World’s Most Efficient Solar Cell and Other Future Tech

It’s #FunFriday! And we’ve got the latest future tech from the science and technology industry around the world. Let’s get started.

World’s Most Efficient Solar Cell

From running on solar energy for 4 straight days to computers that produce water and electricity as byproducts, the world is really betting big on solar technology. Looking at the bigger scheme of things, it is the only type of technology that allows spacecraft to reach the far edges of the solar system.

Australian researchers have developed the world’s most efficient solar cells till date, achieving an energy efficient of 40% - 15% higher than regular solar panels. The research was funded by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and supported by the Australia–US Institute for Advanced Photovoltaics (AUSIAPV).

“We used commercial solar cells, but in a new way, so these efficiency improvements are readily accessible to the solar industry. This is the highest efficiency ever reported for sunlight conversion into electricity,” says Professor Martin Green, “The new results are based on the use of focused sunlight, and are particularly relevant to photovoltaic power towers being developed in Australia.”

World’s Biggest Desalination Plant in Israel

Many probably don’t know that Israel houses the world’s largest desalination plant, and provides for 20% of Israel’s household water. Costing nearly $500 million to build, it will sell water to the Israeli Water Authority for $0.58/1000 liters.

According to NextBigFuture: “The new plant in Israel, called Sorek, was finished in late 2013 but is just now ramping up to its full capacity; it will produce 627,000 cubic meters of water daily, providing evidence that such large desalination facilities are practical. Desalination accounts for 40 percent of Israel’s water supply. Late in 2016, when additional plants will be running, some 50 percent of the country’s water is expected to come from desalination.”

Mirrored Organisms Closer to Reality

In a paper titled "A synthetic molecular system capable of mirror-image genetic replication and transcription", Chinese researchers at the Tsinghua University in Beijing have managed to make a polymerase enzyme that converts DNA into RNA – paving the way for reverse biochemistry in the lab.

“The overwhelmingly homochiral nature of life has left a puzzle as to whether mirror-image biological systems based on a chirally inverted version of molecular machinery could also have existed. This work shows that two key steps in the central dogma of molecular biology, the template-directed polymerization of DNA and transcription into RNA, can be catalyzed by a chemically synthesized D-amino acid polymerase on an L-DNA template,” the website states.

They are very optimistic about the results. “The establishment of such molecular systems with an opposite handedness highlights the potential to exploit enzymatically produced mirror-image biomolecules as research and therapeutic tools.”

Read more at www.bit.ly/q3newsblog. Q3 Technologies is focused on custom offshore software product development, including technology consulting, application migration and modernization, end-to-end support & maintenance services.