Nanomaterials could double efficiency of solar cells by converting waste heat into usable energy

An experimental solar cell created by MIT researchers could massively increase the amount of power generated by a given area of panels, while simultaneously reducing the amount of waste heat. Even better, it sounds super cool when scientists talk about it: “with our own unoptimized geometry, we in fact could break the Shockley-Queisser limit.”

The Shockley-Queisser limit, which is definitely not made up, is the theoretical maximum efficiency of a solar cell, and it’s somewhere around 32 percent for the most common silicon-based ones.

You can get around this by various tricks like stacking cells, but the better option, according to David Bierman, a doctoral student on the team (and who is quoted above), will be thermophotovoltaics — whereby sunlight is turned into heat and then re-emitted as light better suited for the cell to absorb.

Sound weird? Here’s the thing. Solar cells work best with a certain wavelength of light — perhaps ultraviolet is too short, while infrared is too long, but let’s say 600nm (orange visible light) is perfect. Only some of the broad-spectrum radiation emitted by the sun is at or around 600nm, which limits the amount of energy the cell can pull out of that radiation — that’s one of the components of the Shockley-Queisser limit.

What Bierman and the others on his team did was to add a step between the sun and the cell: a carefully engineered structure of carbon nanotubes. “The carbon nanotubes are virtually a perfect absorber over the entire color spectrum,” said Bierman in the MIT news release. “All of the energy of the photons gets converted to heat.”

Normally heat is undesirable in a solar cell, as it’s just waste energy that can interfere with normal operation. But in this case, the heat is not allowed to dissipate; instead, the carbon nanostructure converts the heat back into light — at the exact optimum wavelength of the photovoltaic cell.

The result is a huge increase in efficiency, and that’s not the only benefit. Heat, unlike light, is easy to store and move. If the day’s sunlight was entirely converted to heat and stored away, it could be converted to light on demand — like, say, at night. In other words, this technique essentially allows sunlight to be saved for later.

Experimental results bore out the theory, and a prototype TPV cell performed as expected. But the tech still needs to make it out of the lab, and manufacturing the complex carbon nanomaterials in bulk is no simple task. So you won’t be using thermophotovoltaics next year or the year after — but the technique is a tremendously promising one and unlikely to be left on the shelf.

The team’s research was published in the journal Nature Energy.

Google plans to replace your password with Trust API

The importance of increasing online security around personal information has risen due to the increase in cyber attacks and data breaches over recent year.

Now Instead of just relying on uniquely generated PINs, Google intends to use your biometrics data – like your typing patterns, your current location, and more – to strengthen the second layer of authentication with a better, automatic and trustworthy approach.

Project Abacus: Password-free Logins

Introduced at the Google I/O developer conference, the new feature is called the Trust API, which will be available to Android developers by year-end if the initial tests with "several very large financial institutions" next month goes well.

Trust API was first developed under the codename Project Abacus, which was introduced last year at Google I/O 2015 when the company announced that it was working on a new password-less authentication method for Android devices.

Project Abacus is a system that opts for biometrics over two-factor authentication.

A while ago, the company implemented a similar idea, called "Smart Lock," on devices running Android 5.0 and higher.

Smart Locks automatically locks or unlocks your device when you are in a trusted location, or when your device recognizes your facial characteristics or have a secure Bluetooth device connected.

This Trust API is an upgraded and advanced version of Smart Lock. Trust API works by using the phone's sensors to collect data about you such as your voice, typing patterns, the particular times and locations you might use an app, and even facial recognition to derive a "Trust Score".

This Trust Score is then used to authenticate you without any need to enter a password or PIN, the head of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) unit Daniel Kaufman said Friday at its Google I/O developer conference.

In case your Trust Score is not high enough, apps could revert to asking users for their passwords.

However, the company also said previously that different apps could require different Trust Scores. For example, your bank could require a higher score than a gaming app.

This Trust Score is the new "Trust Score API" or "Trust API" that the company hopes to put in developers' hands by the end of the year..

FindFace, finds your social profile with just using photo

Russian nerds have developed a new Face Recognition technology based app called FindFace, which is a nightmare for privacy lovers and human right advocates.

FindFace is a terrifyingly powerful facial recognition app that lets you photograph strangers in a crowd and find their real identity by connecting them to their social media accounts with 70% success rate, putting public anonymity at risk.

The FindFace app was launched two months ago on Google Play and Apple’s App Store and currently has 500,000 registered users and processed nearly 3 Million searches, according to its co-founders, 26-year-old Artem Kukharenko, and 29-year-old Alexander Kabakov.

According to The Guardian, FindFace uses image recognition technology to compare faces against profile pictures on Vkontakte, a very popular social networking site in Russia that has over 200 Million users.

Besides showing the social media account of the one you are searching for, FindFace also shows you social media accounts of people who look very much like the person in the photograph.

"It also looks for similar people," Kabakov told The Guardian. "So you could just upload a photo of a movie star you like or your ex, and then find ten girls who look similar to her and send them messages."

Although many people may find the app useful, possibly girls who do not want pervs to contact them and harass them would definitely find this app as a stalking tool.

FindFace has marketed itself as a dating app, but its founders hope to make big money from licensing its algorithm to retail companies and law enforcement, claiming their algorithm can search through a Billion photographs in a matter of seconds on a normal computer.

They said that Russian police had already contacted them about using their facial recognition technology.

Just after the launch of this app, Security firm Kaspersky also tested the FindFace's algorithm in April and found that the app works as accurate as it claims to.

When the security company uploaded posed photographs, the app correctly identified people 90 percent of the time, although when it uploaded photos taken sneakily in public, accuracy decreased.

Are you finding the whole thing a bit scary?

This is the entirely new world of technology and gadgets where nothing is hidden; nobody is anonymous.

So, the app leaves just two option for you: Either wear something on your face to trick the camera, like wearing a hoodie, mask, glasses, while roaming on a street, or you better get used to having no privacy in your new society.

Kaspersky also advised Vkontakte users to make their pictures private and delete old photos from the profile pictures album, if they do not want to be identified by strangers.

Pilot earpiece targets language barriers with live conversation translation

From the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's Babel fish to Star Trek's universal translator, science fiction has found ways to break down the intergalactic language barriers, but it's something those of us in the real world are still struggling with. New York startup Waverly Labs is now claiming it's ready to make fiction a reality with the Pilot earpiece, which sits in your ear to provide near real-time translations of multilingual conversations.

   

The time and technology seem close to bring another idea from science fiction into reality. The Babel fish from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a living, squirming animal you stuck in your ear to translate any language in the universe for you in real time – a neat plot device that let every alien in the novels understand each other.

Now, a Manhattan-based company called Waverly Labs is working on commercializing an electronic device that does a similar job. The Pilot is an earpiece that listens in to a conversation and communicates with your smartphone to give you a close-to-real time translation.

To do so, it's going to need to rely on several potential weak-link systems; it'll need a clear signal from its in-built microphone, which will need to do a decent job of converting that signal from speech into text in both speakers' languages.

Then it'll need a good, effective translation, presumably from an online translation engine like those run by Google or Microsoft. In particular, it'll need to operate super-quickly and do a good job translating each language in a spoken, chatty form.

Then it'll need to convert the translation from text to speech and send it back to the earbud. And it'll need to be able to do all these tasks concurrently if the other person keeps talking while it's thinking.

The fact is, all these systems are already out there, up and running. None are perfect, in fact most are still glitchy and inaccurate, but each is steadily improving. Waverly Labs has wisely chosen to launch with European Latin and Germanic languages only at first; these are handled far better by online translators than Euro-to-Asian language translations at the moment.

Both Google Translate and Microsoft's Skype Translator are also already attempting real-time conversation translation in mobile and desktop applications. Pilot's key innovation is to put this stuff into a wearable device such that it effectively "whispers" the translation into the listener's ear.

It'll be interesting to see how that works out in practice, with the inevitable delay the translation system is going to add to the conversation, there won't be any way for you to know when the other party has actually received the translation of the last thing you said. So until it's super quick, it might actually be better to do this stuff through a phone that's sitting on a table that both parties can hear.

In fact, that's how Waverly Labs is going to launch the Pilot system. While pre-orders via Indiegogo will start very soon, deliveries aren't expected for another 12 months. But this US summer, the team will launch a mobile app that gives you the translation experience on your smartphone.

Full retail for the Pilot earpiece system will be US$299. That'll get you a pair of earpieces, so you can use both to listen to music, or presumably give one to your foreign friend when it's time to try to communicate through these things.

Is real-time translation technology ready to make the leap into the big time yet? The proof will be in the pudding. But enough of the pieces are moving into place to suggest that the language barrier may finally be broken.

BoomStick creates room-filling audio in your head

Audio enhancement is never going to be an easy sell. You’re basically trying to sell something people don’t know they’re missing. Sure, the audio coming out of your everyday iPhone earbuds is "meh" at best, but for most people it’s good enough.

BoomCloud 360, though, contends it can fill in that aural gap that you didn’t know you were missing for $99.

The company's device is called BoomStick and, despite the big-sounding name, it’s a relatively tiny, palm-sized device with a 3.5mm output port on one end and a 3.5mm input jack on the other.

According to the manufacturers, it can enhance virtually any audio source with a built an advanced digital signal processor (ADSP) that includes psychoacoustic base adjustment, spatial enhancement and high-frequency contouring. They all combine to, BoomCloud 360 claims, reveal latent audio qualities — things that can get masked in a sound mix

Unlike devices that simply boost audio or even fake 3D sound ("I hear helicopters behind me!"), BoomStick seeks to enhance the spatial quality of music, gaming, movies and spoken audio.

Psychoacoustics, or the study of sound perception, has been around for years. BoomCloud 360 CTO Alan Kraemer, who was formerly CTO at SRS, is an audio expert who is deeply knowledgeable in psychoacoustics. He says it presents audio in a fashion more akin to how we hear it in a natural environment.

Kraemer believes that those chasing lossless audio, like Ponos and Tidal "are wrong." The benefits of higher sample rates are questionable, at best, he told me. Kraemer admitted that bit-depth can help audio quality, but "99% of people can’t hear these things."

Can I hear it

BoomStick has been on the market for almost a month, but now it’s starting to sell in Sprint stores for $79. Seems like the right time to deliver my assessment.

Like any good gadget, BoomStick doesn’t ask you to install special software or twist into knots to complete the setup. It’s simply plug and play. The lightweight device comes with its own carrying case so you can keep it with you and use it with any of your portable devices — at least those that play audio.

The jack plugs into your device's audio out port, and then your headphones plug into the other end of the BoomStick. There’s a small power slider on one side and a mini-USB port for charging. BoomCloud 360 execs told me it can last 15 hours on a charge. Since much of the chassis is filled with battery, it could be an ever smaller device if they dropped the duration to just 8 hours — something BoomCloud 360 has considered.

On the face of the device are a few indicator lights (power, battery and sound) and one large button that turns the audio algorithm on and off. Even with the power off, BoomStick serves as an audio pass-through device and when you turn it on, it doesn’t alter the audio until you hit that big button.

Hit the button

Now here’s where it gets tricky. Yes, when I hit that button virtually every listening device I tried – Apple iPhone ear buds, Beats Audio Solo 2 headphones and Sony Professional Dynamic Stereo Headphones – showed an audible difference.

In general, sound in music, games and video got more spatial presence. The ambient sound, like wind rustling trees and saxophones playing behind Frank Sinatra on New York, New York, moved a little forward. There was also a little sound and bass boost, so the overall sound got louder and there was a little more thump.

Audio quality enhancement on both the Beats and Sony headphones was certainly more pleasant. There’s a warmer sound coming from both those headsets, especially on the Sony’s, which do not seem to add any kind of unwanted signal processing.

The tone on the Apple ear buds could get a bit sharp so that, when I turned on BoomStick, some of the background noises moved into competition with the forward sounds.

While music and games definitely benefited from BoomStick’s audio enhancement, I think the device is a kind of godsend for movie Foley artists.

In film production, they're the ones who create all the sound effects, everything from footsteps to wind to rain drops. BoomStick seems to pluck those sounds out of obscurity and thrust them forward, without overwhelming the voices and soundtrack. This was particularly effective in The Day After Tomorrow: The effect was like watching a big screen movie with digital surround sound, even though I was just using Apple earbuds.

Is BoomStick worth $79 to $99? After all, you can always spend that money on a better pair of headphones. Based on my experience, however, even the sound coming from a pair of headphones costing hundreds of dollars can get a boost from BoomStick.