New solar device converts Sun's energy to hydrogen more efficiently than ever

An international team of scientists has invented a cheap solar device that can store energy from the Sun more efficiently than anything on the market.

One of the biggest problems with solar power becoming a more viable and cost effective alternative to fossil fuels is what to do when the sun isn’t shining. An international team of scientists has figured out a solution, and it just might be the most promising one yet.

Led by Michael Graetzel, director of the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces at the Ecole Polytechnique in Switzerland, the team has created a device that can collect energy from sunlight and convert it to hydrogen, which can be stored and burned as fuel or fed through a fuel cell to generate electricity.

Named a ‘water splitter’, the device has been tipped as the next big thing in solar technology, says Kevin Bullis at MIT’s Technology Review, because it meets three of the four criteria needed to create a practical device. Firstly, it’s highly efficient. It’s made from a new type of material called perovskite, which was discovered in 2009 and found to absorb light much more efficiently than silicon, which is what solar cells are currently made from. According to Bullis, it can store 12.3 percent of the energy in sunlight in the form of hydrogen, which is pretty huge, seeing as 10 percent is the accepted benchmark for efficient solar-hydrogen converters.

Secondly, it’s cheap to produce, using only inexpensive materials. And thirdly, these materials are abundant to source, so the device is also easy to make. On top of perovskite, the device uses cheap nickel and iron to act as catalysts in its two 'water-splitting' electrodes - one that produces hydrogen and one that produces oxygen when they react with water.

"The catalysts built on previous work showing that nickel hydroxide is a promising catalyst, and that adding iron could improve it. The researchers added iron to nickel hydroxide to form a layered structure, and put the catalyst on a porous nickel “foam” to increase the area across which reactions can take place, speeding them up,” says Bullis.

The fourth criteria needed for a practical device is reliability, which the team is now working on increasing. Right now, it only lasts for a few hours before the performance of the solar cell starts to decrease. This is because perovskite degrades much faster than silicon. But the team, which includes researchers from Switzerland, Singapore and Korea, has figured out how to extend this lifespan to over a month by adding a layer of carbon to it. They’ve published their results in the journal Science. They're now working on increasing this further.

What the device in action below:

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The DIY droplet lens could revolutionise science and medicine, and its inventors are one of the finalists for ANSTO's 2014 Eureka Prize for Innovative Use of Technology.

Palau is establishing a no-fishing zone the size of France

The Pacific island of Palau is establishing a no-fishing zone that will cover 630,000 square kilometres to let the populations 'heal' after years of relentless commercial fishing.

In 2009, the island of Palau, located in the western Pacific Ocean just above New Guinea, established the first shark sanctuary in the world. Officials from the country say they've seen such success with the shark sanctuary as a buzzing tourist destination that they’ve launched plans to ban all commercial fishing in Palau's large ocean territory by 2018.

The free fishing zone will span 630,000 square kilometres (240,000 square miles) - an area the size of France - and has been described as “unprecedented”.

The reason behind the no-fishing zone, according to the President of Palau Tommy Remengesau, was to allow the ocean to heal and replenish its populations of fish after decades of overfishing by commerical enterprises from around the world. 

"Remengesau said Pacific island nations, which are also struggling to deal with climate change, were effectively "the conscience of the world" on environmental matters and had to lead by example because of their special connection with the ocean,” says Neil Sands for AFP.

"The ocean is our way of life," Remengesau told journalists. "It sustains and nurtures us, provides us with the basics of our Pacific island cultures, our very identities.”

Remengesau added that sharks offered more value to Palau as eco-tourism assets, saying that a 2011 study conducted by the Australian Institute of Marine Science concluded that a single reef shark could raise almost US$2 million for the local economy over 10 years thanks to the tourists that visit it. Figures put the tourism industry as being almost 30 times more lucrative to Palau than the commercial tuna industry. No attacks have ever occurred as the operators are careful to make sure everyone keeps a safe distance from the sharks.

This new robotic vacuum is powered by a 360-degree 'eye'

British technology company Dyson has revealed its new robotic vacuum cleaner that's remotely operated and powered by a 360-degree camera to map every room.

Named the Dyson 360 Eye, this robotic vacuum cleaner doesn't simply roam your house on its own, cleaning your floors and climbing over obstacles, it also moves using a completely new type of navigation technology that prevents it from going over the same spot twice and running down the battery.

"Where contemporary robot vacuum cleaners use everything from random motion to laser range finders and ultrasound to navigate, the Dyson builds a floor plan with its camera, knows where it is and where it hasn’t been and uses infrared for collision avoidance,” says Stuart Kennedy forThe Australian.

Thanks to its 360-degree camera that can see around the room at a 45-degree angle, the vacuum cleaner can record 30 pictures of its surroundings every second to create an instant map.

“We navigate by coming out of the charging station and then looking back at the charging station,” inventor James Dyson told Kennedy. “In that process it’s already got a picture of the room and knows where the charging station is in the room. It then cleans an area in a square spiral of 3 metres by 3 metres, then moves on to do another area 3 metres by 3 metres. It may come across a TV or something else in the way but it just goes round it and deals with it.”

The vacuum is also connected to a smartphone app, so you can set up cleaning schedules for it to start remotely when you’re not at home.

According to Margaret Rhodes at Wired, Dyson released a vacuum cleaner model called the Dyson DC06 in 2001, before swiftly taking if off the market. The novel vacuum cleaner had 84 sensors, ran with three computers and had a price tag of several thousand dollars, which of course was too much, and the machinery was too heavy to ever be a hit with customers.

In the years that followed, Dyson looked into how they could improve on this idea. Dyson himself invested more than $8 million in a robotics lab at Imperial College London, says Rhodes, with a particular interest in vision-powered systems. With the help of their research, the Dyson 360 Eye was created and will be released worldwide early next year.

Watch how it works below:

This wind turbine can fold into your backpack and charge your laptop

Scientists have 3D-printed a wind turbine that’s small and light enough to fit into a backpack.

Called AirEnergy3D, the turbine can plug directly into a laptop or phone to charge it with renewable energy, or can feed electricity back into a household power system, as Adele Peters reports for Fast Company. 

The turbine is designed to be portable so that it can be carried around by users, or moved around a house depending on where the windiest spot is. Its creators at Poland-based company Omni3D are now raising funds on Kickstarter for the device.

The vertical-shape of the turbine is designed to capture as much energy as possible from the relatively low wind speeds that come through city roofs and backyards, Peters explains. The blade shape is still being refined, but the turbine can already power a lightbulb, and with the Kickstarter funding the team is working towards a design that will be able to produce 300 watts, which is enough to charge computers and other electronic devices.

Impressively, the company is going to make all the plans for the 3D-printed turbine open source, so that others can customise the blades or continue to improve their design. "We want to make it as easy to develop upon the original project," Kamil Dziadkiewicz, an engineer from Omni3D, told Fast Company. "Thanks to 3D printing, everybody as a community can experiment and prototype better solutions for the machine."

The final kit is projected to cost users around US$350, and users assemble it themselves from some electronics and parts that they can 3D print. DIY lovers can also use their own parts and make it from scratch using the open source plans.

And for every US$4,000 (£2,500) pledged, Omni3d will send one of the constructed wind turbines to off-the-grid African villages, to help generate electricity where it’s needed most. The device can also be used in natural disaster situations in regions where solar power may not be the most efficient option.

So, you'll soon have no excuse for leaving home without renewable energy again. Check out theKickstarter campaign video below:

The Germans Have Figured Out How to 3-D Print Cars

The assembly line isn’t going away, but 3-D printing is going to reshape how we make cars. The EDAG Genesis points the way, with an beautifully crafted frame made from a range of materials and inspired by a turtle’s skeleton.

The German engineering firm showed off the Genesis design concept at the Geneva Motor Show as proof that additive manufacturing–EDAG’s fancy term for 3-D printing–can be used to make full-size car components. It’s on an entirely different scale than the tiny, 3-D printed creations coming out of a desktop Makerbot, but it’s also just a frame–a stylized chassis that’s more art than reality.

Before settling on 3-D printing, EDAG tried a few different acronym-heavy options, including selective laser sintering (SLS), selective laser melting (SLM), and stereolithography (SLA). But after extensive tinkering, the final process they used was a modified version of fused-deposition modeling, or FDM.

EDAG’s robot built the Genesis concept by creating a thermoplastic model of the complex interior, although the company says they could use carbon fiber to make the structure both stronger and lighter. EDAG envisions the Genesis as being surrounded by an exterior frame–likely steel or aluminum–to provide a tough exterior to protect the lattice-like monocoque.

We’ve seen 3-D printing applied to cars before, but EDAG’s design is unique because it shows that with the right equipment you can produce a structure at a massively larger scale. Rather than printing out tiny parts and assembling them together to create a whole, the Genesis proposes that future cars could be produced in fewer steps by assembling large, exceptionally strong unibody parts.

Printing of this size is still years from reality due to both cost and scale, but the design is the opening salvo in an arms race for creating large objects with a single process.

“As for the target of using additive manufacturing to produce complete vehicle bodies, there is still a long way to go before this becomes an industrial application,” EDAG says in its announcement. “So for the time being, it remains a vision.”

Activating a specific gene makes fruit flies live 30% longer

Scientists have found that activating a gene in the intestines of fruit flies can slow down ageing throughout the body and increase their lifespan by almost a third.

A team of biologists has shown that activating a gene called AMPK in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster can add two weeks to their usual six-week lifespan.

And the fruit flies didn’t just live longer, their brains aged more slowly and they stayed healthier for longer as well.

AMPK is a gene that helps regulate energy in cells - when cellular energy levels are low, it gets activated. It’s also found in humans in low levels, which led the researchers to believe that understanding its pathway could help us work out how to delay our own ageing process.

As journalist Liat Clark explains for Wired magazine, the team are driven by the idea that by repairing the molecular damage that occurs as cells degrade, we can help to avoid diseases associated with ageing.

"Instead of studying the diseases of ageing - Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, stroke, cardiovascular disease, diabetes - one by one, we believe it may be possible to intervene in the ageing process and delay the onset of many of these diseases," David W Walker, a molecular biologist whose lab conducted the research at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), said in a press release.

A key part of this cellular ageing process is a build up of “molecular garbage” - this is molecular waste that is usually cleared out through a process known as autophagy. But as we age, autophagy can slow down and molecular garbage and protein can build up, something that has already been linked to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. 

Scientists have previously shown that AMPK  was known to activate authopahgy, but scientists weren’t sure of how this process occurred.

The research, led by Matthew Ulgherait from UCLA, involved stimulating AMPK in more than 100,000 fruit flies, and that activating AMPK in the intestine could increase levels of autophagy around the body - even in the brain. This is an important discovery, because in humans it would be much easier to trigger a similar process via the intestine rather than neurally.

“Matt moved beyond correlation and established causality,” Walker said in a press release. “He showed that the activation of autophagy was both necessary to see the anti-aging effects and sufficient; that he could bypass AMPK and directly target autophagy.” The research is published in Cell Reports.

Obviously this cellular pathway now needs to be tested in humans, but it’s a very promising first step towards better understanding the way our cells age - and potentially working out how to slow that natural process down.