a prosthetic part on a human who is missing that part," Walker said. "We had no human; we built a human for the prosthetic parts to occupy."

The robot, which cost almost $1 million to build, was modeled in some physical aspects after Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, who wears one of the world's most advanced bionic hands.
The bionic man has the same prosthetic hand as Meyer — the i-LIMB made by Touch Bionics — with a wrist that can fully rotate and motors in each finger. The hand's grasping abilities are impressive, but the bionic man still drops drinks sometimes.
"He's not the world's best bartender," Walker said.
The robot sports a pair of robotic ankles and feet from BiOM in Bedford, Mass., designed and worn by bioengineer Hugh Herr of MIT's Media Lab, who lost his own legs after getting trapped in a blizzard as a teenager.
To support his prosthetic legs, the bionic man wears a robotic exoskeleton dubbed "Rex," made by REX Bionics in New Zealand. His awkward, jerky walk makes him more Frankensteinian than ever.
Factory-made organs 
But it doesn't end there — the bionic man also has a nearly complete set of artificial organs, including an artificial heart, blood, lungs (and windpipe), pancreas, spleen, kidney and functional circulatory system.
The artificial heart, made by SynCardia Systems in Tucson, Ariz., has beenimplanted in more than 100 peopleto replace their ailing hearts for six to 12 months while they wait for a transplant, Walker said. The circulatory system, built by medical researcher Alex Seifalian of University College London,consists of veins and arteries made from a polymer used to create synthetic organs of any shape.
While it might not satisfy the Scarecrow from "The Wizard of Oz," the bionic man's "brain" can mimic certain functions of the human brain. He has a retinal prosthesis, made by Second Sight in Sylmar, Calif., which can restore limited sight in blind people. He also sports a cochlear implant, speech recognition and speech production systems.
The engineers equipped the bionic man with a sophisticated chatbot program that can carry on a conversation. The only problem is, it has the persona of "an annoying 13-year-old boy from the Ukraine," Walker said.
The most unnerving aspect of the bionic man, though, is his prosthetic face. It's an uncanny replica of Meyer's face. In fact, when Meyer first saw it, he hated it, describing it on the show as "awkward."
The bionic man successfully simulates about two-thirds of the human body. But he lacks a few major organs, including a liver, stomach and intestines, which are still too complex to replicate in a lab.
The bionic man brings up some ethical and philosophical questions: Does creating something so humanlike threaten notions of what it means to be human? What amount of body enhancement is acceptable? And is it wrong that only some people have access to these life-extending technologies?
The access issue is especially troublesome, Walker said. "The preservation of life and quality of life has become basically a technical question and an economic question."
The bionic man made his U.S. debut at New York Comic Con Oct. 10-13, and he will be on display at Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. this fall.