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Around the rim of the lens is an array of other electronics, including a custom-designed chip with a radio that streams content to the display and a variety of sensors, including an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer for tracking the user’s eye movements. This eye tracking capability not only ensures that AR imagery holds still as the user looks around, but also makes it possible to control the device through eye movements alone.

Despite their efforts to pack as much into the lens as possible, it won’t be a stand-alone piece of equipment. Most of the computing power required to run AR applications will be contained in a companion device worn around the neck, which will stream the content to the lens wirelessly.

The lens also hasn’t yet been cleared by the FDA for human use, so early demonstrations involve looking through a lens on a stick just in front of the eye. At present it is only capable of producing images in a green monochrome. But according to CNET , the device allows a user to select a variety of apps arranged in a ring around the periphery of their field of vision using nothing more than their gaze. These make it possible to do everything from checking flight information to using a compass to navigate and track fitness data like heart rate and lap number.

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People with type O-blood are considered “universal donors” because their blood doesn’t have any antigens or proteins, meaning anybody’s body will be able to accept it in an emergency.

But why are there different blood types? Researchers don’t fully know, but factors such as where someone’s ancestors are from and past infections which spurred protective mutations in the blood may have contributed to the diversity, according to Dr. Douglas Guggenheim, a hematologist with Penn Medicine. People with type O blood may get sicker with cholera, for example, while people with type A or B blood may be more likely to experience blood clotting issues. While our blood can’t keep up with the different biological or viral threats going around in real time, it may reflect what’s happened in the past.

“In short, it’s almost like the body has evolved around its environment in order to protect it as best as possible,” Guggenheim says.

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A German research team has developed a tandem solar cell that reaches 24 percent efficiency—measured according to the fraction of photons converted into electricity (i.e., electrons). This sets a new world record as the highest efficiency achieved so far with this combination of organic and perovskite-based absorbers. The solar cell was developed by Professor Dr. Thomas Riedl’s group at the University of Wuppertal together with researchers from the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Cologne and other project partners from the Universities of Potsdam and Tübingen as well as the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschng in Düsseldorf. The results have been published in Nature under the title “Perovskite–organic tandem solar cells with indium oxide interconnect.”

Conventional solar cell technologies are predominantly based on the semiconductor silicon and are now considered to be “as good as it gets.” Significant improvements in their efficiency—i.e., more watts of electrical power per watt of solar radiation collected—can hardly be expected. That makes it all the more necessary to develop new solar technologies that can make a decisive contribution to the energy transition. Two such alternative absorber materials have been combined in this work. Here, organic semiconductors were used, which are carbon-based compounds that can conduct electricity under certain conditions. These were paired with a perovskite, based on a lead-halogen compound, with excellent semiconducting properties. Both of these technologies require significantly less material and energy for their production compared to conventional silicon cells, making it possible to make solar cells even more sustainable.

As sunlight consists of different spectral components, i.e., colors, efficient solar cells have to convert as much of this sunlight as possible into electricity. This can be achieved with so-called tandem cells, in which different semiconductor materials are combined in the solar cell, each of which absorbs different ranges of the . In the current study the organic semiconductors were used for the ultraviolet and visible parts of the light, while the perovskite can efficiently absorb in the near-infrared. Similar combinations of materials have already been explored in the past, but now the research team succeeded in significantly increasing their performance.

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