Saturday 8 June 2019

How to speed up the discovery of new solar cell materials

A broad class of materials called perovskites is considered one of the most promising avenues for developing new, more efficient solar cells. But the virtually limitless number of possible combinations of these materials' constituent elements makes the search for promising new perovskites slow and painstaking.

* This article was originally published here

Walmart one-ups Amazon with deliveries direct to refrigerator

Walmart said Friday it was readying a new home delivery service where its employees could come inside and stock up customers' refrigerators.

* This article was originally published here

VA study backs use of physician assistants, nurse practitioners in diabetes care

Veterans Affairs patients with diabetes have similar health outcomes regardless of whether their primary provider is a physician, nurse practitioner (NP), or physician assistant (PA), according to a Durham VA Health Care System study.

* This article was originally published here

New computer attack mimics user's keystroke characteristics and evades detection

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) cyber security researchers have developed a new attack called Malboard. Malboard evades several detection products that are intended to continuously verify the user's identity based on personalized keystroke characteristics.

* This article was originally published here

Somebody's watching you: The surveillance of self-driving cars

Picture the future, where driving is a thing of the past. You can hop in your car or one from a ride-share, buckle up and tell the car where you want to go. During your ride, you can check your email and look up a few things online through your dashboard. Meanwhile, your whereabouts and other details are being tracked remotely by companies. As self-driving cars develop further, autonomous vehicles will play a much larger role in the digital economy as car companies and others harness personalized customer information through geospatial and navigation technologies, combining it with existing financial consumer profiles, according to a study in Surveillance and Society.

* This article was originally published here

300-year-old piston design reinvented with soft flexible materials

Since their invention in the late 1700s when French-born British physicist Denis Papin, the inventor of the pressure cooker, proposed the piston principle, pistons have been used to harness the power of fluids to perform work in numerous machines and devices.

* This article was originally published here

Using sensors to improve the interaction between humans and robots walking together

Researchers at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant"Anna, Co-Robotics srl and Sheffield Hallam University have recently proposed a new approach to improve interactions between humans and robots as they are walking together. Their paper, published in MDPI's Robotics journal, proposes the use of wearable sensors as a means to improve the collaboration between a human and a robot that are moving around in a shared environment.

* This article was originally published here

When smartphone finger taps can lead to side channel attack

You type, hacker deciphers, your password is doomed. That is the grim scenario being discussed in a paper that is now on arXiv. "Hearing your touch: A new acoustic side channel on smartphones," is by authors Ilia Shumailov, Laurent Simon, Jeff Yan and Ross Anderson.

* This article was originally published here

Teens sleep longer, are more alert for homework when school starts later

Preliminary findings from a new study of middle school and high school students suggest that they got more sleep and were less likely to feel too sleepy to do homework after their district changed to later school start times.

* This article was originally published here

Video games battle for the cloud as industry girds for change

The knock-down, drag-out battle in the video game world heads to the cloud as the premier industry event looks to adapt to a consumer shift to streaming services.

* This article was originally published here