Science | WPN World People News

In order to be useful as solar cells, perovskite films must be able to harvest solar energy at a high efficiency that is cost-effective, be relatively easy to manufacture, and be able to withstand the outdoor environment over a long period of time. Dr. Yan Jiang in Prof. Qi's lab has recently published research in Materials Horizons that may help increase the solar efficiency of the organo-metal halide perovskite MAPbI3. He discovered that the use of a methylamine solution during post-annealing led to a decrease in problems associated with grain boundaries. Grain boundaries manifest as gaps between crystalline domains and can lead to unwanted charge recombination. This is a common occurrence in perovskite films and can reduce their efficiency, making the improvement of grain boundary issues essential to maintain high device performance. Dr. Jiang's novel post annealing treatment produced solar cells that had fused grain boundaries, reduced charge recombination, and displayed an outstanding conversion efficiency of 18.4%. His treated perovskite films also exhibited exceptional stability and reproducibility, making his method useful for industrial production of solar cells.

ESA’s historic Rosetta mission has concluded as planned, with the controlled impact onto the comet it had been investigating for more than two years.

During bilateral meetings in Daejeon, South Korea, NASA and France’s Office National d'Etudes et de Recherches Aerospatiales (ONERA) signed an agreement Tuesday to collaborate on research that focuses on mitigating the effects of civil air transportation noise. 

INVECAS will work closely with GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ technology teams to develop and verify a range of intellectual property (IP) for the company’s 22FDX process. Moreover, INVECAS will offer comprehensive ASIC design services to help customers realize SoC designs with high confidence and low risk.

This composite image shows suspected plumes of water vapor erupting at the 7 o'clock position off the limb of Jupiter's moon Europa. The plumes, photographed by NASA's Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, were seen in silhouette as the moon passed in front of Jupiter. Hubble's ultraviolet sensitivity allowed for the features, rising over 100 miles above Europa's icy surface, to be discerned. The water is believed to come from a subsurface ocean on Europa.

Cell viability was assessed by MTT assay, and protein expression was examined by Western blotting and immunocytochemistry. Cell invasion was monitored using invasion chambers, and cell migration was analysed by scratch wound-healing assay. In vitro and ex vivo angiogenesis studies were performed by capillary-like tube formation assay and chick embryo angiogenesis assay (CEA). 7,12-dimethylbenz(a)anthracene (DMBA) induced mammary carcinoma in Sprague-Dawley rats.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have imaged what may be water vapor plumes erupting off the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. This finding bolsters other Hubble observations suggesting the icy moon erupts with high altitude water vapor plumes.

Researchers have created an exotic 3-D racetrack for electrons in ultrathin slices of a nanomaterial they fabricated at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

Researchers at Nanoscience Center of University of Jyväskylä in Finland have succeeded in producing short chains and rings of gold nanoparticles with unprecedented precision. They used a special kind of nanoparticles with a well-defined structure and linked them together with molecular bridges. These structures – being practically huge molecules – allow extremely accurate studies of light–matter interaction in metallic nanostructures and plasmonics.

This artist's illustration shows a gas giant planet circling a pair of red dwarf stars.
The Saturn-mass planet orbits roughly 300 million miles from the stellar duo. The two red dwarf stars are a mere 7 million miles apart. The illustration is based on Hubble Space Telescope observations that helped astronomers confirm the existence of a planet orbiting two stars in the system OGLE-2007-BLG-349, located 8,000 light-years away.