Category Technology/Electronics

Researchers from Yokohama National University in Japan have developed a prototype microprocessor using superconductor devices that are about 80 times more energy efficient than the state-of-the-art semiconductor devices found in the microprocessors of today’s high-performance computing systems.

As today’s technologies become more and more integrated in our daily lives, the need for more computational power is ever increasing. Because of this increase, the energy use of that increasing computational power is growing immensely...

Albert Einstein once said, “You have to learn the rules of the game, and then you have to play better than anyone else.” That could well be the motto at DeepMind, as a new report reveals it has developed a program that can master complex games without even knowing the rules.

DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, has previously made groundbreaking strides using reinforcement learning to teach programs to master the Chinese boardgame Go and the Japanese strategy game Shogi, as well as chess and challenging Atari video games. In all those instances, computers were given the rules of the game.

But Nature reported today that DeepMind’s MuZero has accomplished the same feats—and in some instances, beat the earlier programs—without first learning the rul...

Maximizing the efficiency of renewable energy technology is dependent on creating nanoparticles with ideal dimensions and density, new simulations have shown. Scientists in Australia have developed a process for calculating the perfect size and density of quantum dots needed to achieve record efficiency in solar panels.

Quantum dots, human-made nanocrystals 100,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper, can be used as light sensitisers, absorbing infrared and visible light and transferring it to other molecules.

This could enable new types of solar panels to capture more of the light spectrum and generate more electrical current, through a process of ‘light fusion’ known as photochemical upconversion.

The researchers, from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science, used l...

Improving the efficiency of solar cells can make a huge difference to the amount of energy produced from the same surface area and the same amount of sunshine, and another world record has been beaten in the push for better yields.

Researchers have now hit an efficiency of 29.15 percent in the perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell category, which is just one of several different types of cells. There are currently a variety of different technologies in use to convert solar energy into electricity.

For this type of panel, the long-term target of more than 30 percent is now tantalisingly within reach...