Graduate student Nicholas Davy holds a sample of the special window glass. (Photos by David Kelly Crow)

Smart windows equipped with controllable glazing can augment lighting, cooling and heating systems by varying their tint, saving up to 40% in an average building’s energy costs. These smart windows require power for operation, so they are relatively complicated to install in existing buildings. But by applying a new solar cell technology, researchers at Princeton University have developed a different type of smart window: a self-powered version that promises to be inexpensive and easy to apply to existing windows. This system features solar cells that selectively absorb near-UVz light, so the new windows are completely self-powered.

“Sunlight is a mixture of electromagnetic radiation mad...

Spin injection and helicity control of surface spin photocurrent in a three dimensional topological insulator. Nature Communications, 2017; 8: 15401 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15401

A discovery of how to control and transfer spinning electrons paves the way for novel hybrid devices that could outperform existing semiconductor electronics. In a study researchers at Linkoping University in Sweden demonstrate how to combine a commonly used semiconductor with a topological insulator. Just as the Earth spins around its own axis, so does an electron, in a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction. “Spintronics” is the name used to describe technologies that exploit both the spin and the charge of the electron. Current applications are limited, and the technology is mainly used in computer hard drives...

Jet, disk, and disk atmosphere in the HH 212 protostellar system. (a) A composite image for the HH 212 jet in different molecules, combining the images from the Very Large Telescope (McCaughrean et al. 2002) and ALMA (Lee et al. 2015). Orange image shows the dusty envelope+disk mapped with ALMA. (b) A zoom-in to the central dusty disk. The asterisk marks the position of the protostar. A size scale of our solar system is shown in the lower right corner for comparison. (c) Atmosphere of the accretion disk detected with ALMA. In the disk atmosphere, green is for deuterated methanol, blue for methanethiol, and red for formamide. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Lee et al.

An international team has used the Atacama Large Millimeter/ submillimeter Array (ALMA) to detect complex organic molecules for...

New planet candidates from the eighth Kepler planet candidate catalog show numerous terrestrial worlds that are near the size of Earth and within the habitable zone of their stars. The dark green span represents an optimistic estimate for habitable zone, while the brighter green a more conservative estimate. Blue circles are confirmed exoplanets, while yellow circles are new planet candidates that require follow-up observations. Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel

Rocky planets are probably a whole lot more common in our galaxy than astronomers previously believed—according to the latest release of Kepler Space Telescope data last week—a scenario that enhances the prospects for extraterrestrial life in nearby solar systems...