3D solar towers offer up to 20 times more power output than traditional flat solar panels

While we’ve looked at the development of solar cell technologies that employnanoscale 3D structures to trap light and increase the amount of solar energy absorbed, MIT researchers have now used 3D on the macro scale to achieve power output that is up to 20 times greater than traditional fixed flat solar panels with the same base area. The approach developed by the researchers involves extending the solar cells upwards in a three-dimensional tower or cube configuration to enable them to better capture the sun's rays when it is lower on the horizon.

Solar panels placed flat on a rooftop are most effective at harnessing solar energy when the sun is close to directly overhead, but quickly lose their efficiency as the angle of the sun’s rays hitting the panel increases – during the mornings, evenings, in the cooler months and in locations far from the equator. It is exactly in these situations that the researcher’s vertical solar modules provided the biggest boosts in power output.

After exploring a variety of possible 3D configurations using a computer algorithm and testing them under a range of latitudes, seasons and weather with specially developed analytic software, the team built three different individual 3D modules and tested them on the MIT lab building roof for several weeks. The results showed a boost in power output ranging from double to more than 20 times that of fixed flat solar panels with the same base area.

By going vertical and collecting more sunlight when the sun is closer to the horizon, the team’s 3D modules were able to generate a more uniform output over time. This uniformity extended over the course of each day, the seasons of a year, and even when accounting for blockage from clouds and shadows.

The researchers say this increase in uniformity could overcome one of the biggest hurdles facing solar energy – predictability of electricity supply that currently makes it difficult to integrate solar power sources into the grid.

They add that this uniformity, as well as the much higher energy output for a given area, would help offset the increased cost of the 3D modules, which are higher per the amount of energy generated when compared to conventional flat solar panels.

While the team’s computer modeling showed complex shapes – such as a cube with each face dimpled inward – would offer a 10 to 15 percent improvement in power output when compared to a simpler cube, these would be difficult to manufacture. In their rooftop tests, the team studied both simpler cube modules as well as more complex accordion-like shapes that could be shipped flat for unfolding on site.

This accordion-like tower was the tallest structure the team tested and such a design could be installed in a parking lot to provide a charging station for electric vehicles, according to Jeffrey Grossman, the senior author of the study and the Carl Richard Soderberg Career Development Associate Professor of Power Engineering at MIT.

Grossman and his colleagues believe that with the fall in the cost of solar cells in recent years - to the point where they have become less expensive than their supporting structures and the outlay for the land upon which they are placed - makes it an ideal time to examine the benefits of different solar cell configurations.

“Even 10 years ago, this idea wouldn’t have been economically justified because the modules cost so much,” Grossman says. But now, he adds, “the cost for silicon cells is a fraction of the total cost, a trend that will continue downward in the near future.”

Buoyed by the success of the tests on the individual 3D modules, the team now plans to study a collection of solar towers that will enable them to examine the effects that one tower’s shadow will have on another as the sun moves across the sky over the course of a day.

While the team believes its 3D solar cells could offer big advantages in flat-rooftop installations or urban environments where space is limited, they say they could also be used in larger-scale applications, such as solar farms, once a configuration that minimizes the shading effects between towers has been developed.

The results of the MIT team’s computer modeling and rooftop testing of real modules appear in the journal Energy and Environmental Science.

Windstalk is a wind farm without the turbines

Wind turbines are an increasingly popular way to generate clean energy withlarge-scale wind farms springing up all over the world. However, many residents near proposed wind farm sites have raised concerns over the aesthetics and the low frequency vibrations they claim are generated by wind turbines. An interesting Windstalk concept devised by New York design firm Atelier DNA could overcome both these problems while still allowing a comparable amount of electricity to be generated by the wind.

Devised as a potential clean energy generation project/tourist attraction for Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City, the Windstalk concept consists of 1,203 carbon fiber reinforced resin poles, which stand 55 meters (180 feet) high and are anchored to the ground in concrete bases that range between 10 and 20 meters (33-66 ft) in diameter. The poles, which measure 30cm (12 in.) in diameter at the base, tapering up to a diameter of 5cm (2 in.) at the top, are packed with a stack of piezoelectric ceramic discs. Between the discs are electrodes that are connected by cables that run the length of each pole – one cable connects the even electrodes, while another connects the odd ones.

So, instead of relying on the wind to turn a turbine to generate electricity, when the pole sways in the wind, the stack of piezoelectric discs are compressed, generating a current through the electrodes. In a nice visual way to indicate how much – if any – power the poles are generating, the top 50cm (20 in.) of each pole is fitted with an LED lamp that glows and dims relative to the amount of power. So when the wind stops, the LED’s go dark.

As a way to maximize the amount of electricity the Windstalk farm would generate, the concept also places a torque generator within the concrete base of each pole. As the poles sway, fluid is forced through the cylinders of an array of current generating shock absorbers to convert the kinetic energy of the swaying poles into electrical energy.

Because the electricity generation capabilities of a Windstalk field site would depend on the wind, the designers have devised a way to store the energy. Below the field of poles would be two large chambers located on top of each other and shaped like the bases of the poles but inverted, (see the cross section image of the pole base section below). When the wind is blowing, part of the electricity generated is used to power a set of pumps that moves water from the lower chamber to the upper one. Then, when the wind dies down, the water flows from the upper chamber down to the lower chamber, turning the pumps into generators.

The WIndstalk project is still only a concept, so the designers haven’t determined the optimal shape for the stalks, saying computer simulations could be used to devise the best profile for maximizing the pole’s movement and variation. Even so, the design team estimates that the overall electricity output of the concept would be comparable to that of a conventional wind turbine array because, even though a single wind turbine that is limited to the same height as the poles may produce more energy than a single Windstalk, the Windstalks can be packed in much denser arrays.

The Atelier DNA Windstalk concept took out second prize in the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) competition this year that asked entrants to “design a series of land/environmental art installations that uniquely combine aesthetic intrigue and artistic concept with clean energy generation.”

Soft Machines claims its cutting-edge VISC CPU cores can outperform Intel, ARM in performance per watt

More than a year ago, we coveredSoft Machines VISC (Variable Instruction Set Computing) and the company’s long-term goal to improve efficiency. VISC’s argument is that by creating a middleware software layer that can translate single-threaded code into parallel workloads that are executed by multiple virtual cores, it can improve overall execution efficiency and reduce power consumption. Or at least, that’s been the claim.

Soft Machines has now revealed more performance data on how it expects its first VISC core, Shasta, to perform, as well as information on the upcoming Shasta+ and Tahoe CPUs.

The first Shasta core will be available this year, with 1-2 virtual cores on a dual-core configuration, or an SMP block of 2-4 VCs with a quad-core configuration. The CPU has a 64-bit ISA and should be clocked at 2GHz. By 2017 Shasta+ will move to 10nm with support for more virtual core instances, followed by a new architecture, Tahoe, in 2016.

This graph captures much of what Soft Machines believes makes its hardware appealing. The company is basically arguing that by virtualizing CPU resources and breaking even single-threaded workloads into pieces that can be spread to different cores (with hypothetically different resources and capabilities) it can realize greater efficiencies than CPU architectures that rely on dynamic frequency and voltage scaling (DFVS).

The big question to answer, I think, is how much of an overhead penalty SoftMachines pays for its virtualization, and what kinds of workloads it can effectively execute on its cores. SPEC is a decent cross-platform benchmark, but it’s also susceptible to hand-tuning and careful optimization. SoftMachines’ documentation states that the same GCC 4.9 settings were used for all processors, but SPEC runs aren’t the same as commercial software deployments.

Now the Shasta results being shown here are simulated, but again, SoftMachines claims to be using the same model they adopted for simulating the performance of their proof-of-concept 28nm core. The simulation method proved accurate for that chip, within 5% on performance and 10% on power. In theory, therefore, the Shasta, Shasta+, and Tahoe results should match as well.

We see plenty of CPU announcements come and go in the journalism business, but Soft Machines has been flying largely under the radar since 2014. They’ve made a few additional announcements, but most of the company’s efforts have apparently been on improving its products as opposed to its media profile. I’m genuinely curious to see if their virtualization approach can actually yield benefits in real-world scenarios, particularly given the difficulty that companies like Intel have had with increasing overall performance. Breaking workloads up dynamically and executing them across virtual “cores” could be more power-efficient than scaling single cores up and down by clock speed, but demonstrating that efficiency in real-world tests will still take some additional work.

Since Soft Machines doesn’t build its own CPUs or SoCs, we’ll have to wait for partner silicon to come to market before we can draw firmer conclusions about whether this approach can improve performance.

The coating conducts electricity on a contact lens

Google Glass was somewhat beset with controversies -- often thought to be unsightly, the tech was also banned in cinemas,declared "no safer than texting"when worn by drivers, andsubject to privacy debates. They may be resigned to the past, however, as a new contact lens is developed that can act as a computer screen. 

The proof of concept, published in Applied Materials and Interfaces and designed by researchers at the University of South Australia, details a polymer film coating that conducts electricity on a contact lens. This could, the researchers say, eventually allow the development of a tiny electrical circuit that could sit on a lens worn by a person, allowing someone to read text or project a computer screen direct from their eye.

Referring to the technology as a "game changer", Professor Drew Evans, who worked on the project, said the method would be a safe way of bringing wearable tech even closer.

"We're talking about anything from a simple sensor that can measure the amount of glucose in the blood through to actually creating electronic displays," he said. "So rather than having something like a pair of glasses that acts like a computer, you can generate images directly onto your contact lens". 

The contact lens works by coating a normal lens with a thin, "biocompatibilising" film, which allows a conductive electronic circuit to work with the body. The lens is pretreated with plasma in order to facilitate both the attachment of the film and its adherence to the eye. The polymers used in the lens have also been used to create 'smart windows', which darken and lighten and may have application as camouflage for the military.

The research has taken several years, and the team now hope that the lens will enter further testing and potentially be available to consumers in the UK and elsewhere. Their next step, they say, is developing complementary technology that can read and translate the information transmitted by the conducting polymers. 

"What is really significant is that the materials we are developing are not only safe but also have the potential for a range of personalised health monitoring applications that could make life simpler for people struggling with chronic health problems," Evans said.

Stanford invents lithium-ion battery that can’t overheat

Lithium-ion batteries are being used in an increasing number of portable gadgets. They are simply the best battery tech we have available today, but they aren’t 100% safe. We’ve all seen what can happen when one of these batteries gets damaged and overheats. Typically there will be a very hot ball of flames that consumes whatever device the battery was inside.

Until we have a replacement for lithium-ion, we need a way to mitigate that risk, and Stanford University looks to have come up with the solution: a lithium-ion battery that can’t overheat. And it’s all thanks to a human body temperature wearable sensor, which has been tweaked for use in batteries.

The tweaked sensor takes the form of a plastic polymer containing nickel particles that’s connected to the battery electrodes. Under normal circumstances electricity is allowed to flow through the nickel particles as they are touching each other. However, if the battery heats up, the polymer expands and at a set temperature the nickel particles separate and break their link. Electricity stops flowing and the battery can’t get any hotter.

The polymer is not only useful because it stops overheating, though. It also contracts as the temperature reduces. So while the battery may stop working to prevent an overheat, it will begin to work again once the temperature is back within acceptable limits. That means no expensive battery replacement for the user, unless of course the battery really is damaged and continues to try to overheat.

As the design is reliant on adding a polymer to existing battery designs, it shouldn’t be very expensive to implement and mass produce. So hopefully Stanford’s invention makes it into commercial batteries quickly, and keeps all our gadgets (and us) safer.

In October, researchers at the University of Cambridge developed a lithium-air batterythat packs far more power into the same size pack as lithium-ion, though that design is years away from commercial mass production.

Smartphones Could Generate Own Power with New Coating

A transparent material that can be attached to a smartphone's touch screen could help the device generate electricity whenever anyone taps it, researchers in China say.

Touch screens are now found on most cell phones and tablet computers. Using a touch screen typically involves finger taps, and scientists at Lanzhou University in China reasoned that the mechanical energy from these motions could be converted into electricity to charge the phone's batteries, which could significantly extend the working time of these portable devices.

The researchers developed a new material based on a transparent silicone rubber known as PDMS. Scientists embedded wires in this rubber that were made of lead zirconate titanate that were only 700 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, wide. For perspective, this is about 140 times thinner than the average width of a human hair. [Top 10 Inventions That Changed the World]

As the rubber solidified, the researchers used electrical fields to align the nanowires in the rubber in columns. This alignment helped set both the material's electrical and visual properties.

Whenever such nanowires are bent — for instance, whenever anyone taps on the material — they generate electricity, a phenomenon known as piezoelectricity. By making sure the nanowires are lined up with one another, the researchers helped ensure that they would react to finger taps in unison, generating as much energy from the motions as possible.

When the material is viewed head-on, these incredibly narrow wires are largely invisible, and the material can look mostly transparent. As such, the nanowires "can harvest tapping energy on a screen without influencing the screen's normal working," study senior author Yong Qin, a materials scientist at Lanzhou University, told Live Science.

In addition, when the material is viewed from an angle, the nanowires interfere with light rays, which means that anything seen through the material at that angle will look blurry. As such, the material can also helpprotect a user's privacy by preventing anyone nearby from being able to peek at someone else's smartphone screen.

In experiments, tapping on the material generated an electrical current of 0.8 nanoamperes, or about one-millionth of the electricity used by a hearing aid. The scientists noted that the results of future research could help their material generate more current to efficiently recharge the batteries of mobile devices.

Electrical signals from nanowires could also help researchers develop more sensitive touch screens, Qin said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Jan. 13 in the journal Small.

Shocking! 'Electric Eel' Fibers Could Power Wearable Tech

Stretchy fibers behaves like electric eels could be woven into clothing to power wearable technology one day, new research reveals.

Experimentally, these flexible fibers produces sufficient power to run electronic lights and watches.

The new fiber is interesting because it borrows a leaf from nature to "solve real-world problems and even surpass nature in some aspects," said study lead author Hao Sun, a materials scientistat Fudan University in Shanghai. [Top 10 Inventions That Changed the World]

High voltage
Electric eels (Electrophorus electricus) are able to generate deadly shocks to stun prey and defend against predators. These fish have cells known as electrocytes, which store and release electrically charged ions to generate powerful electric fields.

By themselves, electrocytes in electric eels generate low voltages of only about 0.15 volts. However, in eels, thousands of these disclike electrocytes line up, working in concert to produce deadly shocks of up to 600 volts, or about five times the voltage emitted from a U.S. electrical outlet.

Sun and his colleagues wanted to harness the power of the electric eel in a man-made material. To do so, they created fibers that resemble the shocking creatures' ability to stack up tiny voltage-producing cells in concert.

These fibers are capacitors, meaning they alternate pairs of electrical conductors and electrical insulators, or materials that block the flow of electricity. Capacitors store electric charge on the surfaces of the conductors, and can capture and release energy much more quickly than batteries can, although they usually store less energy than batteries do.

The scientists fabricated the capacitors by first wrapping sheets of carbon nanotubes around elastic rubber fibers 500 microns wide, or about five times the average width of a human hair. Carbon nanotubes are pipes only nanometers, or billionths of a meter, in diameter that possess remarkable electrical and mechanical properties.

The researchers made sure that the electrically conductive carbon nanotube sheets did not completely cover the electrically insulating rubber. Instead, there were gaps where the insulating rubber was exposed. Such gaps are key, because capacitors consist of both conductive and insulating units.

Then, the scientists applied patches of electrically conductive electrolyte gel onto these fibers. The pattern of patches the researchers used converted the fibers into capacitors.

The more alternating segments of electrically conductive nanotube sheets and electrically insulating rubber gaps a fiber had, the greater the voltage it could generate. A fiber about 39 feet (12 meters) long could generate 1,000 volts, the researchers reported online Jan. 14 in the journal Advanced Materials.

Previous research also sought to mimic electric eels by connecting many electrocyte like units together. However, those units were impractical because they were strung together with metal wires, and generally had poor flexibility, the researchers said. This new device instead connected all of its electrocyte like units together on a single fiber.

"We thought these findings provide an efficient strategy for the advancement of flexible electronics and wearable devices," Sun told Live Science.

Power fiber

The elastic fibers could stretch up to 70 percent more than their usual length without losing their electrical or structural properties, the researchers said. The team also showed that the fibers could be woven together with conventional elastic fibers to create fabric that could be incorporated into clothes.

The researchers suggested that the eely fibers could help power miniature electronic devices. For example, in experiments, they created energy wristbands to power electronic watches, and wove fibers into T-shirts to power 57 light-emitting diodes (LEDs). In the future, these energy fibers "might be incorporated into our daily clothes to power our wearable devices, such as the Apple Watch and Google Glass," Sun said.

The scientists also connected their capacitor fibers to fiber-shaped solar cells to create material that could both harvest and store energy. In experiments, these combinationfibers generated 10 volts of electricity when exposed to light — enough to power some types of small electronic devices, they said. Solar cell fibers could also recharge battery fibers in wearable devices, the researchers said.

Hydrogen Bomb vs. Atomic Bomb: What's the Difference?

North Korea claims to have tested a hydrogen bomb on Wednesday (Jan. 6), a weapon powerful than the bombs that devastated the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II.

Hydrogen bombs, or thermonuclear bombs, are powerful than atomic or "fission" bombs, so the similarly sized seismic events cast doubt on North Korea's claims, experts say. The difference between thermonuclear bombs and fission bombs begins at the atomic level. Fission bombs, like those used in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, work by splitting the nucleus of an atom. When the neutrons, or neutral particles, of the atom's nucleus split, some hit the nuclei of nearby atoms,causing them to split too. The result is an highly explosive chain reaction. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki exploded with the yield of 15 kilotons and 20 kilotons of TNT, respectively, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. [The 10 Greatest Explosions Ever]

In comparison, the first test of a thermonuclear weapon, or hydrogen bomb, in the United States in November 1952 yielded an explosion of the order of 10,000 kilotons of TNT. Thermonuclear bombs start with the same fission reaction that powers atomic bombs — but the majority of the uranium or plutonium in atomic bombs actually goes unused. In a thermonuclear bomb, an additional step means that more of the bomb's explosive power is useable.

First, an igniting explosion compresses a sphere of plutonium-239, the material that will then undergo fission. Inside this pit of plutonium-239 is a chamber of hydrogen gas. The high temperatures and pressures created by the plutonium-239 fission causes the hydrogen atoms to join together. This fusion process releases neutrons, which feed back into the plutonium-239, splitting more atoms and boosting the fission chain reaction.

Governments around the world use global monitoring systems to detect nuclear tests as part of the effort to enforce the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). There are 183 signatories to this treaty, but it is not in force because key nations, including the United States, did not ratify it. Since 1996, Pakistan, India and North Korea have carried out nuclear tests. Nevertheless, the treaty put in place a system of seismic monitoring that can differentiate a nuclear explosion from an earthquake. The CTBT International Monitoring System also includes stations that detect the infrasound — sound whose frequency is too low for human ears to detect — from explosions. Eighty radionuclide monitoring stations around the globe measure atmospheric fallout, which can prove that an explosion detected by other monitoring systems was, actually  nuclear.

MIT develops material that stores sunlight and releases it later as heat

The sun is always hanging in space, releasing excess energy than we can use on Earth.Even though,sunlight is nit uniform at ground level. You have to battle with darkness, clouds, and unpredictable weather to use solar energy, and that means storing it. Researchers from MIT have developed a material that makes it worthwhile to store energy from the sun as heat that can be released on-demand.

All methods for storing solar energy are based on batteries, which have been notoriously slow to improve. This new material could make the process more efficient by storing energy via a chemical reaction to release later as heat. At that time, you could use the heat for anything you want. It’s an incredibly adaptive material as well, in the form of a transparent polymer film. It could be built into car windshields to remove ice, or as a layer in your favorite sweater to keep you warm on a chilly day.

Researchers were able to create this material with the aid of a molecule that exists in two states, one of which can store significant energy. The material is what’s known as a solar thermal fuel (STF), which have been developed in the past. However, this one is different (and more useful) in that it’s actually functional in a solid material. Past STF molecules were only active in a liquid phase suspension.

When exposed to sunlight, an STF flips to a charged state. It can remain “charged” for several days. The molecules can then be triggered on demand with a small temperature increase or some other stimulus to release that energy as heat. You won’t be boiling water with this system right now, but it’s still impressive for an early design. The polymer film designed at MIT can currently release a burst of heat about 10 degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding environment (about 18 degrees F).

The researchers are using a car windshield application as a way to test viability of the material. It would consist of a single layer of STF film sandwiched between two layers of glass. It’s a straightforward, but potentially quite useful application of the technology. It’s illegal to embed opaque heating wires in front windshields as many cars have in the rear, but the transparent STF film could be even more effective anyway. Testing shows that the burst of heat from a “charged” STF film is enough to melt the ice from a car windshield.

The team believes that it can raise the heat output of the material to as much as 20 degrees C above room temperature with some more fine tuning. They’ll also work to improve its transparency. Right now it has a slight yellowish tint. At that point, it could make a significant impact on electric cars, which use a large amount of their battery power to de-ice windows with electric heaters — and that’s only the start. 

Recent hydrogen discovery could make room-temperature superconductors a possibility

Hydrogen is commonplace — it forms around 75% of all the matter we know about. 
Science had concentrated on hydrogen atoms for a very long time, because it is the simplest chemical element known to us. Hydrogen reveals to us a lot of the earliest moments of the universe we live in, before everything started getting complicated and seperate.

One of the things we’ve learned from studying hydrogen is that when in solid form,it behaves like an alkali metal — having one free valence electron,it is expected to behave like other metals with a +1 charge. But we can’t make it behave like a metal. We’ve done a lot of things to hydrogen; by now, we can cool it into a liquid pretty easily. We humans have teased hydrogen atoms into a Bose-Einstein condensate. But until now we still haven’t managed to make it behave like a metal, no matter how we crush or chill it.

What we have managed, as of last week, is to create a new phase of hydrogen — not quite a liquid, not quite a gas.

One moon circles — and has phases

Thank condensed-matter physics for the phase diagram: a chart like this one, which lays out the behavior of hydrogen at different pressures, volumes, and temperatures. Everything else has a phase diagram, too.

For example, water is chemically interesting: the behavior of the hydrogen in water means that there are a dozen different kinds of ice, and not just in a thirty-words-for-snow kind of sense. The bonds that give water molecules the properties they have can change depending on pressure and temperature — and that in turn changes the properties of the water itself.

We just don’t have the requisite pressures on our planet to see metallic hydrogen. To find the stuff, you have to look to the cores of gas giants like Jupiter, or back in time to the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. These are phases of hydrogen that we don’t see in our natural world. Using nearly incompressible diamonds to crush hydrogen atoms together with monumental force, though, is one way we can start to replicate the insane pressures found inside Jupiter. Jupiter is a relatively pedestrian place, here in our own temperate and clement solar system. Comfortable in the crook of one of our unremarkable galaxy’s spiral arms, we live in a rich and calm eddy, far from the extremes we see elsewhere in our still-expanding universe. But not so far away at Jupiter’s core, the conditions are pretty crazy.

The crushing pressure inside Jupiter would fuse it into a star if it was much bigger. And it’s still pretty hot, even if it didn’t start stellar fusion. At the “surface” of Jupiter, inasmuch as Jupiter has a well-distinguished surface that isn’t just a boundary between slightly different densities of fluffy noble-gas slush, the temperature is a balmy ~340K, about 150F. Toward the core, though, there’s a thick mantle of metallic hydrogen responsible for Jupiter’s staggering magnetic field, and the high pressure in the mantle means that the hydrogen atoms have to pack together in a highly ordered state. It gets hotter and the behavior gets stranger, the further down you go.

Heat and high pressure is one way that you can create the conditions for metallic hydrogen. But there’s another way. Low temperature and high pressures are more practical here on Earth, if only because it’s difficult to contain a few very hot atoms of hydrogen when the stuff can diffuse through basically anything you try to bottle it in.

Three researchers from the University of Edinburgh used a diamond anvil cell to apply 388 gigaPascals of pressure to some hydrogen atoms. This is ludicrous pressure — greater than the pressures inside Jupiter’s metallic hydrogen mantle. But the scientists chose to do so at a much cooler temperature — 300 Kelvins, which is pretty close to room temperature here on Earth.

As they dialed up the pressure, the researchers saw spectroscopic evidence of the bonds holding electrons and hydrogen nuclei together begin to disappear. The high pressure forces atoms to crowd in and interact with each other, and when they’re packed firmly enough together the properties of the stuff start to change. The boundaries between phase states aren’t all-or-nothing; under extreme conditions we can observe partial phase changes, in-between states where hydrogen isn’t all the way liquid, but also isn’t all the way gaseous, depending on what the individual particles are actually doing.

Since some signs of bonding were still present under Raman spectroscopy, the team asserts that they’ve found a new phase of hydrogen that exists “between” liquid and gas. The electrons haven’t all been freed from their nuclei, so this may represent an intermediate step in the gas-to-liquid phase transition of hydrogen (condensation from gas to liquid) at high pressure and low temperature. They’re calling it hydrogen V.

One potential use for metallic hydrogen might be as a room-temperature superconductor. Such superconductors have proven elusive in the real world, and the pressure required to create metallic hydrogen might put it beyond our grasp. Current thinking is that it would require approximately 400 gPa of pressure to create metallic hydrogen at room temperature. That’s the equivalent of four million atmospheres of pressure. The research team intends to keep repeating the experiment at higher pressures until either they form metallic hydrogen or the diamond anvil shatters.

Pocket-Sized Device Charges Your Phone using Water

 A sleek new device could help you charge your phone without an electric outlet.

Swedish startup MyFC unveiled its amazing technology, dubbed JAQ, at CES on Jan. 6. The device, small in size can easily slip into your back pocket, is a fuel cell charger. It uses saltwater and oxygen to convert chemical energy into electricity. Then it uses that electricity to charge your phone's battery.

The charger consists of a credit card-shaped "power card" and a hollowed out port that's about the size of a smartphone. The card contains saltwater, which fuels electricity-producing chemical reactions when you slip the card into the port. To get that electricity to your phone's battery, you simply plug your phone into the port with a standard cable. [Smartphones With the Longest Battery Life]

One JAQ power card produces about 1,800 milliampere-hours' (mAH) equivalent of electricity — that's nearly enough energy to fully charge an iPhone 6S. Larger devices, like tablets, can also be charged with the fuel cell, but it'll take more than one power card to get them fully loaded. The saltwater-containing power cards are good for just one use. After that, they stop producing the chemical reactions necessary to generate electricity.

The device works by combining two reactants, in this case hydrogen and oxygen, inside an enclosed space. Hydrogen atoms from the saltwater in the power card enter the fuel cell (there are 10 fuel cells in the card) at the anode, where a "chemical reaction removes their electrons,"MyFC explains on its website. These electrons then produce the current that powers the phone or tablet that's connected to JAQ

Once the hydrogen atoms are stripped of their electrons, they become positively charged hydrogen ions and are able to move through the fuel cell's electrolyte — a membrane like substance that limits the movement of ions in the cell. At the cathode end of the cell, oxygen from the air enters and combines with the hydrogen ions that made it through the electrolyte and electrons returning from the electrical circuit. This reaction results in a totally harmless byproduct: water (H2O).

JAQ isn't available for purchase just yet, but the company anticipates that the product will be ready to ship later this year. When it does go up for sale, MyFC hopes to implement a subscription service. Customers would sign up to receive a certain number of power cards every month. Individual cards would also be available for purchase and will likely cost about $1.50 each, a company spokesperson said.

German plasma giant strides raises nuclear fusion possibility

A German nuclear fusion experiment has yielded a super-hot gas which scientists believe will eventually result to clean and cheap energy.

The helium plasma - a cloud of loose, charged particles - lived just a tenth of a second and was about one million degrees Celsius.

It was welcomed as a breakthrough for the Max Planck Institute's stellarator - a chamber whose design differs from the tokamak fusion devices used elsewhere.

The Sun's energy is created by fusion.

Physicists are in a worldwide race to build stable fusion devices that could not only mimic the Sun but release abundant energy, without the amount of toxic waste generated by nuclear fission - the splitting of the atom.

The team at Greifswald, in northeastern Germany, aim in future to heat hydrogen nuclei to around 100 million C - the necessary conditions for fusion to take place like in the Sun's interior. They will use deuterium, a heavier type, or isotope, of the element.

The stellarator's plasma was created,using a microwave laser, a complex combination of magnets and just 10mg of helium. The Max Planck Institute calls its machine Wendelstein 7-X.

The project started nine years ago and costs 1bn euros (£720m; $1.1bn) so far.

The EU's main nuclear fusion project is called Iter, at Cadarache, in the south of France. But it will not be fired up until the 2020s. It is controversial, having already cost more than €10bn.

Iter will be a tokamak device - the word comes from Russian, meaning a ring-shaped magnetic chamber.

Scientists have been working on nuclear fusion for more than 50 years but the extremely high temperatures involved and difficulty of controlling plasmas mean progress is slow.