Category Technology/Electronics

Heliafilm – superior low light and high temperature energy harvesting performance.

Note that number, 13.2%. Heliatek, in its research for new organic absorber materials, said it set a new organic photovoltaic (OPV) world record for the direct conversion of sunlight into electricity using OPV multi-junction (using more than one material) cell, thanks to the “excellent low light and high temperature behavior of the organic semiconductor.”

Heliatek said they had a small molecule, vacuum deposition process on a plastic film substrate. The cell is a multi-junction cell combining 3 absorbers. Each of them is dedicated to convert green-, red- or near-infrared light of the wavelength range between 450 and 950 nm into electricity...

Robots at the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles US Warren Stamping Plant are seen in Michigan

Advances in artificial intelligence will soon lead to robots that are capable of nearly everything humans do, threatening tens of millions of jobs in the coming 30 years, experts warned Saturday.

“We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task,” said Moshe Vardi, director of the Institute for Information Technology at Rice University in Texas.

“I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?” he asked at a panel discussion on artificial intelligence at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Vardi said there w...

Gallium-arsenide nanowires are on a silicon surface. Credit: Thomas Stettner/Philipp Zimmermann / TUM

Physicists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed a nanolaser, a thousand times thinner than a human hair. Thanks to an ingenious process, the nanowire lasers grow right on a silicon chip, making it possible to produce high-performance photonic components cost-effectively. This will pave the way for fast and efficient data processing with light in the future. Ever smaller, ever faster, ever cheaper – since the start of the computer age the performance of processors has doubled on average every 18 months. 50 years ago already, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore prognosticated this astonishing growth in performance. And Moore’s law seems to hold true to this day.

But the mi...