Chemists at UCR have found a way of turning a single photon into two excitons, by a process known as singlet fission. By doubling the yield of excitons in a solar cell, you theoretically double the number of electrons produced and could lead to having a max theoretical efficiency of 60% or more in an (organic) solar cell See also DOI: 10.1021/jz500676c - "Singlet Fission: From Coherences to Kinetics"

Maybe an idea for the next GTOC? :)

This dutch company, Schuberg, has no managers but instead all the employees (operating in the IT service industry) manage everything themselves. They offer IT support to KLM, Rabobank and Eneco, who are quite very reliant on the uptime of their systems. These companies rate Schuberg consistently with the highest approval. Harvard business school is now teaching this type of organizational structure. Possible new working method?

The Earth Monitoring Competition is annually awarding prizes to innovative solutions for business and society based on Earth observation data.

Somewhat older talk from 2011 on using viruses to grow batteries.

Using dielectric materials as efficient EM radiators and receivers can scale down these antenna's to the chip level, reducing both weight and power consumption. The infamous internet-of-things one step closer. But could we also transmit power this way?? "In dielectric aerials, the medium has high permittivity, meaning that the velocity of the radio wave decreases as it enters the medium," said Dr Dhiraj Sinha, the paper's lead author. "What hasn't been known is how the dielectric medium results in emission of electromagnetic waves. This mystery has puzzled scientists and engineers for more than 60 years." The researchers determined that the reason for this phenomenon is due to symmetry breaking of the electric field associated with the electron acceleration The researchers found that by subjecting the piezoelectric thin films to an asymmetric excitation, the symmetry of the system is similarly broken, resulting in a corresponding symmetry breaking of the electric field, and the generation of electromagnetic radiation.

Stacking laser printed supercapacitors (no clean room required btw) has lead to about 1100F/g and thus about 20-40Wh/L. For supercapacitors thats pretty damn good. For reference, Li-ion recently reached 650Wh/L. The gap is closing, although for supercaps of this type the theoretical maximum is 1400F/g.

As Stevens says in the new article, researchers now know that increased nighttime light exposure tracks with increased rates of breast cancer, obesity and depression. Correlation isn't causation, of course, and it's easy to imagine all the ways researchers might mistake those findings. The easy availability of electric lighting almost certainly tracks with various disease-causing factors: bad diets, sedentary lifestyles, exposure to they array of chemicals that come along with modernity. Very difficult to prove causation I would think, but there are known relationships between hormone levels and light.

Hasta la vista, baby. A real-life T-1000, the shape-shifting liquid-metal robot from Terminator 2, is a step closer, thanks to a self-powered liquid metal motor. The device is surprisingly simple: just a drop of metal alloy made mostly of gallium - which is liquid at just under 30 °C - with some indium and tin mixed in.

Jarvis could make it, add a power supply and aquarium and we are off :)

Ever wondered what radiation looks like? If you have, I bet you didn't think it would look as cool as this. This is a small piece of uranium mineral sitting in a cloud chamber, which means you can see the process of decay and radiation emission....

An alien star passed through our Solar System just 70,000 years ago, astronomers have discovered. No other star is known to have approached this close to us. An international team of researchers says it came five times closer than our current nearest neighbour - Proxima Centauri. Passing straight through the Oort Cloud region. This must have left some sort of mark maybe? A binary system of a red and brown dwarf (8% and 6% solar masses) so maybe not a too significant impact on trajectories in the Oort cloud?

Software that roughly mimics the way the brain works could give smartphones new smarts-leading to more accurate and sophisticated apps for tracking everything from workouts to emotions. The software exploits an artificial-intelligence technique known as deep learning, which uses simulated neurons and synapses to process data.

Technology/Robotics Scientists have developed an octopus-like robot, which can zoom through water with ultra-fast propulsion and acceleration never before seen in man-made underwater vehicles. Most fast aquatic animals are sleek and slender to help them move easily through the water but cephalopods, such as the octopus, are capable of high-speed escapes by filling their bodies with water and then quickly expelling it to dart away.

Eve, an artificially-intelligent 'robot scientist' could make drug discovery faster and much cheaper, say researchers writing in the Royal Society journal Interface. The team has demonstrated the success of the approach as Eve discovered that a compound shown to have anti-cancer properties might also be used in the fight against malaria.

Big data analytic systems are reputed to be capable of finding a needle in a universe of haystacks without having to know what a needle looks like. The very best ways to sort large databases of unstructured text is to use a technique called Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). Unfortunately, LDA is also inaccurate enough at some tasks that the results of any topic model created with it are essentially meaningless, according to Luis Amaral, a physicist whose specialty is the mathematical analysis of complex systems and networks in the real world and one of the senior researchers on the multidisciplinary team from Northwestern University that wrote the paper. Even for an easy case, big data analysis is proving to be far more complicated than many of the companies selling analysis software want people to believe.

Although it may seem like the above two experiments violate the uncertainty principle because the results show a smaller-than-required degree of uncertainty, Shih and his coauthors explain that no violation has occurred due to the fact that the experiments involve photon pairs rather than individual photons. The scientists argue that Popper's original thought experiment was based on a misunderstanding of the proper context of the uncertainty principle: it governs the behavior of single particles only, not the "correlation" of two particles.

A hybrid image classification method was employed for this specific purpose by incorporating the advantages of both pixel-based and object-based image classification approaches. This was performed in two steps: firstly, a pixel-based image classification method, i.e., artificial neural network was applied to classify potential targets with similar spectral reflectance at pixel level; and then an object-based image classification method was used to further differentiate animal targets from the surrounding landscapes through the applications of expert knowledge. As a result, the large animals in two pilot study areas were successfully detected with an average count error of 8.2%, omission error of 6.6% and commission error of 13.7%. The results of the study show for the first time that it is feasible to perform automated detection and counting of large wild animals in open savannahs from space

And Paul, it includes neural networks!

Unlike any other living thing on Earth, electric bacteria use energy in its purest form - naked electricity in the shape of electrons harvested from rocks and metals. We already knew about two types, Shewanella and Geobacter. Now, biologists are showing that they can entice many more out of rocks and marine mud by tempting them with a bit of electrical juice. Experiments growing bacteria on battery electrodes demonstrate that these novel, mind-boggling forms of life are essentially eating and excreting electricity.

Scientists have used the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio-telescope system and NASA's Cassini spacecraft to measure the position of Saturn and its family of moons to within about a mile -- at a range of nearly a billion miles.

The unspoken reality is that the U.S. patent system creates a market so constricted by high transaction costs and legal risks that it excludes the vast majority of small and mid-sized businesses and prevents literally 95 percent of all patented discoveries from ever being put to use to create new products and services, new jobs, and new economic growth.