Science gets one step closer to artificial photosynthesis

Despite our best efforts, photovoltaic solar cells are still expensive and only moderately efficient. Plants have been making electrochemical energy from the sun since time immemorial, which has led to a great deal of interest in duplicating the process in the lab. Artificial photosynthesis could prove to be an important technology in any sustainable energy system, and a team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has taken a big step toward making that a reality with a new catalytic model of cobalt oxide.

When we use traditional photovoltaic solar panels, the photons striking the surface produce electrons directly. The efficiency of this process is a little over 20% for commercially available panels. Plants aren’t after electrical energy, but they still need a lot of electrons to generate biochemical energy. Energy in eukaryotic cells (like animals and plants) comes mostly from the molecule ATP. The overwhelming majority of ATP in cells is produced through the electron transport chain. That is what artificial photosynthesis is trying to tap into — the flow of electrons.

Plants undergoing photosynthesis are able to enzymatically catalyse the oxidation of water in a structure called photosystem II. When good old H₂O is oxidized, you’re left with four electrons, two hydrogen ions (protons), and one oxygen. This process is highly endothermic on its own, which means you have to put a lot of energy into the system to make it happen. The work going on at the Berkeley National Laboratory is centered around catalyzing the oxidation of water so it can be done with light, just like in a plant.

It has been known for some time that cobalt oxide nanocrystals were able to catalyse the oxidation of water when exposed to light, but the process wasn’t good enough. Oxidizing water is a four-electron process, but the second and third steps have always been sluggish with cobalt oxide. Through analysis of the reaction with infrared spectroscopy, the Berkeley team realized there are different types of catalytic sites in a cobalt oxide surface — some are faster, and the others are slower. To oxidize water more efficiently, you simply need to control the structure of the catalyst so its surface has more of the fast sites.

So you’ve broken down water molecules, but now what? A plant uses the electrons to run redox reactions and in order to shuffle the protons around and produce ATP. The oxygen is released as a waste product, much to our benefit. In artificial photosynthesis, the energy from the electrons can be used to generate fuels from carbon dioxide and protons (those hydrogen ions).

The researchers suspect that a cobalt oxide catalyst that has been properly created to produce more fast catalytic sites could use the available light more efficiently than photovoltaics. Cobalt oxide is also plentiful and easy to work with. Solving this intermediate step in the process is not the last piece of the puzzle, but it’s starting to come together.

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Facebook eyes up solar-powered drones, to blanket the world with internet access

Facebook, with the thinly veiled veneer of “bringing internet access to the underconnected,” is looking to acquire Titan Aerospace — an American maker of high-altitude UAVs (drones). The idea is that these Titan drones would be used to connect the 5 billion or so people who don’t yet have reliable internet access — a philanthropic act on the face of it, but when you consider that Facebook’s entire business model is predicated on continued growth, and that almost everyone in the world with an internet connection already has a Facebook account, you can see that this is more about self-preservation than humanitarianism.

Titan Aerospace has two products, the Solara 50 and Solara 60, which the company refers to as “atmospheric satellites.” They seem to be functionally identical, except the Solara 60 can carry a larger payload. Both aircraft are powered by a large number of solar cells, allowing them to ascend to 65,000 feet (almost 20 kilometers), and then circle over a specific region for up to five years (presumably that’s the lifetime of the on-board lithium-ion batteries, which are required for night-time operation). The high altitude is important: The FAA only regulates airspace up to 60,000 feet — above that, pretty much anything goes.

 Once these atmospheric satellites are up there, there’s a wide range of possible applications. Facebook is obviously interested in internet connectivity, but mapping, meteorology, global positioning, rapid response to disasters and wildfires, and a whole slew of other scientific and military applications are also possible.  (Read: Facebook creates Internet.org alliance to reduce price of mobile data plans to 1% of current price.)

As for what level of connectivity Facebook hopes to provide with these drones, it’s too early to say. TechCrunch reports that Facebook, which is looking to acquire Titan for $60 million, would launch 11,000 Solara 60 drones. Their coverage would begin with Africa, and then spread out from there. There’s no word on how fast these connections might be, nor how much such a connection would cost the end user. Perhaps more importantly, there’s also no word on how Facebook intends to connect these 11,000 satellites to the internet. Facebook will need to build a lot of ground stations, perhaps in very remote and very hard to administer areas, and then run fiber to hook them up to the internet. And yes, in case you were wondering, this effort appears to be very similar to Google’s Project Loon — which is essentially the same thing, but using big balloons instead of winged aircraft.

It’s worth pointing out that Titan hasn’t yet produced a commercial UAV. “Technology demonstrations” have been flown (probably much smaller prototypes), and “initial commercial operations” will start sometime in 2015. Perhaps this is why Facebook is only paying $60 million for Titan, rather than the $19 billion it paid for WhatsApp.

While bringing internet access to the underconnected masses is really quite a noble undertaking, don’t ever mistake this for an altruistic act. One of Facebook’s most pressing problems is how to grow its user base. Almost everyone who has an internet connection already has a Facebook account (or uses one of its national competitors, like Russia’s VKontakte). If Facebook doesn’t continue to grow, and doesn’t miraculously stumble across some way to make more money (its ads aren’t doing very well), the stock market will react very poorly indeed. Facebook is almost a victim of its own success — it got so big so quickly that it’s virtually impossible to continue the same growth trajectory. Acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp were a savvy moves to bring in a few hundred million more users, but ultimately they were nothing more than stopgap measures. Bringing the next billion users online and into Facebook’s gribbly mandibles will be a very hard task indeed.

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3D printing in color with Photoshop CC, hands-on

3D printing is one of the most powerful new tools in the arsenal of many creatives, so it was only a matter of time before Adobe added support for it to Photoshop. You can get a sense of the capability from ourcoverage of the initial announcement, but since then I’ve been able to go hands-on and create and print — a small, in-color 3D statue using Photoshop CC and the Shapeways printing service. The process was a little trickier than I anticipated, but the statue came out quite nicely.

Creating your model

The process begins with a 3D model of the object you want to print. Photoshop has support for importing 3D objects, and creating textures on those objects, but it is not really a true 3D modeling tool. So you’re likely to start your project by getting a model from an online site, although you could use one or more of the simple object samples provided with Photoshop. You could also use a tool like the free Sketchup app from Google or the open-source Blender to create your model. Professionals may be willing to pay up for a high-end tool like Solidworks. In my case, I decided to use the same Thingiverse model of a Buddha that our sister site PC Magazine has used to test 3D printers. The model is monochrome, so this being a Photoshop project, the first thing I had to do was give it some color by painting it.

3D Painting

Photoshop’s 3D painting tools may be unfamiliar to many Photoshop users who have only used the program for images. They are much more sophisticated than Photoshop’s traditional image painting tools. Its 3D painting model not only incorporates the texture of the underlying material in how colors are applied, but also lets you set the way paint is applied. Typically you’ll be painting on what Photoshop calls the Diffuse surface, but you can also paint Specular highlights or change the Roughness of the image, for example. The paintbrush tools also have settings for how the paint falls off as the surface curves away from where you are painting. In essence, you can model many of the physical properties of a paintbrush on a 3D surface to create highly realistic objects.

Discovering lighting the hard way

Since almost all 3D printing is done in single color materials, there typically hasn’t been any need to worry about either color or tonal values. As a result, 3D models tend to be lit in a way that makes them pleasing to view online — with the lighting completely ignored when the object is printed. However, since my goal was to print in color, the print driver had to decide how to handle the lighting in the model. I received a nasty surprise when my print preview image was almost black — the driver had literally turned off the lights. Even with Adobe’s help, there didn’t seem to be a way to change that behavior, so I needed to lower the intensity of the lights in Photoshop and completely repaint the image. I would have thought that a simple Curves layer would have accomplished the same thing, but it doesn’t work that way when you’re doing 3D printing.

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Why is Microsoft trying to smuggle Windows into your Android phone?

For more than two decades, ever since DOS and Windows 3.1x, dual-booting has been restricted to hardcore enthusiasts who found being able to boot from one or more operating systems convenient and useful.

If the presentation by Microsoft's Joe Belfiore last week in Barcelona is an indication of how the mobile market will evolve, we're about to see a comeback of dual booting with Android and Windows Phone sitting on the same phone.

The push is likely to come from Microsoft for whom this might be one of the biggest punts of its long history, similar to putting Internet Explorer into Windows 95.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

The gist of the later part of Belfiore's presentation is that Microsoft is working closely with hardware partners to make sure that there is little or no change needed to get a smartphone (or indeed any ARM-based devices) to run Windows Phone or Android.

X86 devices like PCs, laptops and servers run Windows or Linux (or indeed MacOS X) indiscriminately and there's no reason why that shouldn't be the case for smartphones in general.

This is a logical step that is likely to be more helpful to Microsoft than Android - and this tacit agreement will end up being most detrimental to Apple.

How bold is too bold?

It seems likely that Microsoft may encourage partners to offer dual-boot as standard on all Android smartphones by offering Windows Phone for free or for a huge discount.

The cynical among us might suggest that as well as offering Windows Phone for free (or at a low cost), Microsoft will slash the fees associated with cross licensing agreements signed with scores of manufacturers of Android devices to persuade them to put Windows Phone prominently on the Android phone (perhaps on the boot screen).

Either solution will cost money but would enable Microsoft to get Windows into the hands of potentially tens of millions of Android users.

It will hope that they will try Windows Phone and be so enamoured of it that they eventually switch to a solely Windows Phone device or continue to use the two platforms altogether.

This would help Microsoft expand the number of smartphones running Windows Phone exponentially and we might even see Microsoft-backed versions of Android without Google's services (similar to what Nokia is doing), something which would be something of an ironic move.

As always though, the more competition in a market, the more likely innovation will thrive.

The business allure of dual-booting

So what's the point of dual-booting for consumers? Most end-users and consumers are unlikely to gain much from the exercise, depending on how dual-booting devices are pitched to the mainstream.

But there is a category of users for whom this will be a godsend and that is the business/enterprise audience.

Having Windows 8 Embedded or Windows Phone 8 plus Android on a sleek smartphone that can be used both for work and leisure will be an attractive proposal to some.

Microsoft's mobile platform offers easy access to Office 365, Active Directory and the entire Windows ecosystem (including Xbox) and is an incredibly attractive alternative to BlackBerry.

That's the theory many think Redmond will follow because the other option is to see Windows Phone stuck as the third choice after Android and iOS, and seeing numbers of shipped (but not sold) units increase over time.

Piggy-backing on Google's Android is definitely not an ego-boosting move for Microsoft but it is by far the most pragmatic.

It is also one that can yield great results reasonably quickly, which is what Satya Nadella needs at the moment to stamp his authority on the company.

• So how about that Nokia X? Should Microsoft be worried?

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