https://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. The global demand for sustainable energy sources has intensified the search for environmentally friendly alternatives to fossil fuels. Biomass waste, a byproduct of various industrial processes, presents an untapped potential for the production of biofuels and bio-additives. However, the conversion of biomass into useful chemicals has been hindered by inefficiencies in existing catalytic processes. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-advancing-green-chemistry-tandem-catalyst.html Biochemistry Analytical Chemistry Thu, 26 Sep 2024 16:48:02 EDT news646588081 A coating of solar cells with special organic molecules could pave the way for a new generation of solar panels. As a research team reports in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, this coating can increase the efficiency of monolithic tandem cells made of silicon and perovskite while lowering their cost because they are produced from industrial, microstructured, standard silicon wafers. https://phys.org/news/2024-07-surface-modification-effective-textured-perovskitesilicon.html Materials Science Wed, 31 Jul 2024 09:38:39 EDT news641637515 New DNA sequencing technologies have identified the historical remains of George Washington's grandnephews, Samuel Walter Washington and George Steptoe Washington Jr., and their mother, Lucy Payne Washington, from unmarked, fragmentary bones left at the Harewood family cemetery in Charles Town, West Virginia, in the mid-1800s. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-dna-ids-descendants-george-washington.html Archaeology Thu, 28 Mar 2024 11:00:02 EDT news630833250 Technicians at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans have completed a major portion of a weld confidence article for the advanced upper stage of NASA's SLS (Space Launch System) rocket. The hardware was rotated to a horizontal position and moved to another part of the facility Oct. 24. https://phys.org/news/2023-11-early-production-advanced-upper-stage.html Space Exploration Mon, 06 Nov 2023 15:40:02 EST news618507601 The world's best tandem solar cells consisting of a silicon bottom cell and a perovskite top cell can today convert about a third of the incident solar radiation into electrical energy. These are record values, especially for a potentially very inexpensive technology. A team at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) is now providing the scientific data and describes in the journal Science how this development was achieved. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-record-breaking-tandem-solar-cell-precise.html Analytical Chemistry Materials Science Mon, 10 Jul 2023 10:26:52 EDT news608203608 Police investigating the murders of four University of Idaho students have said they used DNA to link evidence found at the crime scene to their suspect, 28-year-old Bryan Kohberger. https://phys.org/news/2023-01-dna-profiling-idaho-student.html Other Mon, 09 Jan 2023 16:40:01 EST news592502886 The animation shows the full launch sequence for the first Meteosat Third Generation Imager (MTG-I1) satellite. MTG-I1 launches on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. https://phys.org/news/2022-12-video-mtg-i1-sequence.html Space Exploration Mon, 12 Dec 2022 14:44:54 EST news590078693 If you happen to see termites engaging in courtship rituals, you'd be hard-pressed to spot the difference between opposite-sex and same-sex couples. That's because one of the termites in a same-sex couple changes its behavior to act like the opposite sex. This "sex role flexibility" is crucial for the evolution and maintenance of same-sex pairs, reports a new study published in PNAS on November 8, 2022. https://phys.org/news/2022-11-sex-role-flexibility-key-evolution.html Plants & Animals Evolution Wed, 09 Nov 2022 09:37:40 EST news587209053 Tandem solar cells made of perovskite and silicon enable significantly higher efficiencies than silicon solar cells alone. Tandem cells from HZB have already achieved several world records. Most recently, in November 2021, HZB research teams achieved a certified efficiency of 29.8 % with a tandem cell made of perovskite and silicon. This was an absolute world record that stood unbeaten at the top for eight months. It was not until the summer of 2022 that a Swiss team at EPFL succeeded in surpassing this value. https://phys.org/news/2022-10-tandem-solar-cells-perovskite-nanostructures.html Nanomaterials Mon, 24 Oct 2022 11:16:28 EDT news585828986 DNA profiling is frequently in the news. Public interest is sparked when DNA is used to identify a suspect or human remains, or resolves a cold case that seems all but forgotten. https://phys.org/news/2022-10-dna-crimes-profiling.html Molecular & Computational biology Wed, 12 Oct 2022 12:45:03 EDT news584797501 A research group led by Prof. Xiao Jianping and Assoc. Prof. Jiao Feng from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with Prof. Qu Zhenping from Dalian University of Technology, designed a tandem bifunctional zeolites-silver (Ag) catalyst that could boost formaldehyde oxidation at low temperatures. https://phys.org/news/2022-05-zeolites-silver-catalyst-boosts-formaldehyde-oxidation.html Materials Science Fri, 13 May 2022 11:08:30 EDT news571658908 A team of researchers from the Netherlands, China, Belgium, Japan and the U.S. has developed a double-shelled hollow sphere that serves as a tandem catalyst. In their paper published in the journal Nature Materials, the group describes the spheres and their use in converting hydrogen and carbon monoxide into a liquid hydrocarbon. https://phys.org/news/2022-02-double-shelled-hollow-spheres-tandem-catalysts.html Materials Science Wed, 16 Feb 2022 09:00:19 EST news564224414 The power conversion efficiency (PCE) of single-junction perovskite solar cells (PSCs) has increased remarkably from 3.8% to 25.2% in just a decade. As the rapid development of PCE has been approaching the limit of its theoretical efficiency, fabricating tandem solar cells by combining subcells with different bandgaps offers an avenue to go beyond the Shockley-Queisser limits of single-junction solar cells. https://phys.org/news/2021-09-cross-linked-hole-layers-high-efficiency-perovskite.html Materials Science Mon, 06 Sep 2021 07:50:36 EDT news550133433 NUS chemists have developed a new way to access prized tri- and tetrasubstituted alkenes through a nickel-catalyzed tandem process involving a Heck reaction followed by carbon-carbon double bond (C=C) migration. https://phys.org/news/2021-08-stereoselective-alkene-synthesis-non-precious-nickel.html Materials Science Tue, 10 Aug 2021 09:21:31 EDT news547806084 A team of researchers at Northwestern University has developed a nanoscale tandem catalyst to get more propylene out of propane during dehydrogenation. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their method and the improvements they found in its use. Chunlei Pei and Jinlong Gong with Tianjin University have published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue outlining the benefits of tandem catalysis and the work done by the team in Illinois. https://phys.org/news/2021-03-nanoscale-tandem-catalyst-propylene-propane.html Nanomaterials Fri, 19 Mar 2021 10:24:24 EDT news535368262 Carbon dioxide reduction reaction (CO2RR) uses renewable electricity to convert carbon dioxide and water into fuels and chemicals, which is considered as an effective way to simultaneously realize carbon recycling and renewable energy storage. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-tandem-catalyst-carbon-dioxide-electroreduction.html Materials Science Tue, 15 Sep 2020 07:55:47 EDT news519375346 Researchers at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and its spin-off, Graphene Flagship Associate Member BeDimensional, in cooperation with ENEA have successfully combined graphene with tandem perovskite-silicon solar cells to achieve efficiencies of up to 26.3%. https://phys.org/news/2020-03-graphene-perovskites-siliconan-ideal-tandem.html Materials Science Tue, 03 Mar 2020 10:12:11 EST news502452727 Scientists at the University of Basel have found a way to change the spatial arrangement of bipyridine molecules on a surface. These potential components of dye-sensitized solar cells form complexes with metals and thereby alter their chemical conformation. The results of this interdisciplinary collaboration between chemists and physicists from Basel were recently published in the scientific journal ACS Omega. https://phys.org/news/2018-10-metal-desired-configuration.html Materials Science Tue, 09 Oct 2018 07:57:48 EDT news458290664 Today at the EU PVSEC conference, imec, the world-leading research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics, energy and digital technologies, presents a thin-film tandem solar cell consisting of a top perovskite cell developed by Imec within the partnerships of EnergyVille and Solliance, and a bottom CIGS cell from the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research (ZSW, Stuttgart, Germany). The tandem cell resulting from this collaboration achieves a record efficiency of 24.6 percent. https://phys.org/news/2018-09-perovskitecigs-tandem-cell-efficiency-percent.html Electronics & Semiconductors Mon, 24 Sep 2018 10:40:01 EDT news457001921 For decades, silicon solar cells have been used to convert energy from sunlight into electricity. However, recent improvements in perovskite alternatives are moving tandem devices—made of both silicon and perovskite—closer to market, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society. https://phys.org/news/2018-06-tandem-solar-cells.html Energy & Green Tech Wed, 13 Jun 2018 12:29:02 EDT news448111722 Solar cells with efficiencies above 20% and produced at low costs – perovskites make this possible. Now, researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have gained fundamental insight into the function of perovskite solar cells. They found that bound states of electron-hole pairs can form during the absorption of light. Still, these pairs can be separated easily for current to flow. In addition, they enhance absorption. Work of the scientists is reported in the journal Applied Physics Letters. https://phys.org/news/2018-04-perovskite-solar-cells-efficient.html Condensed Matter Wed, 25 Apr 2018 10:30:17 EDT news443871006 A simple potassium solution could boost the efficiency of next-generation solar cells, by enabling them to convert more sunlight into electricity. https://phys.org/news/2018-03-potassium-perovskite-based-solar-cells-efficiency.html Materials Science Wed, 21 Mar 2018 14:00:06 EDT news440835987 To determine how efficient new solar cells convert sunlight into electricity, small sample cells are tested under ideal conditions. However, the reported efficiency is not very representative of the actual annual yield when the cells are placed onto a rooftop and exposed to the Dutch weather. In an article published in ACS Energy Letters on August 22, 2017, AMOLF researchers present a model that predicts how the next generation of solar cells will perform under realistic conditions. https://phys.org/news/2017-08-solar-cells-underperform-cloudy-countries.html Energy & Green Tech Tue, 22 Aug 2017 12:58:50 EDT news422625516 Solar panels have tremendous potential to provide affordable renewable energy, but many people see traditional black and blue panels as an eyesore. Architects, homeowners and city planners may be more open to the technology if they could install green panels that melt into the landscape, red panels on rooftops and white ones camouflaged as walls. https://phys.org/news/2017-08-nanotechnology-green-energy.html Nanophysics Tue, 15 Aug 2017 11:00:08 EDT news421999358 Solar panels are proliferating across the globe to help reduce the world's dependency on fossil fuels. But conventional panels are not without environmental costs, too. Now scientists are reporting in the Journal of the American Chemical Society a new advance toward more practical, "greener" solar cells made with inexpensive halide perovskite materials. They have developed low-bandgap perovskite solar cells with a reduced lead content and a power conversion efficiency of 15 percent. https://phys.org/news/2016-09-greener-inexpensive-solar-cells.html Materials Science Wed, 28 Sep 2016 09:46:28 EDT news394274782 Physicists at the University of Salford, along with 12 international partners, have launched a research project that aims to develop novel types of photovoltaic (PV) cell. https://phys.org/news/2016-03-technology-harvesting-solar-energy.html Energy & Green Tech Tue, 01 Mar 2016 09:40:09 EST news376046698 A pair of studies by a team of scientists has shed new light on the nature of a particular type of DNA sequences—tandem DNA repeat arrays—that play important roles in transcription control, genome organization, and development. https://phys.org/news/2016-01-repetitive-dna-sequences.html Cell & Microbiology Thu, 28 Jan 2016 12:00:03 EST news373194662 Scientists at the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and at the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) have jointly set a new world record for converting non-concentrated (1-sun) sunlight into electricity using a dual-junction III-V/Si solar cell. https://phys.org/news/2016-01-efficiency-dual-junction-solar-cell.html Energy & Green Tech Wed, 06 Jan 2016 09:40:34 EST news371295625 Stacking two solar cells one over the other has advantages: Because the energy is "harvested" in two stages, and overall the sunlight can be converted to electricity more efficiently. Empa researchers have come up with a procedure that makes it possible to produce thin film tandem solar cells in which a thin perovskite layer is used. The processing of peroveskite takes place at just 50 degrees Celsius and such a process is potentially applicable for low cost roll-to-roll production in future. https://phys.org/news/2015-11-tandem-solar-cells-efficient.html Energy & Green Tech Mon, 23 Nov 2015 07:58:22 EST news367487889 For human cells, researchers have adopted practices that are currently used for human identification, which are based on the detection of short tandem repeat (STR) markers. For the large volume of research that is performed using non-human cell lines (mouse, hamster, monkey, etc.), there are no STR marker assays that are able to uniquely and unequivocally identify a particular cell line. https://phys.org/news/2013-01-authenticating-non-human-cell-lines.html Biotechnology Mon, 28 Jan 2013 08:46:38 EST news278585136