After TCL announced plans to stop producing BlackBerry phones later this year, it seemed like the once-popular BlackBerry brand would finally be coming to an end. "But now, a new company has pledged to take up the BlackBerry mantle with promises of releasing a new phone featuring a good 'ol physical keyboard sometime next year," reports Gizmodo. From the report: In a press release today, Austin, Texas-based OnwardMobility announced that it had reached an agreement with both BlackBerry and FIH Mobile Limited (a subsidiary of Foxconn) to create a new 5G BlackBerry Android phone with a physical keyboard. The device is slated to be available in both Europe and North America sometime in the first half of 2021. That said, this new BlackBerry phone will have slightly different ambitions than the previous BlackBerry handsets produced by TCL, as OnwardMobility is planning to target its BlackBerry phone at businesses and enterprise professionals who want something that delivers both a tactile typing experience and an emphasis on privacy and security.

When it comes to producing a new BlackBerry phone, OnwardMobility CEO Peter Franklin said, "Enterprise professionals are eager for secure 5G devices that enable productivity, without sacrificing the user experience. BlackBerry smartphones are known for protecting communications, privacy, and data." BlackBerry CEO John Chen also issued similar sentiments, saying that "BlackBerry is thrilled OnwardMobility will deliver a BlackBerry 5G smartphone device with physical keyboard leveraging our high standards of trust and security synonymous with our brand. We are excited that customers will experience the enterprise and government level security and mobile productivity the new BlackBerry 5G smartphone will offer."

"A simulated F-16 Viper fighter jet with an artificial intelligence-driven 'pilot' went undefeated in five rounds of mock air combat against an actual top Air Force fighter jockey today," reports The Drive in an update to a story shared by Slashdot reader schwit1. From the report: The event was the culmination of an effort that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began last year as an adjacent project to the larger Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program, which is focused on exploring how artificial intelligence and machine learning may help automate various aspects of air-to-air combat. Heron Systems, a company with just 30 employees, had beaten out Aurora Flight Sciences, EpiSys Science, Georgia Tech Research Institute, Lockheed Martin, Perspecta Labs, PhysicsAI, and SoarTech to claim the top spot in the last of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) AlphaDogfight Trials. This three-day event had started on Aug. 18, 2020.

On the first day, all eight teams had spared against five different types of simulated adversaries that Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) had developed. This included one dubbed a "zombie," with a flight profile similar to a cruise missile or a large drone, as well as ones that performed like fighter jets, such as the F-16 Viper, or heavy bombers, according to Air Force Magazine. On Aug. 19, the teams 'flew' against each other, whittling down the number of competitors to four finalists -- Aurora Flight Sciences, Heron Systems, Lockheed Martin, and PhysicsAI -- who moved on to the last phase. Those four remaining teams then battled each other in semi-finals earlier today.

Lockheed Martin beat Physics AI, while Heron Systems defeated Aurora Flight Sciences. Heron Systems pulled out a major upset over number two ranked Lockheed Martin before going on to face the actual human F-16 pilot, a Weapons School instructor pilot with the callsign Banger, in simulated combat. This tournament was the third and final trial in a series of events that started in November 2019. That initial trial involved teams flying simulated F-15 Eagle fighter jets, while the second one, which took place in January of this year, shifted to using the F-16 as the representative aircraft. The teams taking part in the competition this week again used digital representations of the Viper. It's not entirely clear how the outcome of this tournament may now impact the larger Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program directly. DARPA has said in the past that it hopes the event will at least "energize and expand a base of AI developers" for ACE.

tedlistens writes: Facing questions about a mysterious series of changes to some fact-check labels, Facebook recently wrote to a group of senators with an assurance: its fact checkers can and do label "opinion" content if it crosses the line into falsehood. What Facebook didn't tell the senators: the company draws that line, and can pressure changes to fact checks & misinformation penalties. And it does. Facebook acknowledged to me that it may ask fact checkers to change their ratings, and that it exercises control over pages' internal misinformation strikes.

In one case -- a video containing misinformation about climate change published by PragerU -- Facebook downgraded a fact-check label from "false" to "partly false," and removed the page's misinformation strikes. Was the change warranted? "Let me put it this way," says Scott Johnson, an editor at Climate Feedback, one of Facebook's third-party fact checking organizations. "Our reviewers gave it a -2 rating on our +2 to -2 scale and our summary describes it as 'incorrect and misleading to viewers,' so we had selected the 'false' label accordingly."

In some cases the video now carries no apparent label at all. After an update that Facebook announced last week, the company is using what it calls a "lighter-weight warning label" for "partly false" content in the U.S.: an unobtrusive box below the video under "related articles" that says "fact check," with a link. Meanwhile, older versions of the video appeared to evade labels completely: A handful of other PragerU posts containing the video appear without any labeling, a review by Fast Company found. Versions of the labeled and unlabeled video have now racked up millions of views since April 2016, when it was first published.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A California judge has granted Uber and Lyft an emergency reprieve from an order requiring them to treat their drivers as employees. The companies were facing a Thursday deadline to comply with the order. Earlier today, Lyft announced that it would be forced to shut down in the state at midnight tonight. Lyft said it was being forced to shut down its California operations by a 2019 California law, AB 5, that forces ride-hailing companies to treat their drivers as employees rather than independent contractors. Uber had warned that it was likely to do the same if the courts didn't delay enforcement of the law.

"This is not something we wanted to do, as we know millions of Californians depend on Lyft for daily, essential trips," Lyft wrote. However, the company said, the new law would "necessitate an overhaul of the entire business model -- it's not a switch that can be flipped overnight." The judge's emergency stay means that Lyft and Uber will be able to keep operating under their current model while they continue litigating whether the new law applies to them. Yesterday, in a podcast interview Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi rejected the notion his company is capable of employing all of its drivers in California.

"We can't go out and hire 50,000 people overnight," Khosrowshahi said on the Pivot School podcast hosted by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. "Everything that we have built is based on this platform that... brings people who want transportation or delivery together. You can't flip that overnight."

An anonymous reader shares a report: This morning, multiple readers wrote in to alert us to a major Adobe gaff. It seems the latest update to the Lightroom app for iPhone and iPad inadvertently wiped users' photos and presets that were not already synced to the cloud. Adobe has confirmed that there is no way to get them back. The issue first cropped up on the Photoshop feedback forums two days ago, when the Lightroom app on iOS was updated to version 5.4. A user named Mohamad Alif Eqnur posted asking why all of his photos, presets, and watermark data had been removed after updating to the most recent version through the iOS app store. This was followed by replies from other users saying that the same thing happened to them, whether or not they were subscription based or free. One user posted to Reddit's r/Lightroom subreddit saying that they had lost "2+ years of edits" after the update.

"I've talked with customer service for 4+ hours over the past 2 days and just a minute ago they told me that the issue has no fix and that these lost photos are unrecoverable," wrote the user. "Adobe is unbelievable some times. All I got was a 'we're sincerely sorry' and nothing else. 2+ years of photo edits just gone because of Adobe and all they give is a sorry, lmao." esterday afternoon, at 4:30pm Eastern Time, Adobe officially confirmed the issue, explaining that customers who updated to Lightroom 5.4 on iPhone and iPad "may be missing photos and presets," that those photos and presets are "not recoverable," and that they "sincerely apologize" to users who have been affected by the issue. Version 5.4.1 has already been released, fixing the issue, but it can do nothing about the lost data.

A lesser-known technology known as "mailto" links can be abused to launch attacks on the users of email desktop clients. From a report: The new attacks can be used to secretly steal local files and have them emailed as attachments to attackers, according to a research paper published last week by academics from two German universities. The "vulnerability" at the heart of these attacks is how email clients implemented RFC6068 -- the technical standard that describes the 'mailto' URI scheme. Mailto refer to special types of links, usually supported by web browsers or email clients. These are links that, when clicked, they open a new email compose/reply window rather than a new web page (website). RFC6068 says that mailto links can support various parameters. When used with mailto links, these parameters will pre-fill the new email window with predefined content.

Google Pixel Buds can now alert you to the sounds of a crying baby, barking dog, or the siren of an emergency vehicle when you're listening to something and may not otherwise hear the sound. From a report: The feature reduces the volume of whatever music or podcast you're listening to and plays a chime sound to signal an alert. Attention Alerts is part of an AI-powered experimental feature being added to Google's flagship earbuds today in a larger firmware update. Google trained AI systems to recognize the trio of sounds by scraping audio from publicly available videos, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat. Amazon's Echo speakers have the ability to detect sounds that may be important in a home setting, like alarms, breaking glass, or sounds indicating someone is in your home when you're away.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In a turn of fortune, Airbnb today announced that it has filed to go public, albeit confidentially. The move puts the home-sharing service on a path to a public offering sooner rather than later, and comes after reports that the company was prepping an IPO filing this month. Those same reports indicated that Airbnb could go public as soon as the end of the year. A Q3 or Q4 Airbnb offering is therefore a distinct possibility.

The company promised in 2019 that it would go public in 2020, but that pledge seemed far-off in the middle of the year. Since then, Airbnb has made noise about different parts of its business coming back to life, although changed by new travel and work and vacation patterns from its users. If Airbnb has filed, we can presume that present results are good enough to get it life, else the firm would have not filed and would have simply gone public later. The question now becomes if its Q2 numbers were good enough to get it out the door, or if the company intends to update its S-1 filing with Q3 numbers, push the filing live and go public with more recovery time in its results.

An anonymous reader shares a report from IEEE Spectrum, written by Mark Crittenden, head of battery development and integration at Oxis Energy: Electric aircraft are all the rage, with prototypes in development in every size from delivery drones to passenger aircraft. But the technology has yet to take off, and for one reason: lack of a suitable battery. For a large passenger aircraft to take off, cruise, and land hundreds of kilometers away would take batteries that weigh thousands of kilograms -- far too heavy for the plane to be able to get into the air in the first place. Even for relatively small aircraft, such as two-seat trainers, the sheer weight of batteries limits the plane's payload, curtails its range, and thus constrains where the aircraft can fly. Reducing battery weight would be an advantage not only for aviation, but for other electric vehicles, such as cars, trucks, buses, and boats, all of whose performance is also directly tied to the energy-to-weight ratio of their batteries. For such applications, today's battery of choice is lithium ion. It reached maturity years ago, with each new incremental improvement smaller than the last. We need a new chemistry.

Since 2004 my company, Oxis Energy, in Oxfordshire, England, has been working on one of the leading contenders -- lithium sulfur. Our battery technology is extremely lightweight: Our most recent models are achieving more than twice the energy density typical of lithium-ion batteries. Lithium sulfur is also capable of providing the required levels of power and durability needed for aviation, and, most important, it is safe enough. After all, a plane can't handle a sudden fire or some other calamity by simply pulling to the side of the road. The new technology has been a long time coming, but the wait is now over. The first set of flight trials have already been completed.
[...]
Three factors will determine whether lithium-sulfur batteries ultimately succeed or fail. First is the successful integration of the batteries into multiple aircraft types, to prove the principle. Second is the continued refinement of the cell chemistry. Third is the continued reduction in the unit cost. A plus here is that sulfur is about as cheap as materials get, so there's reason to hope that with volume manufacturing, the unit cost will fall below that of the lithium-ion design, as would be required for commercial success. Oxis has already produced tens of thousands of cells, and it is currently scaling up two new projects. Right now, it is establishing a manufacturing plant for the production of both the electrolyte and the cathode active material in Port Talbot, Wales. Later, the actual mass production of lithium-sulfur cells will begin on a site that belongs to Mercedes-Benz Brazil, in Minas Gerais, Brazil. This state-of-the-art plant should be commissioned and operating by 2023. If the economies of scale prove out, and if the demand for electric aircraft rises as we expect, then lithium-sulfur batteries could begin to supplant lithium-ion batteries in this field. And what works in the air ought to work on the ground, as well.

New submitter HotSyncer shares a report from Phys.Org: [I]n a paper published on Aug. 17, in Nature Nanotechnology, Stanford scientists demonstrate a new approach to slow light significantly, much like an echo chamber holds onto sound, and to direct it at will. Researchers in the lab of Jennifer Dionne, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford, structured ultrathin silicon chips into nanoscale bars to resonantly trap light and then release or redirect it later. These "high-quality-factor" or "high-Q" resonators could lead to novel ways of manipulating and using light, including new applications for quantum computing, virtual reality and augmented reality; light-based WiFi; and even the detection of viruses like SARS-CoV-2.

"We're essentially trying to trap light in a tiny box that still allows the light to come and go from many different directions," said postdoctoral fellow Mark Lawrence, who is also lead author of the paper. "It's easy to trap light in a box with many sides, but not so easy if the sides are transparent -- as is the case with many Silicon-based applications."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: The security research team at Comparitech today disclosed how an unsecured database left almost 235 million Instagram, TikTok and YouTube user profiles exposed online in what can only be described as a massive data leak. The data was spread across several datasets; the most significant being two coming in at just under 100 million each and containing profile records apparently scraped from Instagram. The third-largest was a dataset of some 42 million TikTok users, followed by just under 4 million YouTube user profiles.

Comparitech says that, based on the samples it collected, one in five records contained either a telephone number or email address. Every record also included at least some, sometimes all, the following information: Profile name; Full real name; Profile photo; and Account description. Statistics about follower engagement, including: Number of followers; Engagement rate; Follower growth rate; Audience gender; Audience age; Audience location; Likes; Last post timestamp; Age; and Gender. "The information would probably be most valuable to spammers and cybercriminals running phishing campaigns," Paul Bischoff, Comparitech editor, says. "Even though the data is publicly accessible, the fact that it was leaked in aggregate as a well-structured database makes it much more valuable than each profile would be in isolation," Bischoff adds. Indeed, Bischoff told me that it would be easy for a bot to use the database to post targeted spam comments on any Instagram profile matching criteria such as gender, age or number of followers. The data appeared to have originated from a company called Deep Social, which was banned by both Facebook and Instagram in 2018 after scraping user profile data. The company was wound down sometime after this.

The researchers reached out to Deep Social, which then forwarded the disclosure to a Hong Kong-registered social media influencer data-marketing company called Social Data. Social Data shut down the database about three hours after the researchers' initial email. "Social Data has denied any connection between itself and Deep Social," reports Forbes, citing Comparitech.

In a podcast interview Wednesday, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi rejected the notion his company is capable of employing all of its drivers in California, as a state judge has ordered it to do so [and comply with AB5, the state law that makes it more difficult for companies to use independent contractors]. The Verge reports: "We can't go out and hire 50,000 people overnight," Khosrowshahi said on the Pivot School podcast hosted by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. "Everything that we have built is based on this platform that... brings people who want transportation or delivery together. You can't flip that overnight." [T]he companies claim they would need to shut down operations in California completely in order to retool their businesses to comply with the law. Khosrowshahi said the shutdown likely wouldn't be permanent. "It'll take time but we're going to figure out a way to be in California," he said. "We want to be in California."

Khosrowshahi confirmed reports that Uber was looking into other models, like a franchise-style system in which the company would license its brand to fleet operators in California. "There's a black car service that we have that's based on fleets," he said. "And we are trying to figure out exactly what we do going forward." Regardless, Khosrowshahi said that Uber's response would be to limit the number of drivers allowed on its platform and to raise prices for customers after it eventually relaunches in the state. He predicted that upwards of 80 percent of those drivers who only log onto the app for 5-10 a week would no longer be able to earn on the platform. Trip prices in dense urban centers like San Francisco will go up around 20 percent, he said, while rates would be even higher in smaller, less dense cities.

Uber's critics note that there is nothing stopping Uber from continuing to provide drivers with the flexibility to set their own schedules under AB5. But the company rejects this notion, arguing that no company in California or elsewhere lets employees set their own hours. Uber has proposed a "third way" through the ballot measure it's supporting in California called Proposition 22. The measure would allow the company to sidestep AB5 and go on classifying drivers as independent contractors, while also providing some added benefits like a minimum wage and access to health insurance. Along with Lyft and DoorDash, it has committed to spend over $100 million, while union-backed driver groups only have around $866,000 to lobby against it.

SmartAboutThings writes: Microsoft released Flight Simulator 2020 but many people who bought it online are having problems downloading it, installing it, or simply running the new game. Some users simply didn't get to download the game even if they tried several times to do so. When the download was finally complete, they received an error while trying to install it. Even if some users also got through the installation, they faced another problem: the game freezes at the starting screen. Microsoft didn't present a solution yet but Windowsreport.com wrote first about these problems and offered some workarounds and possible solutions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: The UK's Department for Transportation said Tuesday it plans new regulations in preparation for "automated lane-keeping-assist systems." These kinds of systems could potentially let a car control all necessary functions at lower speeds, even in the city. It's probably a matter of when this kind of technology is available, and when it does hit the road, the UK hopes to have comprehensive regulations in place and seeks input from relevant industries. The current proposal would allow this kind of automated system to operate at speeds up to 70 mph on roads in the country. This follows regulations passed by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe this past June, which allows this kind of technology to operate at speeds up to 37 mph.

Perhaps more crucially, the future legislation in the UK will look to either define cars featuring automated lane-keeping assist as autonomous or not. If the country does, automakers and technology companies would be legally responsible for the car's safety since under an "autonomous" definition, driver's wouldn't be the ones operating the vehicle when the system is engaged. This legal dance has led numerous automakers to skip Level 3 automated systems and focus on Level 4 and 5, which would give a car total autonomy and not require the vehicle to hand back controls to the driver in the event of an error. Essentially, UK drivers would be legally permitted to rely on future automated systems with no penalties, unlike today.

Facebook on Wednesday banned about 900 pages and groups and 1,500 ads tied to the pro-Trump conspiracy theory QAnon, part of a sweeping action that also restricted the reach of over 10,000 Instagram pages and almost 2,000 Facebook groups pushing the baseless conspiracy theory that has spawned real-world violence. From a report: Facebook also took down thousands of accounts, pages and groups as part of what they called a "policy expansion," seeking to limit violent rhetoric tied to QAnon, political militias and protest groups like antifa. QAnon is an elaborate, unfounded conspiracy theory alleging that President Donald Trump is secretly saving the world from a group of prominent Satanic cannibals that run the world. The group has been linked to several violent, criminal incidents, including a train hijacking, kidnappings, a police chase and a murder. The new policy states that "Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts associated with these movements and organizations will be removed when they discuss potential violence." QAnon, militia movements and violent movements tied to protests will now no longer be allowed to purchase ads on Facebook. QAnon ads, which often pushed merchandise, were allowed on the platform before Wednesday's announcement.

Facebook's failure to halt the spread of coronavirus misinformation makes it a "major threat" to public health, a damning new report has warned. From a news report: Research by activist group Avaaz found health misinformation relating to the pandemic was viewed 3.8bn times on the social media site in the last year. Just 16 per cent of all misinformation analysed in the study carried a warning label, with the remaining 84 per cent remaining online without a warning. Facebook has vowed to crack down on conspiracy theories and misleading content linked to Covid-19 amid concerns inaccurate information was spreading unchecked on the platform. A company spokesperson said the findings of the report did not "reflect the steps we've taken to keep it from spreading on our service." Facebook said it had applied warning labels to 98m pieces of content and removed a further 7m between April and June. The site added that it had also directed more than 2bn people to resources from official health authorities.

Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, writing in a column for The New York Times: Were almost any country other than China involved, Mr. Trump's demands would be indefensible. But the threatened bans on TikTok and WeChat, whatever their motivations, can also be seen as an overdue response, a tit for tat, in a long battle for the soul of the internet. In China, the foreign equivalents of TikTok and WeChat -- video and messaging apps such as YouTube and WhatsApp -- have been banned for years. The country's extensive blocking, censorship and surveillance violate just about every principle of internet openness and decency. China keeps a closed and censorial internet economy at home while its products enjoy full access to open markets abroad. The asymmetry is unfair and ought no longer be tolerated. The privilege of full internet access -- the open internet -- should be extended only to companies from countries that respect that openness themselves. Behind the TikTok controversy is an important struggle between two dueling visions of the internet. The first is an older vision: the idea that the internet should, in a neutral fashion, connect everyone, and that blocking and censorship of sites by nation-states should be rare and justified by more than the will of the ruler. The second and newer vision, of which China has been the leading exponent, is "net nationalism," which views the country's internet primarily as a tool of state power. Economic growth, surveillance and thought control, from this perspective, are the internet's most important functions. China, in furtherance of this vision, bans not only most foreign competitors to its tech businesses but also foreign sources of news, religious instruction and other information, while using the internet to promote state propaganda and engage in foreign electoral interference.

For many years, laboring under the vain expectation that China, succumbing to inexorable world-historical forces, would become more like us, Western democracies have allowed China to exploit this situation. We have accepted, with only muted complaints, Chinese censorship and blocking of content from abroad while allowing Chinese companies to explore and exploit whatever markets it likes. Few foreign companies are allowed to reach Chinese citizens with ideas or services, but the world is fully open to China's online companies. From China's perspective, the asymmetry has been a bonanza that has served economic as well as political goals. While China does have great engineers, European nations overrun by American tech companies must be jealous of the thriving tech industry that China has built in the absence of serious foreign competition (aided by the theft of trade secrets). At the same time, China has managed, to an extent many believed impossible, to use the internet to suppress any nascent political opposition and ceaselessly promote its ruling party. The idealists who thought the internet would automatically create democracy in China were wrong.

An internal breach at Twitter a half decade ago yielded data that was later used by Saudi Arabia to harass or arrest people critical of the government, according to lawsuits, human rights groups and the relative of a person apprehended in 2018. From a report: In 2015, two Twitter employees allegedly accessed more than 6,000 accounts while acting as spies for the government of Saudi Arabia. Some details of the incident have been disclosed by U.S. prosecutors, who charged the two men last November, and in recent lawsuits by people who alleged their accounts were among those breached. But few other details have emerged about what the Saudi government may have done with the data. Now, the sister of a Saudi man who ran an anonymous Twitter account said her brother's disappearance resulted from the activities of the alleged Twitter spies. Abdulrahman al-Sadhan was working at his office in Riyadh on March 12, 2018 when Saudi Arabia's secret police showed up and took him away, according to his sister, Areej al-Sadhan. His family hasn't seen him since, and until he was permitted to make a short phone call to a relative in February, they worried that he might have been killed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Phone spear phishing" attacks have been on the rise since a bitcoin scam took over the social media platform in July. When law enforcement arrested three alleged young hackers in the US and the UK last month, the story of the worst-known hack of Twitter's systems seemed to have drawn to a tidy close. But in fact, the technique that allowed hackers to take control of the accounts of Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and dozens of others is still in use against a broad array of victims, in a series of attacks that began well before Twitter's blowup, and in recent weeks has escalated into a full-blown crime wave.

But Twitter is hardly the only recent target of "phone spear phishing," also sometimes known as "vishing," for "voice phishing," a form of social engineering. In just the past month since the Twitter hack unfolded, dozens of companies -- including banks, cryptocurrency exchanges, and web hosting firms -- have been targeted with the same hacking playbook, according to three investigators in a cybersecurity industry group that's been working with victims and law enforcement to track the attacks. As in the Twitter hack, employees of those targets have received phone calls from hackers posing as IT staff to trick them into giving up their passwords to internal tools. Then the attackers have sold that access to others who have typically used it to target high-net-worth users of the company's services -- most often aiming to steal large amounts of cryptocurrency, but also sometimes targeting non-crypto accounts on traditional financial services. "Simultaneous with the Twitter hack and in the days that followed, we saw this big increase in this type of phishing, fanning out and targeting a bunch of different industries," says Allison Nixon, who serves as chief research officer at cybersecurity firm Unit 221b and assisted the FBI in its investigation into the Twitter hack. "I've seen some unsettling stuff in the past couple of weeks, companies getting broken into that you wouldn't think are soft targets. And it's happening repeatedly, like the companies can't keep them out."

While the perpetrators don't appear to be state-sponsored hackers or foreign cybercrime organizations, it may be only a matter of time until they're adopted by these foreign groups who contract out the phone calls to English-speaking phone phishers.

Bodhammer shares a report from the University of Michigan: In a step closer to skyscrapers that serve as power sources, a team led by University of Michigan researchers has set a new efficiency record for color-neutral, transparent solar cells. The team achieved 8.1% efficiency and 43.3% transparency with an organic, or carbon-based, design rather than conventional silicon. While the cells have a slight green tint, they are much more like the gray of sunglasses and automobile windows.

The new material is a combination of organic molecules engineered to be transparent in the visible and absorbing in the near infrared, an invisible part of the spectrum that accounts for much of the energy in sunlight. In addition, the researchers developed optical coatings to boost both power generated from infrared light and transparency in the visible range -- two qualities that are usually in competition with one another. The color-neutral version of the device was made with an indium tin oxide electrode. A silver electrode improved the efficiency to 10.8%, with 45.8% transparency. However, that version's slightly greenish tint may not be acceptable in some window applications.

Both versions can be manufactured at large scale, using materials that are less toxic than other transparent solar cells. The transparent organic solar cells can also be customized for local latitudes, taking advantage of the fact that they are most efficient when the sun's rays are hitting them at a perpendicular angle. They can be placed in between the panes of double-glazed windows. [The team is] working on several improvements to the technology, with the next goal being to reach a light utilization efficiency of 7% and extending the cell lifetime to about 10 years. They are also investigating the economics of installing transparent solar cell windows into new and existing buildings. The research has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.