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Archive for the ‘mobile phones’ category: Page 186

Mar 30, 2017

This fully transparent solar cell could make every window and screen a power source

Posted by in categories: engineering, mobile phones, solar power, sustainability

Back in August 2014, researchers at Michigan State University created a fully transparent solar concentrator, which could turn any window or sheet of glass (like your smartphone’s screen) into a photovoltaic solar cell. Unlike other “transparent” solar cells that we’ve reported on in the past, this one really is transparent, as you can see in the photos throughout this story. According to Richard Lunt, who led the research at the time, the team was confident the transparent solar panels can be efficiently deployed in a wide range of settings, from “tall buildings with lots of windows or any kind of mobile device that demands high aesthetic quality like a phone or e-reader.”

Now Ubiquitous Energy, an MIT startup we first reported on in 2013, is getting closer to bringing its transparent solar panels to market. Lunt cofounded the company and remains assistant professor of chemical engineering and materials science at Michigan State University. Essentially, what they’re doing is instead of shrinking the components, they’re changing the way the cell absorbs light. The cell selectively harvests the part of the solar spectrum we can’t see with our eye, while letting regular visible light pass through.

Scientifically, a transparent solar panel is something of an oxymoron. Solar cells, specifically the photovoltaic kind, make energy by absorbing photons (sunlight) and converting them into electrons (electricity). If a material is transparent, however, by definition it means that all of the light passes through the medium to strike the back of your eye. This is why previous transparent solar cells have actually only been partially transparent — and, to add insult to injury, they usually they cast a colorful shadow too.

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Mar 30, 2017

This Cloud Actually Rains Drops Of Tequila

Posted by in categories: futurism, mobile phones

A future bar fad?


Science has pulled through with the goods once again. Nope, no word yet on an unlimited clean energy source or a phone battery that lasts more than a day. But hold tight, they have created an indoor cloud that produces raindrops of real tequila.

The tequila cloud is part of an installation at Urban Spree art gallery in Berlin, created by the ad agency LAPIZ on behalf of the Mexico Tourism Board. The idea is that the weather sucks in Germany during March, so why not head over to Mexico for a holiday? Sounds good to us.

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Mar 29, 2017

[In-Depth Look] A New Way to Interact with Your Phone: Bixby, the Galaxy S8 Intelligent Interface

Posted by in categories: mobile phones, space

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Mar 28, 2017

I Took the AI Class Facebookers Are Literally Sprinting to Get Into

Posted by in categories: food, internet, mobile phones, robotics/AI

Chia-Chiunn Ho was eating lunch inside Facebook headquarters, at the Full Circle Cafe, when he saw the notice on his phone: Larry Zitnick, one of the leading figures at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, was teaching another class on deep learning.

Ho is a 34-year-old Facebook digital graphics engineer known to everyone as “Solti,” after his favorite conductor. He couldn’t see a way of signing up for the class right there in the app. So he stood up from his half-eaten lunch and sprinted across MPK 20, the Facebook building that’s longer than a football field but feels like a single room. “My desk is all the way at the other end,” he says. Sliding into his desk chair, he opened his laptop and surfed back to the page. But the class was already full.

Internet giants have vacuumed up most of the available AI talent—and they need more.

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Mar 26, 2017

A smartphone app can screen for male infertility

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, engineering, mobile phones

More than 45 million couples worldwide grapple with infertility, but current standard methods for diagnosing male infertility can be expensive, labor-intensive, and require testing in a clinical setting.

Cultural and social stigma, and lack of access in resource-limited countries, may prevent men from seeking an evaluation. Investigators at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) set out to develop a home-based diagnostic test that could be used to measure semen quality with a smartphone-based device. New findings by the team indicating that the analyzer can identify abnormal semen samples based on sperm concentration and motility criteria with approximately 98 percent accuracy are published online in today’s Science Translational Medicine.

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Mar 25, 2017

Underwater phone case

Posted by in category: mobile phones

You can use the touch screen underwater.


A company has fixed the most annoying thing about underwater phone cases.

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Mar 22, 2017

This pretty e-paper smart calendar is everything I want in a gadget

Posted by in category: mobile phones

A designer named Kosho Tsuboi has conceived a beautiful gadget idea. His product, the Magic Calendar, is an e-paper calendar that syncs with a smartphone to display your schedule. The project is associated with Google’s Android Experiments, which appears to be a Japanese program in which creators can pitch ideas for Android-centered gadgets. In this case, the calendar relies on a custom Android app, and, judging off the below video, uses Google Calendar for syncing.

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Mar 18, 2017

E-tattoos turn knuckles and freckles into smartphone controls

Posted by in category: mobile phones

Tattoos that turn skin into a touchscreen could display notifications on your body and let you answer a call or pump up the volume with a tap of your fingers.

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Mar 15, 2017

You’ll Want One of These for Your Next Camping Trip

Posted by in category: mobile phones

Charge your phone while you heat your dinner.

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Mar 15, 2017

How DNA Could One Day Rebuild Cell Phones

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, mobile phones

Inside a Boston lab just a few miles away from MIT, a team of PhDs is building tools for a future where factories are powered by biology, not traditional manufacturing. The startup, Ginkgo Bioworks, currently helps clients design flavors and fragrances by modifying the DNA of microbes like yeast. Once the yeast have been tweaked to produce a particular scent as a byproduct, they can be brewed like beer and the smell can be extracted and bottled — which reduces the client’s need to depend on natural resources for ingredients. (video by: Alan Jeffries, Victoria Blackburne-Daniell, Drew Beebe) (Source: Bloomberg)

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