Solar Nanotubes Make Light Work?

I have been reporting on developments in photovoltaic cells for as long as I can remember and there’s always some new technology or fabrication method that’s going to improve upon the woeful efficiency of today’s silicon based solar cells. I’m still waiting and outside the labs most commercial cells still only manage a fairly miserable 20 – 30 percent efficiency, which basically means that during their lifetime very few solar cells ever recover the enormous amount of energy put into their manufacture, let alone live long enough to generate ‘free’ electricity. I have no doubt that one day the problem will be licked and this might just be the development to do it. It’s a rolled up graphene layer nanotube and it’s the brainchild of a team of researchers at Cornell University. The first problem, though, is that it’s tiny, no larger than a DNA molecule, which means you’ll need an awful lot of them to do anything useful. The good news is that it’s very efficient and when exposed to light the tubular structure creates more electrons, and the cylindrical structure makes it easier for them to flow. I know, we’ve been here before so don’t hold your breath, but one day, it will happen, and maybe, just maybe this is where it started…

NVIDIA to Prep Dual Chip and 40nm Cards

It seems that NVIDIA is working on a dual chip solution right now, although it’s trying to keep it secret. It is not sure what chip the green company will use to power the card, yet there are some voices stating that it may be a GT200 55nm. The same rumors say that the dual chip solution may be due for a December launch.

The Santa Clara graphics card manufacturer appears to be silent on its future plans. It only talked about CUDA, PhysX and Graphics plus concept with its partners, yet it is focusing on the graphics solutions for gaming or other segments as well. The new card that the company is rumored to be working on may prove a power hungry and really hot product, yet it won’t matter that much if it manages to perform a lot better than Radeon HD 4870 X2, the leader of the extreme performance market today. Read more

X58, Intel’s First Nehalem Chipset

Intel’s upcoming generation of processors, called the Nehalem, will be introduced later this year, and all the signals point to a Q4 release. As previously stated by the chip manufacturer during this spring’s Intel Developer Forum, the first Nehalem units to hit the market will be built on the 45-nanometer process technology (Bloomfield silicon) and will sport four processing cores.

It is widely known that the 4-core behemoth will come with an integrated DDR3-1333 memory controller, SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading) technology and 8 MB of L2 cache. The SMT implementation will allow each of the CPU cores to simultaneously process two threads, just like the previous HyperThreading technology introduced back in the Pentium 4 era. Read more

Shirt Power for iPods

A week or so ago you may recall many newspapers carried a story about an odd looking contraption that you strapped to your legs, which generated power as you walk, enough to power up to 10 mobile phones one report said. Well, here’s something a tad more elegant. Researchers at the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology have come up with an idea that generates power from nano fibres, that can be incorporated into everyday items of clothing, like shirts and trousers. Pairs of fibres are coated with zinc oxide nanowires and as they rub against each other they generate tiny currents using a piezoelectric effect. Read more

The Robot Invasion Begins

So be it then! We should at least look at the bright side of the whole deal. No more stepping out of the car, no more getting dirty or smelling of petrol after a quick refuel. The automatic refueling unit was developed by an inventor from Netherlands who is also a gas station owner, and is the first of its kind in the world working in a gas-pumping station. Ouch! That will really drive some unemployed people mad.

Nico van Staveren said in an interview that he got the idea while visiting a
farm and saw the robotic arm used for milking the cows, and started thinking that he could build a similar device that would fill the tank of a car on its own. If it were to go into mass production, a model could cost up to 110,000 U.S. dollars. However, it does not work on all types of cars, just on the models that do not require a specific key to open the gas cap in order to gain access to the fuel tank. Read more