If you’re thinking about going solar, we’ve got good news: your options have just been expanded. SolarWindow Technologies announced that their new cells can produce 50 times the energy of panels commonly in use today. What that means is a faster return on the investment required for a solar set up. CEO John Conklin called it “the most innovative breakthrough in powering the half-billion square feet of windows installed on commercial buildings in the US, annually.”
Here’s how the windows supposedly work. Glass panels are first treated with a photovoltaic coating made up of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and a few secret ingredients that SolarWindow is keeping under wraps. The “active layer” absorbs light, while the transparent conductors make energy extraction possible. For transparency, the coatings are applied in liquid form at ambient pressures and dried at low temps. The result is clear solar paneling, and the coatings can be added to any conventional glass or plastic.
Related: Ingenious Sunport lets you use solar energy even if you don’t have solar panels
Logically, the SolarWindow coatings are designed to be applied to the interior of glass or plastic window units, to protect the coatings from the elements. They also plan on offering a 25-year warranty to match those offered by conventional solar panels.
By comparison, traditional solar systems need 5-11 years to show an investment return, and that’s in addition to requiring 10-12 acres of space. SolarWindows claim that they can use natural, shaded, or even artificial light to produce energy, unlike conventional solar, which means they’re good for use on all four sides of a building instead of just on the roof.
The SolarWindow’s Power Reinvented webcast showed a working version of the tech to participants and stakeholders last Thursday, August 20. Their website offers a slew of independent performance evaluations on everything from environmental impact to power comparisons ,so prospective buyers and media can draw their own conclusions. Ultimately, we’ll follow the evolution of the tech with our fingers crossed that SolarWindow can meet all of its claims.
The paneling will reportedly be available within the next four years, so unfortunately you can’t order them today. However, if you’re doing a major home or commercial remodel or construct, it’s worth considering solar window tech over today’s solar panels.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.