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Month: October 2018

Six-hundred million people in Sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity. To meet these power needs, a mix of large public-run utility grids and standalone systems will be necessary for universal access in the region. Governments, aid organizations, and scientists are working to understand which electricity grid solution would be most cost-effective and reliable across urban, peri-urban, and rural areas.

Standalone, or “decentralized” electricity systems—most often solar power with battery storage—are usually thought to be too expensive compared to large state-run grids in all but the most remote locations. However, declining costs of solar and new battery technologies are changing the best pathways to deliver reliable power to people that currently lack access to electricity. New UC Berkeley research published today in Nature Energy finds that decentralized electricity systems in sub-saharan Africa can be designed for extremely high reliability, and that this may come at remarkably low costs in the future.

Jonathan Lee, a Ph.D. candidate in the Energy and Resources Group (ERG) and Associate Professor Duncan Callaway worked with more than 10 years of solar data from NASA and developed an optimization that determines the lowest cost way to build a standalone system given component costs and a target reliability. At current costs, their model indicates that most regions in Sub-Saharan Africa can get 95% reliable power—meaning customers can use electricity from some combination of solar panels and batteries 95% of the time—for roughly USD$0.40 per kWh. Though that cost is high relative to current costs, their model indicates that with aggressive but plausible future cost declines in decentralized system costs, largely in batteries, these costs would drop to levels competitive with the grid in many parts of the continent in less than a decade.

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Visions for what we can do with future electronics depend on finding ways to go beyond the capabilities of silicon conductors. The experimental field of molecular electronics is thought to represent a way forward, and recent work at KTH may enable scalable production of the nanoscale electrodes that are needed in order to explore molecules and exploit their behavior as potentially valuable electronic materials.

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Our universe is permeated with a vast, unseen force that seems to oppose gravity. Physicists call this force dark energy, and it is thought to be constantly pushing our universe outward.

But in June, a group of physicists published a paper in the preprint journal arXiv implying that dark energy changes over time. This means that the universe will not expand forever but might eventually collapse into the size it was before the Big Bang.

Almost immediately, however, physicists found problems with the theory: Several independent groups subsequently published papers that suggested revisions to the conjecture. Now, a paper published on Oct. 2 in the journal Physical Review D suggests that, as it stands, the original conjecture can’t be true because it can’t explain the existence of the Higgs boson — which we know exists, thanks to the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle collider on the border between France and Switzerland. [Beyond Higgs: 5 Elusive Particles That May Lurk in the Universe].

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Fletcher told the ABC the guidelines were developed in consultation with people living with autism, researchers and doctors, and had been approved by the National Health and Medical Research Council.

“It does not change what the NDIS does and indeed it may well be that there are people who, today, would not be diagnosed who will be diagnosed,” he said. “That will be a judgment for clinicians and medical profession and the NDIS will continue to do what it does, which is make an assessment of the impairment that somebody suffers as a result of a disability. Is it likely to be permanent and lifelong? Is it significant? What impact does it have on the functioning?”

Dr Wenn Lawson, the co-chair of the Australian Autism Research Council, said a consistent assessment and diagnosis process for autism meant people would be able to access more appropriate supports.

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On October 16, 2017, an international group of astronomers and physicists excitedly reported the first simultaneous detection of light and gravitational waves from the same source—a merger of two neutron stars. Now, a team that includes several University of Maryland astronomers has identified a direct relative of that historic event.

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