Topps Blog

Friday, 28 October 2022

New Transparent Solar Cells Could Help Scientists Create Energy-Generating Windows

(Photo: Isaac Burke/Unsplash) Soon the natural light filtering through your window could do more than just brighten up your space. Scientists have achieved a level of efficiency for dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) that might enable the creation of energy-generating windows.

In a paper published this week in the journal Nature, researchers from Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne detail the way in which they helped DSCs harvest energy from the full visible light spectrum. DSCs, a type of low-cost, thin film solar cell, use photosensitized dye attached to the surface of a wide band gap semiconductor to convert visible light into energy. Despite their financial and physical practicality, they’re not as efficient as conventional solar cells, which delegates both light absorption and energy generation to the semiconductor. This means that even though energy-generating windows have technically been possible for a while, the devices wouldn’t have been worth the resources.

This new efficiency record could change that. The team in Switzerland enhanced DSCs’ efficiency by meticulously controlling the assembly of dye molecules on the cells’ nanocrystalline mesoporous titanium dioxide (TiO2) films. Pre-adsorbing a single layer of hydroxamic acid derivative on the film’s surface allowed the scientists to improve the molecular packing and performance of two custom-designed sensitizers. These sensitizers were found to be capable of harvesting light from the entire visible spectrum.

Dye-sensitized solar cells. (Image: Ronald Vera Saavedra Colombia/Wikimedia Commons)

During a simulation of standard air mass 1.5 sunlight—the air mass coefficient typically used to measure solar cells’ performance—the enhanced DSCs achieved a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 15.2 percent. Considering the fact that 12.3 percent was the best-known DSC PCE in 2019, that figure is impressive, especially when you factor in that the enhanced cells maintained operational stability over 500 hours of testing. Better yet, when the scientists tested their enhanced DSCs on devices with a larger active surface area, they achieved a groundbreaking PCE range of 28.4 to 30.2 percent.

The team believes the enhanced DSCs could pave the way for energy-generating windows, skylights, and greenhouses in the near future. They could even find a place in low-power electronic devices, which would then use ambient light as an energy source.

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Physical Copies of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Don’t Have the Game on the Disc

Call of Duty is one of the most popular video game franchises in history — Sony has pointed out, as it tries to keep Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard. CoD could almost be considered a genre all by itself. Naturally, the release of a new game in the series is a big deal, but as gamers excitedly tear into their physical copies of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, they’re finding a nasty surprise. Instead of the game, discs have just 72MB of data and the rest must be downloaded.

The disc versions of the game appear to be functionally identical to digital copies. Instead of buying the license and downloading it, you purchase a disc that ships to you with a license key. Pop that in your console, and you don’t get to play the game right away — you have to download the game just like those who bought digital codes. So, the production and shipping of these discs is a complete waste of time and resources.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II is a roughly 35GB game, which is small enough to fit on modern Blu-Ray game discs. However, with the addition of a day-one patch, MWII balloons to a ridiculous 150GB on the PS5. Ignoring for a moment how silly it is to ship a disc with nothing on it, it’s unacceptable that the publishers didn’t tell people this is what they were buying. There are good reasons people might want the disc version of a game.

70mb … pic.twitter.com/NkgamI1VIs

— Does it play? (@DoesItPlay1) October 26, 2022

Playing games via physical discs isn’t as common these days as it used to be, but it provides an important option for people who don’t have enough internet bandwidth to download dozens of gigabytes. Many ISPs also cap data usage, so you may not want to download enormous games. In the US, which generally has higher data caps than many countries, Comcast caps residential users to 1.2TB per month. Downloading Modern Warfare II would eat up more than 10% of that allotment, even if you went out of your way to buy a disc version of the game. Plus, a disc is more likely to work in the absence of online services, which publishers like to shut down to save money once a game is no longer popular. It appears none of those advantages matter to Activision.

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DOJ Launches Criminal Probe Examining Tesla’s Autopilot Crashes

Tesla has leaned into autonomous driving like few other automakers with its Autopilot system, which has been a core feature of its vehicles since 2013. However, that push could get the company in trouble. A new report says that the US Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation of Tesla following a series of crashes and deaths related to Autopilot.

Initially, Tesla required customers to pay extra for Autopilot, priced between $5,000 and $8,000, depending on features. As it expanded to produce less expensive vehicles, Tesla included the basic Autopilot feature set for no additional charge. As more drivers started using Autopilot, we started to see reports of accidents where Autopilot was in complete control of the car. Tesla has since expanded the “Full Self-Driving (FSD)” features of its vehicles to make the cars more reliable and able to drive themselves in more situations. And yet, Autopilot is not true self-driving.

At issue is the way Tesla advertises and discusses Autopilot. While the company’s more careful disclaimers note that drivers have to keep their hands on the wheel, anyone who has driven in a Tesla knows that the vehicle will often let you zone out for long periods of time without any nudges. And then there’s the way Tesla CEO Elon Musk talks about Autopilot. A promotional video on Tesla’s website features Musk saying that the driver is only there “for legal reasons,” and “the car is driving itself.”

Overhead signs present a challenge for autopilot systems

Reuters reports that the DOJ investigation started last year and could be a more serious threat to Tesla than the various state-level investigations already pending. The case could result in criminal charges against individual executives or the company as a whole, sources have said. However, charges would most likely require that evidence of intentional misrepresentation is uncovered in the probe. If not, Tesla can always point to its disclaimers as legal cover, even if Musk is out there making wild claims about Autopilot’s capabilities. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is also investigating crashes in which Teslas were in Autopilot mode.

Tesla does not have a media office — it only has Elon Musk, who has been too busy closing his Twitter acquisition to tweet any statements about this report. This comes as Tesla has been paring back the sensors in its cars, which has made some Autopilot features unavailable as the company works to update the system to rely solely on camera input. Tesla is not alone in struggling to perfect self-driving technology. After years and billions of dollars, big players like Google and Uber are still struggling to make vehicles that can drive as well as humans.

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NASA Borrowing Parts From Mars Mission to Put an Earthquake Detector on the Moon

NASA’s InSight Mars mission is winding down, and while it never managed to get the burrowing heat probe to work, InSight is still a huge success thanks to its groundbreaking seismometer. Now, the first seismometer to operate on another planet is making history again. Spare parts from the Seismic Experiment for Internal Structure (SEIS) will form the basis for a seismic instrument that will make its way to the far side of the moon in 2025.

SEIS was designed and developed by the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP) and the French CNES space agency. Work began back in the 90s, and eventually the project was chosen to fly on InSight, which reached Mars in 2018. As part of the development process, engineers built a duplicate seismometer that is still on Earth. Parts of this device will be integrated into the Farside Seismic Suite (FSS) that NASA plans to deploy to Schrödinger crater on the far side of the Moon.

SEIS (above) featured three ultra-sensitive pendulums spaced 120 degrees apart, allowing it to detect movement in any direction as little as 10 picometers. That’s smaller than the width of a single atom. This incredible precision allowed NASA to record hundreds of Marsquakes, far more than scientists expected to detect. For the FSS, one of the backup SEIS pendulums will become the Very Broad Band (VBB) seismometer for the mission, which will measure vertical ground vibrations. A second instrument known as the Short Period Seismometer (SPS) will monitor movement in other directions.

The existing SEIS hardware was already a good match for the proposed lunar application, according to Gabriel Pont, who manages the FSS project at CNES. “The Farside Seismic Suite seismometer will be tuned for lunar gravity. It will be placed in a vacuum protection case called seismobox,” Pont told Ars Technica. The team expects the 40-kilogram FSS lander to have similar sensitivity to SEIS on Mars, making it about 10 times better than the last seismometers deployed on the moon during the Apollo program.

NASA has awarded the contract for transporting the Farside Seismic Suite to Draper Laboratory. The lander (see above), is just the vehicle for getting the FSS to the surface. The instruments will be independent of the lander with their own solar panels, communication, and heaters. To save power, the FSS will not transmit data during the lunar night, but it will connect to an orbiter while in sunlight to upload data. NASA is paying $73 million to Draper for this landing under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which is currently set for May 2025.

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RTX 4090 Cable Gate Saga Continues, Nvidia’s Adapter Possibly to Blame

(Photo: /u/NoDuelsPolicy on Reddit) This week we’ve seen more reports of fried RTX 4090 adapters, with the count now up to a half dozen or so. Previously we just knew that some adapters were melting, and in doing so also damaging the connector on the card. It wasn’t clear exactly what was to blame for this situation. Was it the adapter, the bending of it, or some other engineering mishap? Now the intrepid tinkerers at Igor’s Lab have revealed what they believe is the culprit: the Nvidia-designed 4-into-1 adapter. This takes four 8-pin cables and routes them into a single 16-pin plug. Its poor construction is likely the cause of the issue, and photos reveal it to be a hot mess, pardon the pun.

Previously all we knew was that adapters were melting. It was theorized it was somehow related to bending the adapter, which is required due to the size of the GPUs. Their width places the connector close to most cases’ side panel, necessitating an almost 90-degree bend to move the cable out of the way. This isn’t rocket science; you don’t want to put a serious bend on any electrical connection. This might not be an issue if the connection was as solid as a rock. However, it turns out it’s not very solid at all. This is seemingly due to insufficient soldering around the wires, which is meant to keep them in place. Igor’s Lab took one of the adapters apart to investigate, and the results aren’t pretty.

The exposed connector looks like a lab experiment, not something provided with a $1,600 GPU. (Image: Igor’s Lab)

According to his investigation, there are six contact patches and four wires on each side of the adapter. Two on the edges are soldered to one point each, and the four in the middle are connected to two wires each. You can see in the photo there’s a surprisingly small amount of solder used for these connections. Igor says the connections use a 0.2mm copper base with 2mm of solder per wire. That leaves 4mm of solder for the twin cable connections.

For 14 gauge wire, that’s not much. Now just imagine bending those wires at a right-angle while they are hot, and you can see the problem. This could cause the solo cables at the edge to get loose first. Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly what we’ve seen in several of the reports so far (see below). When that happens all the current will flow through the remaining wires, so they will heat up drastically.

A melted adapter via Reddit.

To summarize the findings, the problem is not with the actual cables coming from the PSU. Nor is it with the connector on the PCB. It seems to lie exclusively with the adapter designed by Nvidia. This is included with every Ada GPU and was made by a third party for Nvidia. Igor assumes Nvidia wasn’t aware of how poorly they were made, or it didn’t examine them too closely. If it had, it would never have allowed its add-in board (AIB) partners to include them with its flagship GPUs.

For now, Nvidia is still investigating according. In an update, Igor’s Lab says Nvidia has reached out to its board partners and asked to have all damaged GPUs sent to HQ for analysis. The next logical step would be for Nvidia to announce a recall for the adapters. It should have new adapters made, and replace them for free. That could take some time, obviously, and will seriously piss off current RTX 4090 owners. However, those gamers will likely prefer a safer adapter in the long run. They could alternatively purchase an ATX 3.0/PCIe Gen 5 power supply, but those are still hard to find. Plus, they will be expensive. Some companies like Seasonic and CableMod are also offering 90-degree adapters as well, but they’re not for sale yet.

Seasonic’s upcoming 90-degree 12VHPWR cable. (Image: Bilibili)

Until we hear from Nvidia officially, our advice is pretty simple: be careful with your adapter, and don’t bend it. If it’s currently bending due to your case’s side panel, take off the side panel.

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Thursday, 27 October 2022

Our Search for Habitable Planets Just Got a Lot Narrower, Study Suggests

In the past few decades, astronomy has gone from speculating about the existence of planets outside our solar system to identifying more than 5,000 of them. Now, the hunt for habitable exoplanets is on, but we may have a smaller pool of possible candidates, according to a new study from researchers at the University of California, Riverside. After analyzing a nearby exoplanet, the team has concluded it is unlikely that the most common type of star in the Milky Way is capable of supporting life as we know it.

The study focused on an exoplanet called GJ 1252b, which orbits an m-dwarf star (sometimes called a red dwarf) just 66 light years away. That’s right next door in astronomical terms. These small, long-lived stars are so numerous that discovering habitable planets around them could mean a much higher chance of finding extraterrestrial life.

However, there’s one big problem: An exoplanet close enough to a red dwarf to have liquid water would also be subjected to intense radiation and unpredictable solar flare activity. Could such a world even maintain an atmosphere? The proximity of GJ 1252b provided the Riverside researchers with a chance to find out one way or the other.

Astronomers measured infrared radiation from GJ 1252b during a so-called “secondary eclipse,” when the planet passes behind a star that blocks both its light as well as light reflected from its star. The radiation readings suggested the exoplanet, which completes an orbit of its host star in just 12 Earth hours, has a surface temperature of 2,242 degrees Fahrenheit (1,226 degrees Celsius). That’s hot enough to melt gold, silver, and copper. This led the researchers to conclude that GJ 1252b does not have an atmosphere.

The Trappist-1 system consists of several rocky planets orbiting an m-dwarf star. The Webb telescope will soon conduct new observations of these worlds.

Further, the team calculated what it would take for the exoplanet to have any atmosphere whatsoever in the face of such intense solar activity. Even with carbon levels 700 times higher than Earth, they estimate GJ 1252b would still have its atmosphere stripped away. “It’s possible this planet’s condition could be a bad sign for planets even further away from this type of star,” says Riverside astrophysicist Michelle Hill.

This doesn’t mean habitable planets are out of the question, though. While most of the 5,000 stars near Earth are m-dwarfs, about 1,000 are similar to the sun and could potentially host Earth-like planets. And the universe is a big place — there are always more stars to survey, and new instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope will help us observe them in greater detail than ever before.

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NASA Opens Investigation Into Recent UFO Sightings, Hopes They’re ‘Not an Adversary’

We could be closer to confirming the presence of extraterrestrial life than ever before. NASA has officially kicked off its study of UFOs (officially UAPs, or unidentified aerial phenomena), and 16 top scientists and scholars will be leading the effort.

In a statement released Friday, NASA announced that it had chosen the individuals responsible for conducting its independent UAP study, which is separate from the Department of Defense’s UAP Task Force and its successor, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group. The team is impressively diverse: Two astrophysicists, two policy specialists, two aviation specialists, an oceanographer, an AI startup founder, a science journalist, a planetary scientist, a former NASA astronaut, a telescope scientist, a space infrastructure consultant, an electrical and computer engineer, and a physicist each made the cut.

Beginning this week, the team will be responsible for building a foundation upon which NASA and other agencies can continue studying UAPs. Focusing entirely on unclassified data, they’ll help determine how information sourced from civilians, government entities, and private enterprises can be analyzed and potentially used for future UAP discernment. The study will coincide with NASA’s aircraft safety goals, given UAP’s potential effect on air safety and national security overall.

A UFO photographed over Lake Cote, Costa Rica in September 1971. (Photo: Instituto Geográfico Nacional de Costa Rica/Wikimedia Commons)

“Exploring the unknown in space and the atmosphere is at the heart of who we are at NASA,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. “Understanding the data we have surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena is critical to helping us draw scientific conclusions about what is happening in our skies. Data is the language of scientists and makes the unexplainable, explainable.”

Interest in official UAP research has been growing over the last several months. In May, the Pentagon briefed Congress on a number of UAP sightings, only one of which has since been explained. The hearing, along with the 2021 preliminary UAP assessment that inspired it, earmarked this decade as the first in which the US government has (publicly) shown a serious interest in investigating what could be otherworldly phenomena.

According to NASA chief Bill Nelson, humans very well could have witnessed extraterrestrial activity in recent years. During a live-streamed interview with the University of Virginia last year, Nelson said hundreds of acknowledged UAP sightings still lack explanations. “I’ve talked to those pilots and they know they saw something, and their radars locked on to it. And they don’t know what it is. And we don’t know what it is,” he said. “We hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology. But it’s something… Who am I to say planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilized and organized like ours?”

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