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A solar cell with 26.3 percent efficiency. (credit: Photovoltaic & Thin Film Research Laboratories (Kaneka corporation))

Solar panels are cheaper than ever these days, but installation costs can still be considerable for homeowners. More efficient solar panels can recapture the cost of their installation more quickly, so making panels that are better at converting sunlight into electricity is a key focus of solar research and development.

The silicon-based cells that make up a solar panel have a theoretical efficiency limit of 29 percent, but so far that number has proven elusive. Practical efficiency rates in the low-20-percent range have been considered very good for commercial solar panels. But researchers with Japanese chemical manufacturer Kaneka Corporation have built a solar cell with a photo conversion rate of 26.3 percent, breaking the previous record of 25.6 percent. Although it’s just a 2.7 percent increase in efficiency, improvements in commercially viable solar cell technology are increasingly hard-won.

Not only that, but the researchers noted in their paper that after they submitted their article to Nature Energy, they were able to further optimize their solar cell to achieve 26.6 percent efficiency. That result has been recognized by the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL).

On Wednesday, a team of astronomers revealed the discovery of a planetary system less than 40 light years away containing seven Earth-sized planets. The system's star is an ultracool dwarf, TRAPPIST-1, which is nothing to write home about—but astronomers gradually realized that the system has a plethora of planets, and three of them could support water oceans on their surface.

Google, as it often does, commemorated the discovery with a Doodle:

(credit: Google)

Google Doodles have been around nearly as long as the search engine itself, with the first one commemorating Burning Man back in 1998:

Enlarge (credit: PewDiePie via YouTube)

This week started with controversial PewDiePie news—and that's how it's going to end, too. The YouTube megastar, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, posted a response video today addressing The Wall Street Journal's report about alleged anti-Semitic comments. Those comments cost him both a lucrative contract with Disney and his deal with YouTube Red.

In his response, Kjellberg apologized for jokes that "went too far" and acknowledged that he offended people. But he also claimed that "old-school media" (in this case the Journal) attacked him personally for being a YouTube personality who makes a substantial living off the online video platform.

Let's recap the controversy: The Wall Street Journal produced a video and an article earlier this week about PewDiePie's alleged anti-Semitism, citing clips from recent videos in which he is shown watching a Hitler speech, making a Hitler salute, and paying two men to hold up a sign saying "Death to all Jews." After fielding an inquiry from the Journal about the videos, Disney cut ties with PewDiePie, who had been running the Disney YouTube network, Revelmode. Shortly thereafter, YouTube announced it was canceling PewDiePie's YouTube Red show, Scare PewDiePie, and it removed the YouTube star from its Google Preferred ad network.

Enlarge / Bitcoin trader Kolin Burges from London speaks to reporters as he protests against Tokyo-based bitcoin changer Mt. Gox in front of the company's office in Tokyo on February 26, 2014. (credit: YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images)

At least four hedge funds have "begun buying or offering to buy claims" from the thousands of people who lost bitcoins when Mt. Gox collapsed three years ago, according to the Financial Times, which cited anonymous sources.

Mt. Gox, a Japan-based bitcoin exchange, collapsed nearly three years ago. It first buckled after weeks of sustained DDoS attacks and "transaction malleability" problems, which led the company to halt withdrawals entirely. The company filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan not long after.

However, about a month later, in March 2014, Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles suddenly announced that he had found an "old format wallet" containing approximately 200,000 bitcoins. At present exchange rates, that sum is worth over $200 million.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | BSIP)

Editing the genomes of human embryos should be allowable to treat or prevent serious diseases and disabilities—but only amid stringent oversight and safety protocols and only if no reasonable alternatives exist—according to a report released Tuesday by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.
The endorsement, however cautious, is a reversal from some previous recommendations from experts and ethicists, who have considered making heritable alterations to humans unequivocally off-limits. Among other concerns about the idea is the fear that unscrupulous scientists could try to create “designer” or enhanced babies, with heightened intelligence, beauty, strength, etc.

The expert panel—22 of the world’s leading experts on genetics, bioethics, medicine, and law—is still completely opposed to such efforts. But amid new, powerful genome-editing tools, such as CRISPR/Cas9, the experts were forced to reconsider genome editing’s potential for good.

“Human genome editing holds tremendous promise for understanding, treating, or preventing many devastating genetic diseases, and for improving treatment of many other illnesses,” Alta Charo, co-chair of the panel and a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement.

The panel of experts also took into consideration the reality that genome editing will occur around the world regardless of an endorsement. Therefore, the committee saw it as beneficial to put forth stringent guidelines for how to do it responsibly. (Currently in the US, genome editing in humans is not permitted—the Food and Drug Administration is barred from using federal funds to review “research in which a human embryo is intentionally created or modified to include a heritable genetic modification.”)

(credit: Indigo Skies Photography)

An organization that manages transmission systems across the central US announced on Tuesday that it broke a record for wind penetration in North America. On Sunday at 4:30am, Southwest Power Pool (SPP) became the first regional transmission organization (RTO) to serve 52.1 percent of its load using wind energy.

SPP also set the previous record in April 2016 with 49.2 percent wind generation. A record previous to that was set by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) in late March 2016, when the organization hit 48.28 percent wind penetration at 1:10am.

Records for wind penetration, which measure the amount of total load supplied by wind on a moment-to-moment basis, are being broken more frequently these days, on a regional and internal level. As RTOs, which generally serve large areas and cross state lines, add more wind turbines to their portfolios, wind is becoming a more important part of the energy mix. SPP noted that “wind is now the third most-prevalent fuel source in the SPP region,” which covers 550,000 square miles of territory in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and portions of neighboring states. Natural gas and coal are still the primary fuel sources for SPP, but the organization said that wind accounted for 15 percent of its generating capacity in 2016.

(credit: Wired)

Humans must become cyborgs and develop a direct high-bandwidth connection with machines, or risk irrelevance and obsolescence, says Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

Musk's latest cheery thoughts were imparted at the World Government Summit in the UAE. "Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence," Musk said, according to CNBC.

The main thrust of Musk's argument seems to hinge on the limited bandwidth and processing power of a single human being. Computers can ingest, transfer, and process gigabytes of data per second, every second, forever. Meatbags, however, are severely limited by an input/output rate—talking, typing, listening—that's best measured in bits per second. Thus, to risk being replaced by a robot or artificial intelligence, we need to become machines.

Enlarge / Details of Breath of the Wild's two announced DLC packs, from the video announcement this morning. (credit: Nintendo)

Post-launch downloadable content (DLC) has become almost standard for any kind of big-budget, epic adventure game these days. Nintendo's popular Zelda series has resisted this trend until now, as the company announced today that Breath of the Wild will see two DLC packs released later this year.

The packs, sold together in a bundle for $19.99, will be released in the summer and the holiday season. Those who purchase them starting on March 3, however, will get instant access to three in-game treasure chests that contain "useful items" and "exclusive in-game clothing."

The Summer DLC pack contains a number of gameplay features that some may think should have been part of the base package, including: a "Cave of Trials" challenge mode; a more difficult "Hard mode"; and an amorphous "additional map feature." The holiday season DLC pack fits closer to the usual expectations for this kind of post-launch DLC, including a new original story, new dungeon, and "additional challenges."

Enlarge (credit: YouTube Red)

A couple of big names are severing ties with Felix Kjellberg, otherwise known as PewDiePie on YouTube. The Wall Street Journal reported that Disney's Maker Studios dropped PewDiePie from its company, which had previously partnered with the YouTube creator to make the entertainment network Revelmode. Shortly after that announcement, Variety reported that YouTube cancelled the second season of Scare PewDiePie, the YouTube Red show starring Kjellberg, and dropped PewDiePie from Google Preferred, one of the company's advertising programs for top-tier brands and talent.

All of this follows PewDiePie's video posted last month in which he paid two Indian men to hold up a sign that said "Death to all Jews." He did this using a site called Fiverr, a freelance website that lets anyone pay for a variety of services—including graphic design and programming—for just $5. One of the services listed at the time was for Funny Guys, a comedy duo consisting of the two Indian men who would hold up a sign with anything written on it for $5.

After the initial backlash toward PewDiePie's video, the YouTube creator posted a follow-up video in which he says he didn't think the men would actually hold up such an offensive sign. Fiverr banned Funny Guys after the incident; the duo said they didn't understand what the sign meant at the time. PewDiePie apologized while asking Fiverr to reinstate the men to its website, claiming he felt "partially responsible." He also responded to the controversy on his Tumblr page this weekend, defending his channel as "entertainment, and not a place for any serious political commentary," but he also admitted that his previous actions were "ultimately offensive." PewDiePie is no stranger to offensive content, as most of his videos showcase his bombastic sense of humor, but that hasn't stopped 53 million people from subscribing to his channel.

Enlarge / The (original) Nokia 3310.

Mobile World Congress is right around the corner, and all month we've been getting a slow trickle of news about each company's expected lineup. Now a report from VentureBeat claims to know the MWC offerings from HMD, and it includes a re-release of the Nokia 3310.

The 3310—first released in the year 2000—was one of the best selling phones ever, and the cheap, durable candy bar phone was one of the models that gave Nokia its reputation for durable, unkillable phones. VentureBeat claims a "modern version" of the little workhorse will be on display at MWC, with a release price of €59 ($62). We're apparently talking about a tiny feature phone that makes phone calls and doesn't do much else. Even with the nostalgic design and presumably long battery life, would such a device do well in a world where smartphones are the standard?

If you're out of the loop on the HMD/Nokia brand transaction: HMD is the new home of the Nokia brand for smartphones, after the brand was purchased and ultimately killed by Microsoft. Unlike your typical zombie brand owner, (like say, TCL's use of the Blackberry brand) HMD was created by former Nokia employees with the express purpose of keeping the light of Nokia phones alive. The update of the 3310 seems designed to show the world that HMD knows what made Nokia phones good, and it's honoring that past.

Enlarge / Those huge heaps of WoW gold have got to be worth, like, $50 on Blizzard.net. Easily.

It has been almost two years now since Blizzard began letting World of Warcraft players pay for their monthly game-time subscriptions using in-game gold rather than real money. Now, Blizzard is expanding that effort by letting players indirectly trade WoW gold for in-game items in other Blizzard games like Hearthstone and Overwatch.

The new feature is really just a slight tweak to the WoW Token, a specialized item that can be purchased for $20 (£15/€20) in real money or for a free-floating, in-game gold price at World of Warcraft auction houses. Those Tokens can still be exchanged for 30 days of World of Warcraft subscription time, but as of this week, they can also be redeemed for $15 in balance on your Battle.net account. (European figures TBC.)

That balance can then be spent on packs of Hearthstone cards, Overwatch Loot Boxes, Heroes of the Storm skins, or even downloadable copies of games like StarCraft II and Diablo III. That means that a dedicated WoW player can now fund a multigame Blizzard habit simply by earning enough in-game gold.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

If you play games on PC, where God intended them to be played, chances are you’ve got Steam installed. Since its troubled launch in 2003, Valve’s publishing platform has gone from a thing we had to grudgingly put up with in order to play Half Life 2 to the most popular digital game distribution tool on the planet. Most of us—me included—interact with it pretty much daily.

But as game distribution was shifting from physical to digital, ISPs also began implementing data caps—usually under the guise of “network management” (though anyone who thinks caps aren’t a pure revenue play should send me an e-mail, because I’ve got a bridge to sell you, cheap!). Steam is fast, Steam is easy, and Steam is ubiquitous—but if you’ve just rebuilt a PC or reinstalled an OS and you need to reinstall your games, Steam will obligingly help you put a giant dent in your cap—very quickly.

But there’s an alternative to having to re-download all your Steam games from the Internet: you can set up a local Steam caching server, so that once you download something, you’ve got it on your LAN instead of having to reach for it across the net and incur usage fees.

Enlarge / US President Donald Trump signs an executive order as Vice President Mike Pence looks on at the White House in Washington, DC on January 20, 2017. (credit: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images))

Last week was a busy one for controversial executive orders, and this week started with another.

On Monday, President Trump signed a far-reaching Executive Order directing federal agencies to get rid of two existing regulations for every new regulation added—regardless of almost any other consideration. Specifically, the order says that “unless prohibited by law," agencies “shall identify at least two existing regulations to be repealed." The EO also states that “the total incremental cost of all new regulations, including repealed regulations, to be finalized this year shall be no greater than zero.”

In other words, the costs imposed by repealed rules will have to, at a minimum, equal the costs imposed by any new rules.

Submitted by: Discord666 (via Amazing Superpowers)