Current photovoltaic cells are not too good at capturing the sun’s energy – on average less than 20% efficient, and maxing out at about 40%. A new design hits 47% efficiency under certain conditions, by capturing the heat in sunlight, rather than the light.

The cell combines a photovoltaic process that turns light into electricity with another that converts heat; combined, they beat the current record for solar energy efficiency, as well as the theoretical efficiency limit of a cell of this design. (Emphasis added.)

“Theoretical efficiency” is calculated based on a set of assumptions about things like the geometry of the cell, the wavelengths the cell can capture (i.e., visible light), the reflectiveness, etc. When your actual physical devices doesn’t actually match the assumptions (i.e., also sucks up infrared), you can get better than theoretical efficiency.

Link: New solar cell uses that other thing the sun emits: heat

From the Make Magazine blog, a fascinating video – originally a film, clearly – about the design of a basic consumer good – a whiskey decanter – in the 1960s. Pretty long and painstaking process, from concepts – drawn by hand by a whole team of designers – to prototypes, cast by hand from hand turned and carved plaster of Paris – to testing.

Here’s a neat video about a design firm in the ’60s, and what it looked like to build things before the days of 3d modeling and rapid prototyping. Designers drew out many different plans, then the favorites were cut out in a machine shop, cast, and assembled painstakingly by hand. Looks like fun!

Make: Online : How-To: Design something without a computer

Hat tip to Alan Cooper @mralancooper for passing this along via Twitter.

The Edge Foundation, John Brockman’s virtual thinktank of leading scientists and thinkers, held a conference on the cognitive basis of morality in July. The proceedings are coming online now. Some very interesting stuff! The point of the conference was to surface the type of progress that science is making on understanding all facets of human behavior, including our moral behavior and reasoning. As the tools of cognitive neuroscience, brain imaging, physics, information technology, psychology, and other disciplines improve, we’re gaining the ability to see into this most complex of systems – they way we act, think, and believe. And we’re learning a lot of interesting – and sometime counter-intuitive – things.

The goal of this research is to help us, ultimately, not only know more, but to enable us to have better lives. As Harvard cognitive neuroscientist Joshua D. Green said during one of the discussion sessions:

Now, it’s true that, as scientists, our basic job is to describe the world as it is. But I don’t think that that’s the only thing that matters. In fact, I think the reason why we’re here, the reason why we think this is such an exciting topic, is not that we think that the new moral psychology is going to cure cancer. Rather, we think that understanding this aspect of human nature is going to perhaps change the way we think and change the way we respond to important problems and issues in the real world. If all we were going to do is just describe how people think and never do anything with it, never use our knowledge to change the way we relate to our problems, then I don’t think there would be much of a payoff. I think that applying our scientific knowledge to real problems is the payoff.

Link: Edge: THE NEW SCIENCE OF MORALITY

Screenshot of a protein from FoldIt game

Computers and gamers worked together to create optimal protein structures using the FoldIt online game.

… people were very good about detecting a hydrophobic amino acid when it stuck out from the protein’s surface, instead of being buried internally, and they were willing to rearrange the structure’s internals in order to tuck the offending amino acid back inside. Those sorts of extensive rearrangements were beyond Rosetta’s abilities, since the energy changes involved in the transitions are so large.

[the computer] would often get things slightly off (think of a zipper that’s off by a single tooth). Shifting every bond by a single partner was beyond its abilities, but it’s something a human can do trivially.

But it really required both parties:

Humans turn out to be really bad at starting from a simple linear chain of amino acids; they need a rough idea of what the protein might look like before they can recognize patterns to optimize. Given a set of 10 potential structures produced by Rosetta, however, the best players were very adept at picking the one closest to the optimal configuration.

Gamers beat algorithms at finding protein structures

And you can try iFoldit yourself, at fold.it.

Hat tip to Jane McGonigal (@avantgame) for the link via Twitter!

I have four blogs that I manage (none of them are burning down the internet in popularity, to be honest) and I’d love to get them all onto one install of WordPress. It’s going to cost me a bit more, though – I’ll have to add Dedicated IP to my GoDaddy hosting account.

WordPress Multiple User (MU) is a blog that allows multiple blogs to be published from a single installation. To install WordPress MU with our hosting, you will need to have a Deluxe or higher hosting plan and a Dedicated IP address.

Installing WordPress Multi-User (MU) – Search the Go Daddy Help Center