Category Technology/Electronics

Scaffolds in a compound solar cell filled with perovskite after fracture testing. Credit: Dauskardt Lab/Stanford University

Packing tiny solar cells together, like micro-lenses in the compound eye of an insect, could pave the way to a new generation of advanced photovoltaics. In a new study, the Stanford team used the insect-inspired design to protect a fragile photovoltaic material, perovskite from deteriorating when exposed to heat, moisture or mechanical stress. The results are published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science (E&ES).

“Perovskites are promising, low-cost materials that convert sunlight to electricity as efficiently as conventional solar cells made of silicon,” said Reinhold Dauskardt, a professor of materials science and engineering and senior author of the study...

ComText allows robots to understand contextual commands such as, “Pick up the box I put down.” Credit: Tom Buehler/MIT CSAIL

ComText, from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, allows robots to understand contextual commands. Computer scientists have developed an Alexa-like system that allows robots to understand a wide range of commands that require contextual knowledge about objects and their environments. They’ve dubbed the system ‘ComText,’ for ‘commands in context.’ Despite what you might see in movies, today’s robots are still very limited in what they can do. They can be great for many repetitive tasks, but their inability to understand the nuances of human language makes them mostly useless for more complicated requests.

For example, if you put a specif...

Researchers from CSAIL have devised a new system for data center caching that uses flash memory. In addition to costing less and consuming less power, a flash caching system could dramatically reduce the number of cache servers required by a data center. Credit: MIT News

Flash-memory system could reduce power consumption of data center ‘caches’ by 90%. Researchers have developed a new system for data center caching that uses flash memory, the kind of memory used in most smartphones. Most modern websites store data in databases, and since database queries are relatively slow, most sites also maintain so-called cache servers, which list the results of common queries for faster access...

KIPAC scientists have for the first time used artificial neural networks to analyze complex distortions in spacetime, called gravitational lenses, demonstrating that the method is 10 million times faster than traditional analyses. (Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Brain-mimicking ‘neural networks’ can revolutionize the way astrophysicists analyze their most complex data. Researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have for the first time shown that neural networks – a form of artificial intelligence — can accurately analyze the complex distortions in spacetime known as gravitational lenses 10 million times faster than traditional methods...