Self-repairing solar cells could also fix our energy dependency

Self-repairing solar cells could also fix our energy dependencyIt doesn’t take much for a photovoltaic cell to not work quite as well as it used to. Sure, a big hail storm or the like will do a number on your megabucks rooftop installation, but the sun itself, the very thing those cells are designed to capture, gradually damages their internals, reducing efficiency. The fix, according to a team at MIT, is self-assembling (and therefore self-repairing) solar cells made up of a synthetic molecular soup containing phospholipids that, when mixed with a solution, attach themselves to a series of carbon nanotubes for alignment. Other molecules that react with light then attach to the phospholipids and, with a little illumination, start firing out electrons like mad. After a few hours of solar pummeling the whole thing can be broken down and automatically re-created, returning efficiency to maximum. Overall efficiency of the system is extremely low currently, thanks to a low concentration of those photon-catching structures, but individually they capture about 40 percent of the light’s energy, meaning a higher concentration could make for very hearty soup indeed.

Self-repairing solar cells could also fix our energy dependency originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MIT app turns your Android phone into a supercomputer… of sorts

Oh, sure — a few people have called Google’s Nexus One a “superphone,” but suddenly, that nickname has taken on a whole new level of meaning. A team of talent from MIT has put its head down in order to concoct a new Android application that can come darn close to solving complex computational problems in just a fraction of the time that it’d take a bona fide supercomputer. The goal here is to let researchers and scientists convert to Google’s mobile OS, but if you aren’t falling for that one, it’s also designed to “let engineers perform complicated calculations in the field, and to better control systems for vehicles or robotic systems.” Of course, the models that are hosted on the phone do require a supercomputer to create, but once certain formulas are embedded, the app can then compute approximations in mere seconds rather than hours. Best of all, rbAPPmit is available for download as well speak in the source link below, but we’d probably wait for the (presumably thick) user guide to surface before diving in headfirst.

[Thanks, Alasdair]

MIT app turns your Android phone into a supercomputer… of sorts originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 17:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Is The Copenhagen Wheel the Future of Bikes?

Copenhagen Wheel.jpg

The finalists have been announced for the annual James Dyson Award, which honors the best inventions coming from the next generation of engineers. It’s kind of like that movie Revenge of the Nerds, but it has a £10,000 prize.

The Copenhagen Wheel is of the cooler finalists. Despite its name, it was created by a team at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, which aims to use technology to foster modern, sustainable cities. The awards will be announced in early October, but as biker, geek, city-dweller, and American, I’m pulling for The Copenhagen Wheel.

The Wheel does a few different cool things. First, the Wheel is a sleek accessory that instantly turns a boring conventional bike into a hybrid electric power bike from the year 3000! The tech works much like a standard hybrid car does, by storing energy from breaking and pedaling which bicyclists can later use to climb hilly terrains with a built-in engine. 

Second, the Wheel does can sync with your smart phone to link in social media network built around biking. The Wheel includes location and environmental sensors that can be used to plot bike routes, achieve exercise goals, or share data with other linked-in bikers (traffic, pollution, road conditions, etc.)

The Copenhagen Wheel is a clean green technology that could end up bringing a lot more
urban-dwelling bikers into the fold. The Wheel is currently in production by Ducati Energia of Italy and will be available next year for $600 per wheel.

Video describing the whole shebang after the jump.

MIT Seaswarm autonomous robots coming soon to an oil spill near you (video)

Think of it as an autonomous, swarming, photovoltaic legion of seagoing Roombas (or don’t, if you’re easily upset). The Seaswarm project at MIT takes a thin, hydrophobic material and drags it behind a robot outfitted with GPS and WiFi for determining its location and communicating within a swarm. When deployed, the group finds the outer edges of an oil spill, and works its way into the center, coordinating the cleanup with minimal human interference. The material itself can take on twenty times its weight in oil. And yes, the whole thing is re-usable. According to researchers, 5,000 of these relatively low cost devices could have cleaned up the BP oil disaster in a month — which is more than we can say for Kevin Costner! See it in action after the break.

Continue reading MIT Seaswarm autonomous robots coming soon to an oil spill near you (video)

MIT Seaswarm autonomous robots coming soon to an oil spill near you (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Viruses Might Help Make Better Batteries

How can you make tiny, flexible materials that conduct electricity more efficiently than today’s batteries? You can engineer expensive, high-density carbon nanotubes. Or you can use the original nanobots, made by nature itself: viruses.

An MIT group recently described an advance that brings us closer to the day when freaky, half-alive nanomachines assemble batteries you could wear.

The research comes out of Angela Belcher’s Biomolecular Materials Group at MIT, which has been working on this project since 1994. They use bacteriophages to build — really, evolve — hyperdense materials from ionic particles, the same way bone, shells, chalk, and glass were made in the Cambrian period.

This week Mark Allen, a postdoc in the group, outlined the use of a new cathode made with iron flouride. Allen also described some of the potential applications of this technology. The high flexibility of the nanostructured material means you can weave it into any fabric or pour it into any shape, including:

  • Wearable battery packs for soliders, first responders, and civilians;
  • Tiny rechargable batteries for portable electronics including smart phones, laptops, and GPS;
  • Unmanned aerial vehicles, which require lightweight, long-lasting power sources.

In 2008, the group published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences outlining how this would work. Viruses create a template, assembling nanowires out of cobalt oxide. These are built on top of a synthetic electrolytic polymer, called a polyelectrolyte. (Natural polyelectrolytes include protein polypeptides and DNA.) Stamp this electrode onto a platinum current collector, and:

The resulting electrode arrays exhibit full electrochemical functionality. This versatile approach for fabricating and positioning electrodes may provide greater flexibility for implementing advanced battery designs such as those with interdigitated microelectrodes or 3D architectures.

A UAV is going to provide the first real-world test of the scaled-up batteries in action. Other applications we’ve seen touted for wearable electronics include wearable solar cells and electronic devices that stand up to repeat laundering. So much to look forward to.

Follow us for real-time tech news: Tim Carmody and Gadget Lab on Twitter.


Android Phones Can Substitute for Supercomputers

There’s an app for almost everything. Now add one that can run calculations from a supercomputer on a Nexus One phone in real time and without the need for internet connectivity.

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Texas Advanced Computing Center have created an Android app that can take simulations from the powerful Ranger supercomputer and solve them further on the mobile phone.

“The idea of using a phone is to show we can take a device with one chip and low power to compute a solution so it comes as close to the one solved on a supercomputer,” John Peterson, a research associate at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, told Wired.com.

Many researchers depend heavily on supercomputers capable of millions of calculations per second to simulate problems and advance their studies. Texas Computing Center’s Ranger supercomputer went live in 2008 with 62,976 CPU cores, 123 terabytes of memory, 1.73 petabytes of disk space and 579.4 teraflops of performance.

But massive machines such as the Ranger are not easily available. Researchers have to book time on them and they aren’t available for computations that need to be done quickly. Supercomputers also can’t be carried into field experiments. Having a device in hand that could help solve a problem quickly can be handy.

That’s where a technique called “certified reduced basis approximation” comes into play. The method lets researchers take a complex problem, define the values that are most relevant to the problem and set the upper and lower bounds. David Knezevic, a post-doctoral associate at MIT and Anthony Patera, a professor at the school, refined the technique to make it work on a smartphone. They did it by including strong error bounds that show how close they are to an actual supercomputer solution.

“It’s demonstrating that with a small processor, you can still get a meaningful answer to a big problem,” says Peterson.

The app is just one half of the solution, though. A supercomputer still has to create the reduced model that can be transferred to the phone as an app. When outside the office, researchers can enter values into the app to find answers quickly or visualize data.

For instance, for a problem in fluid dynamics, researchers will spend a day or two simulating a model using a supercomputer like Ranger. Of that computation, they will take a small amount of data and store it on a server as a reduced model.

This reduced model can be used to perform simulations on a cellphone, offering answers near instantaneously for use in real-world applications.

“The payoff for model reduction is large when you can go from an expensive supercomputer solution to a calculation that takes a couple of seconds on a smart phone,” Knezevic told a writer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. “That’s a speed up of orders of magnitude.”

There’s one disadvantage though. The smartphone app has to be customized for the problem it is solving, so it’s not universal.

“If a researcher came along with a problem, he would have to code up his own equation within the framework to represent it on the phone,” says Peterson. “What he would develop would be specific to the problem.”

For now, the researchers have made their app available through files on SourceForge.

Check out their video showing how the app works:

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Photo: Texas Advanced Computing Center


Melting silicon ‘in reverse’ can help purify it, result in cheaper electronics

Just our favorite combination of news: a mind-bending innovation that can have a very practical impact on our daily tech consumption. MIT scientists have found that silicon — when combined in the right dosage with other metals — can actually be made to melt by reducing its temperature. Typically, you’d require 1,414 degrees of Celsius heat to liquidize solid silicon, but the intermixed variant discussed here need only reach 900 degrees before its slow cooling process starts turning it gooey. The great advantage to this discovery is that because the impurities tend to separate off into the liquid part, there’s now a practicable way to filter them out, meaning that things like solar cells won’t require the same high grade of silicon purity for their construction — which in turn might lead to us being able to afford them one day. Of course, that’s getting way too far ahead of ourselves, as the research is still ongoing, but good news is good news no matter the timescale.

Melting silicon ‘in reverse’ can help purify it, result in cheaper electronics originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Aug 2010 10:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Terrafugia’s flying car Transitions into a safer, better, tamer-looking personal transporter

Whether you classify it as a roadable aircraft or a flying car, Terrafugia’s Transition looks resolutely set on avoiding vaporware status and becoming a bona fide commercial reality late next year. It’s ironic, then, that the latest development is being illustrated with a bunch of renders, but what they show is a significantly redesigned body, which now comes with FAA-approved safety features and brings the hybrid vehicle closer to its final shape. The new design integrates lessons learned from the Transition’s test flight last year to improve the wing shape and retraction mechanism, while also including an impact-absorbing crumple zone in the nose. The two-seater now also comes with a touchscreen center console — because nothing signals modernity better than a touchscreen — and can be seen in all its computer-generated glory on video after the break.

Continue reading Terrafugia’s flying car Transitions into a safer, better, tamer-looking personal transporter

Terrafugia’s flying car Transitions into a safer, better, tamer-looking personal transporter originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 05:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MIT researchers develop autonomous glider that can land on a wire

The latest research at MIT is not only paving the way to more agile autonomous aircraft, but it’s a reminder of how much catching up we have to do to match the complexity and skill of the common bird. In a project that’s been ongoing since 2005, Rick Cory and Russ Tedrake have developed a mathematical model of how a bird lands on a wire and emulated the move with an autonomous glider. To control the glider, they developed a system that allows the craft to keep an eye on itself and the position of the wire using external cameras, sending control data if adjustments have to be made. As it is, UAVs are generally limited to the same set of maneuvers that piloted aircraft have, but the researchers don’t feel that this has to be the case. For their next trick they plan to take the show outside, as well as develop vehicles with flapping wings. This is all great, but we’re holding out for a device that pitches (and wisecracks) as well as Woody Woodpecker.

Continue reading MIT researchers develop autonomous glider that can land on a wire

MIT researchers develop autonomous glider that can land on a wire originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Jul 2010 04:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fibers That Can Hear and Sing Could Power Electronic Textiles

The clothing of the future could be more than just fashion. MIT researchers are working to develop fibers that can hear and produce sound, and someday those could take the form of wearable electronics.

“The ancients used clothes for the same reason that we do, which is thermal insulation and aesthetics,” Yoel Fink, associate professor of materials science and principal investigator at MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics, told Wired.com. “What we have done is start thinking how fibers go beyond that and change their properties.”

Fink and his team hope their latest research will result in fibers that can be fashioned into clothes capable of capturing speech, textiles that can measure blood flow in the capillaries or nets that can double as sound sensors.

“It’s a very significant breakthrough on the level of the material used and the structure that was fabricated,” says Ayman Abouraddy, a professor at the College of Optics & Photonics in the University of Central Florida.

“Line a whole wall with these fibers and you could get a very interesting surround-sound system,”  says Abouraddy, who isn’t involved in the research.

Fibers, whether they are for clothing or telecommunications, have always been static, incapable of doing more than one thing: Hold fabric together, or transmit optical signals, for instance. The key to electronic textiles is fiber that can change its properties over a wide range of frequencies, says Fink.

The acoustic fibers have been created from a plastic called polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) that’s commonly used in microphones. The researchers tweaked the plastic to ensure its molecules are lopsided so all the fluorine atoms line up on one side and hydrogen atoms on the other. This asymmetry of the molecules makes the plastic piezoelectric.

Piezoelectricity is the key property here that allows the fibers to react to a range of frequencies, giving them the ability to function as both a microphone and a speaker.

“The important aspect of it is maintaining the crystalline form in the fiber,” says Abouraddy. “Usually the crystal melts if it is heated sufficiently, which happens when the fibers are being manufactured, but the new technique seems to have solved that problem.”

To manufacture the fibers, the piezoelectric molecules are all aligned in the same direction by applying an electric field that’s about 20 times as powerful as those that cause lightning during a thunderstorm.

So far, it has worked well enough that you can actually hear through the fibers. Researchers connected the fibers to a power supply and applied a current to make it vibrate at audible frequencies to generate sound.

The next major step will be to reduce the dimensions of the fiber so it can some day be woven into clothing.

“Right now the width of the fiber is around 2.5 mm, while in clothing today, the fibers are at around 50 microns,” says Abouraddy. “So they will have to reduce the width by a big magnitude.”

That’s one of the things that researchers will be working on over the next few years, says Fink. Eventually, he hopes, the manufacturing process will be perfected enough for the fibers to be affordable.

“Am I going to be able to sell this for a buck a meter in San Francisco soon? The answer is no,” says Fink. “But we should be able to get good economies of scale.”

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Photo: Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT/Greg Hren