Metals Tech

Britain’s heatwave has helped break several solar power-generation records, and over the weekend the renewable energy source briefly eclipsed gas power stations as the UK’s top source of electricity.

While new solar installations have virtually flatlined over the past year, a run of largely cloudless days has seen a series of highs for power generation by the sector.

Solar broke the record for weekly output between 21 and 28 June, producing 533 gigawatt hours of power.

During that period, solar generated more than 75GWh on five of the seven days, another record. In a first, solar output also hit more than 8GW for eight consecutive days.

The records are largely symbolic – gas and nuclear generated much more power in recent days – but the milestones shows how far the technology has come.

A decade ago, solar contributed almost nothing to UK electricity supplies.

Duncan Burt, director of system operations at National Grid, said: “During the past 12 months alone, we have seen renewable generation records broken and we expect this trend to continue, as technology advances and we find new ways to accommodate and manage more wind and solar power on our network.”

For about an hour on Saturday afternoon, solar panels across the country’s rooftops and fields were the number one source of electricity, with a share of more than 27%. So far, solar has only come top at weekends, when demand is lower.

The record for peak solar generation was 9.42GW, set on 14 May this year.

At the end of May, there was a total of , up just 1.6% on May 2017.

The rate at which solar records are set is likely to slow, as growth has petered out due to subsidy cuts. Incentives for householders to put panels on their roofs , with no sign of a replacement scheme.

At the bigger scale, some developers believe they can build without subsidies, by going large.

Hive Energy told an industry audience last week that it believes technological improvements mean its planned Kent solar farm will have 14% more capacity than originally conceived.

The Cleve Hill scheme could have a capacity of as much 400MW, the company said, compared to the UK’s current largest solar farm, a 72.2MW one in Wales.

Dr Alastair Buckley, a solar expert at the University of Sheffield, said: “This marks the start of subsidy-free solar being economically viable, and I genuinely believe we’ll see bigger changes to the electricity sector in the next 10 years than we’ve seen in the past 10.”

The new world record for the highest performing perovskite solar cell has been set by researchers from the United Kingdom and China.

In a study published by researchers from the Peking University, University of Surrey, Oxford, and Cambridge in the journal Science, they explained how they created a new technique to reduce non-radiative recombination and maximize the efficiency of perovskite solar cell technology.

To date, experts consider perovskite-based cells as the future of solar cell technology. These cells reportedly offer the same power conversion efficiency (PCE) performance at a more affordable cost than the current silicon-based solar cells.

In their paper, the researchers described creating a technique called Solution-Process Secondary (SSG). The new process reportedly increased the voltage of inverted perovskite solar cells by up to 100 millivolts. This allowed the solar cells to reach up to 1.21 volts without compromising the quality of the flowing electric current within the device.

The researchers then tested their technique on a device, eventually reaching a PCE of 20.9 percent, the highest recorded PCE for inverted perovskite solar cells ever made.

“The need for clean and sustainable energy that helps us to stop damaging our planet is what drives us at the Advanced Technology Institute. Our new technique confirms that there is a lot of promise with perovskite solar cells and we aim to explore this new and exciting area more in the future,” Dr. Wei Zhang from the University of Surrey’s Advanced Technology Institute, said in a statement.

Professor Ravi Silva, the Director of the Advanced Technology Institute at the University of Surrey, went on to say:

“It is pleasing to see the Advanced Technology Institute join in this global project that could provide a solution to the need for a truly sustainable, cheap and clean energy resource. This was a monumental effort from leading laboratories, researchers, and institutions from across the world, all working together for the common good.”

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council reportedly awarded Zhang and his team the New Investigator Award together with £236,000 to further their studies involving vertical heterojunction devices based on perovskite and carbon nanomaterials.

If bipedal robots are expected to successfully carry out intended tasks of search and rescue and disaster relief, then scientists and engineers will have to watch the robots’ steps. It is built into the situation that the bipedal robots will have to move the operation along without tripping and falling in hazardous terrain.

Writing in IEEE Spectrum this month, two researchers in the frontlines of bipedal walking research give us a glimpse on what the challenge is really like to get robots to walk on tough terrain where they must step up, step down, stay on balance, without fail.

Make no mistake, they added, the challenge remains real. “Current state-of-the-art robots are slow with quasi-static motions, not robust to unexpected disturbances and are inefficient in terms of their energy usage.”

Ayush Agrawal and Quan Nguyen are from UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. They explained why it’s tough. They wrote, “designing control algorithms that can handle discrete footholds (like rubble or stepping stones) is challenging, because there are strict constraints on foot placement that can’t be violated and the motion of these systems are governed by complex dynamical equations.”

They also commented on how the robots manage to move. “Moreover, these robots do not ‘know’ what the terrain will be like ahead of time; only the next step location is shown to the robot, a scenario that closely represents what a robot might encounter in the real world.”

The two and their Hybrid Robotics Group at UC Berkeley and CMU team appear to be on to next steps in “optimal and nonlinear control systems.”

According to the summing up of Luke Dormehl, Digital Trends: A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University, including Professor Koushil Sreenath, Ayush Agrawal, and Quan Nguyen, have developed control algorithms that allow an ATRIAS robot to dynamically and swiftly walk over random terrain of stepping stones.

The paper “Dynamic Walking on Randomly-Varying Discrete Terrain with One-step Preview” explores “2-step periodic gait optimization.” It enables the team to handle a wide change in footstep placement of a robot.

The two said they have been working on “developing formal control frameworks for high degree-of-freedom bipedal robots that not only guarantee precise footstep placement over discrete terrain, but are also robust to model uncertainties and external forces.”

The team used an underactuated (no actuators at the ankle, just fixed-point feet) bipedal robot under different types of terrain. This is an ATRIAS robot—a practical choice in that the robots can test out locomotion.

The ATRIAS site page calls attention to the carbon-fiber leg mechanism as lightweight, and softening each footfall instead of sending large jolts to the body.

Backed by some “neat math,” Agrawal and Nguyen said their robots can walk over discrete terrain without slipping or falling over.

The robots get the movements right in stepping on and off the stepping stones. They have been able to achieve “precise footstep placement over stepping stones,” Agarwahl told Digital Trends, “with varying step lengths and step heights, on a human scale bipedal robot.”

Agarwahl and Nguyen stated in IEEE Spectrum that “We believe that this is the first time that dynamic walking on stepping stones with simultaneous variation in step length and step height has been successfully demonstrated on a bipedal robot.”

What’s next?

The robots are currently “blind,” said John Biggs in TechCrunch; the researchers will look into combining this work with computer vision research.

“With a new robot, Cassie, soon to arrive at Berkeley,” said the two in IEEE Spectrum, “we plan to extend our experimental results to 3D walking over real-world stepping-stones.”

Just before dawn on Friday, SpaceX launched a spaceship with nearly 6,000 lbs of cargo to the International Space Station.

The Dragon ship is slated to reach the ISS on Monday and is mostly filled with science experiments, food, water, and other supplies. But the mission contains a few extra goodies for astronauts, including a flying, talking, interactive robotic head.

The orb-shaped device is called the Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, or CIMON, and weighs about 11 pounds. It will use microphones and cameras to record astronauts, has an expressive digital face, and can even make small talk.

“CIMON will be the first [artificial intelligence]-based mission and flight assistance system,” Manfred Jaumann, a payload engineer at Airbus (which helped build the robot), said in a press release. He added that CIMON will be a “a free flyer, a kind of flying brain” that will interact with, aid, and learn from astronauts.

Though CIMON is a far cry from the HAL 9000 supercomputer in the classic sci-fi book and movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” its capabilities are nonetheless impressive.
The machine’s “brain” is powered by a version of IBM Watson — the software that famously defeated “Jeopardy!” champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011 to win $1 million.

The CIMON project aims explore how astronauts get along with artificially intelligent beings for extended periods of time, according to NASA’s pre-flight briefing materials.

Training a floating head to be a friend

CIMON was created primarily by the German Aerospace Center, in collaboration with IBM, the European Space Agency, and other partners.

At first, the robot’s only friend will be German astronaut Alexander Gerst, who launched to the space station on June 6. CIMON’s team trained the robot to recognize Gerst’s voice via microphones and his face using cameras. In orbit, the machine will follow Gerst around like a puppy, using an air-propulsion system.

The robot has a stand-alone version of Watson AI in its memory banks. That means CIMON can interpret data, respond to commands, solve problems, and generally be a useful little robot without any internet connection — a tricky problem in space.

Gerst will unbox CIMON sometime after Monday and use the flying robot through October. During that time, it will help Gerst solve basic problems and check off tasks like a digital assistant.

CIMON has three big missions to do, according to Airbus. One is to guide Gerst through a crystal-growth experiment. The second is for CIMON to look at a Rubik’s cube through its camera and give Gerst instructions for how to solve it. The final task is to record and assist Gerst while he performs a complex medical experiment.

“Experiments sometimes consist of more than 100 different steps,” Matthias Biniok, the lead Watson architect in Germany, wrote in an IBM blog post. He said “CIMON knows them all” — so astronauts shouldn’t have to worry as much about missing a step.

In addition to helping with experiments, CIMON is equipped with sensors that can alert astronauts to dangerous conditions when they’re not near a computer console.

“It can also serve as an early warning system for technical problems,” Airbus said.

A model for artificially intelligent astronaut assistants?

CIMON will use a neural network to interact with and learn from Gerst, at least at first. Ultimately, CIMON will monitor space station astronauts to help assess their emotional states and psychological “group effects,” Biniok said.

The data gathered could inform the programming of future robotic assistants, which could in turn aid astronauts and ease the tedium of long journeys to the moon or Mars.

“Social interaction between people and machines, between astronauts and assistance systems equipped with emotional intelligence, could play an important role in the success of long-term missions,” Airbus said.

Ultimately, CIMON’s technology may even find its way back to the ground.

“We predict that assistance systems of this kind also have a bright future right here on Earth, such as in hospitals or to support nursing care,” Biniok said.

In case you were wondering how close we’re getting to “2001: A Space Odyssey,” no astronauts named “Dave” are scheduled to fly to the space station anytime soon, according to NASA.

Plasma physics is a rich and diverse field of enquiry, with its own special twist. In some areas of science, intellectual vitality comes from the beauty of grand theories and the search for deep underlying laws—as shown by Albert Einstein’s account of gravity in general relativity, or string theorists’ attempt to replace the standard model of subatomic particles with tiny oscillating strands of energy. The study of plasmas also enjoys some remarkably elegant mathematical constructions, but unlike its scientific cousins, it’s mostly been driven by its applications to the real world.

First, though, how do you make a plasma? Imagine heating up a container full of ice and watching it pass from solid to liquid to gas. As the temperature climbs, the water molecules get more energetic and excitable, and move around more and more freely. If you keep going, at something like 12,000 degrees Celsius the atoms themselves will begin to break apart. Electrons will be stripped from their nuclei, leaving behind charged particles known as ions that swirl about in the resulting soup of electrons. This is the plasma state.

The connection between blood and ‘physical’ plasma is more than mere coincidence. In 1927, the American chemist Irving Langmuir observed that the way plasmas carried electrons, ions, molecules, and other impurities was similar to how blood plasma ferries around red and white blood cells and germs. Langmuir was a pioneer in the study of plasmas; with his colleague Lewi Tonks, he also discovered that plasmas are characterized by rapid oscillations of their electrons due to the collective behavior of the particles.

Another interesting property of plasmas is their capacity to support so-called hydromagnetic waves—bulges that move through the plasma along magnetic field lines, similar to how vibrations travel along a guitar string. When Hannes Alfvén, the Swedish scientist and eventual Nobel prizewinner, first proposed the existence of these waves in 1942, the physics community was skeptical. But after Alfvén delivered a lecture at the University of Chicago, the renowned physicist and faculty member Enrico Fermi came up to him to discuss the theory, conceding that ‘Of course such waves could exist!’ From that moment on, the scientific consensus was that Alfvén was absolutely correct.

One of the biggest motivators of contemporary plasma science is the promise of controlled thermonuclear fusion, where atoms merge together and release intense but manageable bursts of energy. This would provide an almost limitless source of safe, ‘green’ power, but it’s not an easy task. Before fusion can occur here on Earth, the plasma must be heated to more than 100 million degrees Celsius, about 10 times hotter than the center of the sun!

But that’s not even the most complicated bit; we managed to reach those temperatures and beyond in the 1990s. What’s worse is that hot plasma is very unstable and doesn’t like to stay at a fixed volume, which means that it’s hard to contain and make useful.

Attempts to achieve controlled thermonuclear fusion date back to the early 1950s. At the time, research was done secretly by the US as well as the Soviet Union and Great Britain. In the US, Princeton University was the fulcrum for this research. There, the physicist Lyman Spitzer started Project Matterhorn, where a secret coterie of scientists tried to spark and contain fusion in a figure-8-shaped device called a ‘stellarator.’ They didn’t have computers, and had to rely only on pen and pencil calculations. While they didn’t solve the puzzle, they ended up developing ‘the energy principle,’ which remains a powerful method for testing the ideal stability of a plasma.

Meanwhile, scientists in the Soviet Union were developing a different device: the ‘tokamak.’ This machine, designed by the physicists Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm, employed a strong magnetic field to corral hot plasma into the shape of a donut. The tokamak was better at keeping the plasma hot and stable, and to this day most of the fusion research programs rely on a tokamak design. To that end, a consortium of China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the US has joined together to construct the world’s largest tokamak reactor, expected to open in 2025. However, in recent years there’s also been a renewed enthusiasm for stellarators, and the world’s largest opened in Germany in 2015. Investing in both routes to fusion probably gives us our best chance of ultimately attaining success.

Plasma is also entangled with the physics of the space around Earth, where the stuff gets carried through the void on the winds generated in the upper atmosphere of the sun. We’re lucky that Earth’s magnetic field shields us from the charged plasma particles and damaging radiation of such solar wind, but our satellites, spacecraft and astronauts are all exposed. Their capacity to survive in this hostile environment relies on understanding and accommodating ourselves to the quirks of plasma.

In a new field known as ‘space weather,’ plasma physics plays a role similar to that of fluid dynamics in terrestrial, atmospheric conditions. I’ve devoted much of my research to something called magnetic reconnection, where the magnetic field lines in the plasma can tear and reconnect, which leads to a rapid release of energy. This process is believed to power the sun’s eruptive events, such as solar flares, although detailed comprehension remains elusive. In the future, we might be able to predict solar storms the way that we can forecast bad weather in cities.

Looking backward, not forward, in space and time, my hope is that plasma physics will offer insights into how stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters first formed. According to the standard cosmological model, plasma was pervasive in the early universe; then everything began to cool, and charged electrons and protons bound together to make electrically neutral hydrogen atoms. This state lasted until the first stars and black holes formed and began emitting radiation, at which point the universe ‘reionized’ and returned to a mostly plasma state.

Finally, plasmas help to explain some of the most spectacular phenomena we’ve observed in the remotest regions of the cosmos. Take far-away black holes, massive objects so dense that even light can’t escape them. They’re practically invisible to direct observation. However, black holes are typically encircled by a rotating disk of plasma matter, which orbits within the black hole’s gravitational pull, and emits high-energy photons that can be observed in the X-ray spectrum, revealing something about this extreme environment.

It’s been an exciting journey for me since the days I thought that solids, liquids, and gases were the only kinds of matter that mattered. Plasmas still seem rather exotic, but as we learn to exploit their potential, and widen our view of the cosmos, one day they might seem as normal to us as ice and water. And if we ever achieve controlled nuclear fusion, plasmas might be something we can no longer live without.

Faster, more powerful computing has the potential to revolutionize fields from drug delivery to freight transportation. But some are also worried that the computers of the future could also upend what it means to be human.

Quantum computing capitalizes on the quantum-physics principle that a particle may be in two states at once, as long as it does not leave a record of either state. Unlike traditional computers, which are made of bits restrained to values of zero or one, a quantum computer would allow bits to have both values simultaneously, which would lead to much faster, more powerful processing.

According to Mordechai Segev, a professor of physics at Technion Israel Institute of Technology, a functional, accurate quantum computer would need to consist of about 2,000 quantum bits. “I think it is reasonable to assume that a quantum computer will be there in our lifetime,” he said on Friday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. Such a computer would perhaps be “a specialized machine,” Segev said, but “it would work better than any traditional computer” at solving the problems for which it is designed.

But the advent of quantum computing promises to bring more than improved problem-solving. Such an increase in processing power could spell apocalypse for current encryption methods. On a more existential level, according to Daniel Zajfman, some people are concerned that quantum computing could bring about the end of free will.

Zajfman, the president of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said on Friday that the question boils down to: “Could we create a system that would really make everything predictable?” As a physicist, Zajfman said, he believes that “there is always a cause and effect,” which would imply that, given enough processing power, a computer fed every detail of the world as we know it could bring those details to their logical conclusions, thereby predicting the future with perfect accuracy.

But, he said, physicists also believe in the theory of chaotic behavior, which, in Zajfman’s words, posits that “there’s something inherent in nature … that creates systems that are by definition chaotic.” That complicates the straightforward system of cause and effect, he said, because “the language of the cause and effect is so much dependent on very, very tiny changes”—for example, spending a few more seconds brushing your teeth on a given morning could make the difference between whether you get into a car crash that day or not.

This interdependence of details, commonly known as the butterfly effect, means that predicting the future with perfect accuracy is a problem that’s “almost impossible to solve,” Zajfman said. Free will, he said, is likely safe—at least from quantum computing. “But then again,” he added, “don’t believe anyone who tells you something is impossible.”