University of Queensland researchers have developed indoor solar panels that could one day power your wearables, sensors, and small electronics using nothing but the light already in your home or office.
The panels are based on perovskite, a material that has been gaining attention as a successor to traditional silicon in solar cells. While silicon-based indoor solar cells top out at around 10 percent efficiency, perovskite can do significantly better.
The catch has always been that most perovskite solar cells rely on lead and hazardous solvents in their production, which is a problem for both safety and scaling up to real-world manufacturing. The UQ team has figured out a way around that.
PhD student Zitong Wang, under the supervision of Dr Miaoqiang Lyu and Professor Lianzhou Wang, developed a vapor-based process that can manufacture high-quality lead-free perovskite material without any hazardous solvents.
The panels hit a power conversion efficiency of 16.36 percent under indoor lighting, which is the highest recorded for this type of lead-free perovskite indoor solar cell made using an industry-compatible method.
The panels are being explored as an alternative to coin-cell and button batteries for low-power devices like environmental sensors, wearables, and health monitors. Supermarkets testing electronic shelf labels, which replace paper price tags, are among the early candidates for the technology.
The panels are thin, flexible, and can be made in different shapes, making them easy to slot into all kinds of products. The next step is encapsulation to protect them from moisture and oxygen. After that, it is mostly a waiting game.
Dr Lyu expects perovskite indoor panels to hit the consumer market within the next few years. This is an exciting new technological development that could significantly benefit the environment. I look forward to seeing how it evolves and improves our lives.
AI has plenty of messy use cases, but emergency medicine may be one place where it can do some real good. A Harvard study comparing AI performance against doctors using patient data from emergency-room cases revealed that OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model outperformed human doctors in emergency triage diagnosis, especially in cases where decisions had to be made quickly with limited information.
What did the test reveal?
Norwegian-American robotics firm 1X Technologies has offered a glimpse into what scaled humanoid robot production looks like, and it’s surprisingly circular. In a newly released demo, its Neo robot is shown assisting humans on the factory floor, helping build more Neo units as the company moves toward full-scale manufacturing.
Robots helping build more robots
Amazon is giving product pages the podcast treatment, and it’s as useful as it sounds. This might sound like a neat new trick till you hear what some of these AI “hosts” are actually discussing.
The company recently expanded its “Hear the highlights” feature with a new interactive mode called “Join the chat.” This feature lets shoppers listen to AI-generated audio summaries about the products they are viewing, and even ask questions by text or voice while the audio is playing. It added a layer of interactivity, with these AI hosts being capable of pausing and answering in real time. But that’s where the handy idea ends, and the bizarre bit starts.
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