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Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered and demonstrated a new method for overcoming two major hurdles facing solar energy. By developing a new antireflective coating that boosts the amount of sunlight captured by solar panels and allows those panels to absorb the entire solar spectrum from nearly any angle, the research team has moved academia and industry closer to realizing high-efficiency, cost-effective solar power.

“To get maximum efficiency when converting solar power into electricity, you want a solar panel that can absorb nearly every single photon of light, regardless of the sun’s position in the sky,” said Shawn-Yu Lin, professor of physics at Rensselaer and a member of the university’s Future Chips Constellation, who led the research project.  “Our new antireflective coating makes this possible.”

An untreated silicon solar cell only absorbs 67.4 percent of sunlight shone upon it — meaning that nearly one-third of that sunlight is reflected away and thus unharvestable. From an economic and efficiency perspective, this unharvested light is wasted potential and a major barrier hampering the proliferation and widespread adoption of solar power. 

After a silicon surface was treated with Lin’s new nanoengineered reflective coating, however, the material absorbed 96.21 percent of sunlight shone upon it — meaning that only 3.79 percent of the sunlight was reflected and unharvested. This huge gain in absorption was consistent across the entire spectrum of sunlight, from UV to visible light and infrared, and moves solar power a significant step forward toward economic viability. 

Lin’s new coating also successfully tackles the tricky challenge of angles. 

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This one is a tad technical but the opportunities are amazing - IT

In future, polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA for short) – better known as acrylic glass – could be made from natural raw materials such as sugars, alcohols or fatty acids. Compared with the previous chemical production process, a biotechnological process is far more environmentally friendly.

PMMA is manufactured by polymerising methyl methacrylate (MMA). In a bacterial strain, scientists at the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) have found an enzyme which could be used for the biotechnological production of a precursor of MMA.

Dr Thore Rohwerder has been nominated as one of three candidates for the European Evonik research award for his discovery. The competition is overseen by Dr Arend Oetker, president of the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft (Association of Donors to German Science). The aim of the award is to encourage young researchers to risk taking the step from the laboratory into business. The topic of the 2008 Evonik research award is “White Biotechnology” (industrial biotechnology). The Science-to-Business Award worth EUR 100,000 was given to Dr. Paul Dalby from the University College London on November 12th in Berlin. Dalby’s method for combining enzymes and customizing them for new tasks convinced the international jury.

The newly enzyme discovered by Dr. Thore Rohwerder und Dr. Roland H. Müller, called 2-hydroxyisobutyryl-CoA mutase, makes it possible to turn a linear C4 carbon structure into a branched one. Compounds of this type are precursors of MMA. Parent compounds may of course include intermediate products from the petrochemical industry. The revolutionary aspect, however, is that this enzyme, integrated into metabolically appropriate microorganisms, can also transform sugars and other natural compounds into the products desired. Until now, the only way to produce this precursor – 2-hydroxyisobutyrate (2-HIBA) – was a purely chemical process based on petrochemical raw materials.

The chemicals industry worldwide is searching for suitable biological processes, so that in future, renewable raw materials can also be used as a basis for MMA synthesis. The mutase presented here provides the solution: an enzyme which shifts a functional group from one position to another within a molecule. While in a post-doc position at the UFZ’s Department of Environmental Microbiology, Dr Thore Rohwerder and his mentor Dr Roland H. Müller discovered the enzyme in a newly isolated bacterial strain they found while searching for bacteria to break down the pollutant MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether).

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Approximately two-thirds of Americans voting in the November Presidential election will cast their votes on paper ballots. How can voters be assured their votes are counted and kept private?

GW Assistant Professor of Computer Science Poorvi Vora and doctoral student Stefan Popoveniuc discussed and demonstrated “voter-verifiable” voting system, Scantegrity, a multi-university project. Scantegrity involves optical scan ballots, invisible ink, and a fool-proof way for voters to ensure their ballots are correctly tallied.

Scantegrity is a vote-counting system that enables individuals to verify that their ballots have been collected and accurately tabulated. Scantegrity is the only such system in the country that can be used with current optical scan ballots and does not change the voting experience for users.

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Scientists in Italy are reporting that a new process could eliminate key obstacles to expanded use of coal gasification to transform that abundant domestic energy resource into synthetic liquid fuels for cars and trucks. 

In the study, Maria Sudiro and colleagues note that coal is the only conventional energy source with the potential for meeting global energy demands in the near future. World coal reserves, they note, are 25 percent greater than crude oil and the United States alone has enough coal to supply its own energy needs for centuries. However, existing processes for converting coal into much-needed liquid fuels are uneconomical and release too much carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and other air pollutants.

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A new research field called transformation optics may usher in a host of radical advances including a cloak of invisibility and ultra-powerful microscopes and computers by harnessing nanotechnology and “metamaterials.”

The field, which applies mathematical principles similar to those in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, will be described in an article to be published Friday (Oct. 17) in the journal Science. The article will appear in the magazine’s Perspectives section and was written by Vladimir Shalaev, Purdue’s Robert and Anne Burnett Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The list of possible breakthroughs includes a cloak of invisibility; computers and consumer electronics that use light instead of electronic signals to process information; a “planar hyperlens” that could make optical microscopes 10 times more powerful and able to see objects as small as DNA; advanced sensors; and more efficient solar collectors.

“Transformation optics is a new way of manipulating and controlling light at all distances, from the macro- to the nanoscale, and it represents a new paradigm for the science of light,” Shalaev said. “Although there were early works that helped to develop the basis for transformation optics, the field was only recently established thanks in part to papers by Sir John Pendry at the Imperial College, London, and Ulf Leonhardt at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and their co-workers.”

Current optical technologies are limited because, for the efficient control of light, components cannot be smaller than the size of the wavelengths of light. Transformation optics sidesteps this limitation using a new class of materials, or metamaterials, which are able to guide and control light on all scales, including the scale of nanometers, or billionths of a meter.

“The whole idea behind metamaterials is to create materials designed and engineered out of artificial atoms, meta-atoms, which are smaller than the wavelengths of light itself,” Shalaev said. “One of the most exciting applications is an electromagnetic cloak that could bend light around itself, similar to the flow of water around a stone, making invisible both the cloak and an object hidden inside.”

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Boston University’s College of Engineering is a partner launching a major program, under a National Science Foundation grant, to develop the next generation of wireless communications technology based on visible light instead of radio waves.

Researchers expect to piggyback data communications capabilities on low-power light emitting diodes, or LEDs, to create “Smart Lighting” that would be faster and more secure than current network technology.

“Imagine if your computer, iPhone, TV, radio and thermostat could all communicate with you when you walked in a room just by flipping the wall light switch and without the usual cluster of wires,” said BU Engineering Professor Thomas Little. “This could be done with an LED-based communications network that also provides light – all over existing power lines with low power consumption, high reliability and no electromagnetic interference. Ultimately, the system is expected to be applicable from existing illumination devices, like swapping light bulbs for LEDs.”

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When people working on a project get together with their laptops and PDAs, they share information via the internet and a client server. But new software developed by European researchers allows independent, ad hoc, secure networking anywhere.

The power and reach of the internet in today’s world is such that people have, in a short space of time, become over-reliant on it for many tasks both in business and personal life.

If a group of people are gathered together with their laptops in a conference room and are working together on a project, they need to use the web as a communications medium and a central server to store the data they are working on.

If the internet connection is unavailable, congested or even just unaffordable, it has a serious impact on the productivity of the group.

To overcome this, we need to move away from the centralised, rigid client-server paradigm and fixed communications infrastructure. This is just what researchers on the EU-funded POPEYE project have been doing.

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Observers like Bill Gates believe that by 2025 we could have robots in every home. In labs across Europe, researchers are creating designs that could become the robo-butler of the future.

Bill Gates likens the current state of robotics research to the earliest days of personal computing history when he formed the then fledging company Microsoft. Like the 1970s personal computer market, robotics designs and breakthroughs are following one another rapidly, and consumers are beginning to take an interest, too.

In Europe, as the rest of the world, there is s surge in robotics research, reflected in part by the European Network of Robotic Research (EURON), an EU-funded network of excellence that completed its work in May 2008.

It was an important network. The dozens of research programmes united by EURON represent a state-of-the-art in robotics, and a tantalising glimpse of the future.

That glimpse shows that researchers across Europe are creating new designs and tackling fundamental problems that eventually could lead to a world standard for domestic robots. Already enthusiasts are buying kits, making and programming their own robots.

In Japan, every year sees a new toy robot, while in the USA commercial robot vacuums like the Roomba are readily available.

But what will the robot butler of 2025 look like? 

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With the high cost of gasoline and diesel fuel impacting costs for automobiles, trucks, buses and the overall economy, a Temple University physics professor has developed a simple device which could dramatically improve fuel efficiency as much as 20 percent.

According to Rongjia Tao, Chair of Temple’s Physics Department, the small device consists of an electrically charged tube that can be attached to the fuel line of a car’s engine near the fuel injector. With the use of a power supply from the vehicle’s battery, the device creates an electric field that thins fuel, or reduces its viscosity, so that smaller droplets are injected into the engine. That leads to more efficient and cleaner combustion than a standard fuel injector, he says.

Six months of road testing in a diesel-powered Mercedes-Benz automobile showed that the device increased highway fuel from 32 miles per gallon to 38 mpg, a 20 percent boost, and a 12-15 percent gain in city driving.

The results of the laboratory and road tests verifying that this simple device can boost gas mileage.

“We expect the device will have wide applications on all types of internal combustion engines, present ones and future ones,” Tao wrote in the study published in Energy & Fuels.

Further improvements in the device could lead to even better mileage, he suggests, and cited engines powered by gasoline, biodiesel, and kerosene as having potential use of the device.

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Advances in sensing technology will help to reduce the wastage from ‘farm to fork’ that’s contributing to the UK’s £10 billion food wastage bill, according to the UK’s Sensors & Instrumentation Knowledge Transfer Network.

Sensors can detect early indicators of food spoilage before visual signs are apparent, identify toxins and monitor water and nutrient concentration within the soil to improve irrigation efficiency.

“The government’s Food Matters document highlights that the production and disposal of food not only costs billions but contributes significantly to the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. New developments in sensing technology are helping to improve the efficiency of everyday processes, reduce costs and benefit the environment,” said Phil Cooper, Director of the Sensors & Instrumentation Knowledge Transfer Network.

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