Science world

 Improving the efficiency of solar cells can make a huge difference to the amount of energy produced from the same surface area and the same amount of sunshine, and another world record has been beaten in the push for better yields. Researchers have now hit efficiency of 29.15 percent in the perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell category, which is just one of several different types of cells. There are currently a variety of different technologies in use to convert solar energy into electricity. For this type of panel, the long-term target of more than 30 percent is now tantalizingly within reach. The latest lab tests edge ahead of the maximum 28 percent efficiency that perovskite/silicon cells have managed up to this point. The layers of the tandem solar cell. (Eike Köhnen/HZB) "Tandem solar cells that pair silicon with a metal halide perovskite are a promising option for surpassing the single-cell efficiency limit," write the researchers in their published paper. "We re...

 A team of Chinese scientists has developed the foremost powerful quantum computer within the world, capable of engaging at least one task 100 trillion times faster than the world's fastest supercomputers. In 2019, Google said it had built the primary machine to attain "quantum supremacy," the primary to outperform the world's best supercomputers at quantum calculation, Live Science previously reported. (IBM disputed Google's claim at the time.) The Chinese team, based primarily at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, reported their quantum computer, named Jiuzhang, is 10 billion times faster than Google's. an outline of Jiuzhang and its feat of calculation was published December 3 within the journal Science. Assuming both claims interference, Jiuzhang would be the second quantum computer to realize quantum supremacy anywhere within the world. China has invested heavily in quantum computing, with Xi Jinping's government spending US$1...

   Airlines are testing all forms of ways to create planes less of a haul on the environment. Virgin Atlantic recently used recycled waste to power a billboard flight, while Boeing and JetBlue have backed a shot to make hybrid-electric planes. The Netherlands ’ KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is taking a distinct approach. It just partnered with a university to develop the “Flying-V,” a radical new airplane design that puts passenger seats inside the plane’s wings — and it could decrease the number of fuel needed for flights by a considerable 20 percent. On Monday, KLM announced plans to collaborate with the Delft University of Technology on the school’s in-development Flying-V airplane design. And it doesn’t just put passengers within the plane’s wings — the fuel tanks and hold also will find a brand new home there. Based on the researchers’ calculations, the new design should allow the Flying-V to move approximately the identical number of passengers as an Airbus A350 using 20 perc...

 How might The Terminator have played out if Skynet had decided it probably wasn't responsible enough to carry the keys to the complete US nuclear arsenal? because it seems, scientists could have saved us from such a future AI-led apocalypse, by creating neural networks that know when they're untrustworthy. These deep learning neural networks are designed to mimic the human brain by weighing up a large number of things in balance with one another, spotting patterns in masses of knowledge that humans haven't got the capacity to analyze. While Skynet might still be how off, AI is already making decisions in fields that affect human lives like autonomous driving and diagnosing, which means it is important that they are as accurate as possible. to assist towards this goal, this newly created neural network system can generate its confidence level moreover as its predictions. "We need the flexibility to not only have high-performance models but also to know after we cannot ...

 The Virgin Hyperloop made its first journey carrying passengers Sunday, during a test the corporate claimed represented a serious revolution for the "groundbreaking" technology capable of transporting people at 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) an hour. The Hyperloop is meant to hold passengers in small pods through a thermionic tube, with proponents arguing it could revolutionize high-speed travel. Virgin says the Hyperloop is ready to reach top speeds of 1,080 kilometers an hour (671 mph) - projecting a 45-minute journey from la to the port of entry - and can produce no carbon emissions. But until Sunday the technology, first proposed by eccentric US tech magnate Elon Musk in 2012, had not been tested with people on board. Two Virgin employees made the 500-meter journey in a very two-person vehicle in precisely 15 seconds at a test site within the Nevada desert. Passenger Sara Luchian told the BBC she felt the trip was "exhilarating both psychologically and physically...

It is an incontrovertible fact that bees are disappearing from our world. There are many reasons for this, including pesticides and poor nutrition, although the causes aren't fully understood. Most beekeepers need to buy or rent them. These losses are causing a rise in prices. it's estimated that US beekeepers have lost 40% of their honey bee colonies, in line with the US Bee Informed Partnership. Russian scientists from the Polytechnic University of Tomsk consider an alternative: the employment of robot bees. The researchers shall launch the project in 2019. in step with their plans, the dimensions of the prototypes would be a minimum of seven times larger than the 000 bees, that is, they'd reach the dimensions of the palm of a hand. For use in greenhouses As explained by Alexéi Yákovlev, director of the Polytechnic University of Tomsk, artificial bees would be especially beneficial for strawberries and other plants that grow in greenhouses throughout the year.  "We a...

 Training a robot during a simulation that permits it to recollect the way to get out of sticky situations lets it traverse difficult terrain more smoothly in the real world. Joonho Lee at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and his colleagues trained a neural network algorithm, which was designed to manage a four-legged robot, during a simulated environment just like a computer game, which was stuffed with hills, steps, and stairs. The researchers told the algorithm which direction it should be trying to maneuver in, additionally limiting how quickly it could turn, reflecting the capabilities of the 000 robots. They then started the algorithm making random movements within the simulation, rewarding it for getting the proper way, and penalizing it otherwise. By accumulating rewards, the neural network learned the way to give way a spread of terrain. Currently, most robots respond in real-time to measurements of their surroundings using preprogrammed reactions, encountering every problem for ...

 Facebook has developed a man-made intelligence capable of accurately translating between any pair of 100 languages without wishing on first translating to English, as many existing systems do. The AI outperforms such systems by 10 points on a 100-point scale utilized by academics to automatically evaluate the standard of machine translations. Translations produced by the model were also assessed by humans, who scored it as around 90 per cent accurate. Facebook’s system was trained on a knowledge set of seven.5 billion sentence pairs gathered from the online across 100 languages, though not all the languages had an equal number of sentence pairs. “What I actually was curious about was operation English as a middle man. Globally there are many regions where they speak two languages that aren’t English,” says Angela Fan of Facebook AI, who led the work. The model was trained by specializing in languages that are commonly translated to and from one another, grouping languages into 14 ...

 Chemists have used microwaves to convert plastic bags, milk bottles, and other supermarket packaging into a clean source of hydrogen. Plastic waste can already be converted to hydrogen using other methods, and commercial facilities are being developed to rework the plastic. However, a brand new approach holds the promise of being quicker and fewer energy-intensive. Peter Edwards at the University of Oxford says he and his colleagues wanted to “confront the grim reality” of plastic waste, with the united kingdom alone producing 1.5 million tonnes every year. because the density of hydrogen in plastic bags is about 14 percent by weight, plastic offers a possible new source for countries eyeing cleanly produced hydrogen to tackle temperature change. Most existing approaches involve first using very high temperatures of quite 750°C to decompose plastic into syngas, a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide gas, then employing a second step to filter the hydrogen. Edwards and his team inst...