Solar power has its knockers, and many of them focus on the low efficiency of current implementations. A new semiconductor material may remedy this shortcoming in times to come, enabling a 45% efficienct use of the available energy in sunlight thanks to an extra ‘energy band’ which allows it to use low-energy photons as well as the more powerful ones. As with all stories of this nature, there’s a lot of R&D to do and obstacles to overcome, and maybe you’re still skeptical. So how about hybrid solar lighting systems that pipe sunlight into buildings optically when it’s available, and switch to electricity when it’s not?

Bad news for amotivated employees – that secret cubby where you lurk while goofing off won’t stay secret for long. As soon as your employer insists you wear one of Hitachi’s new wifi / RFID-enabled name badges, they’ll be able to track your every move over their wireless network connection. Of course, the system is designed to improve security in the workplace, but the potential for intrusive employee monitoring is more than obvious. Just remember – if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear. Probably.

This idea has been kicking around for a while in the outer reaches of the military and space blogospheres, but now New Scientist has picked up the magnetic ‘launch ring’ projectile-accelerator story. The idea proposed is that a circular track of magnets can be used to gradually increase the velocity of a payload over a few hours, before switching to an outer track for it to launch into orbit. The USAF likes the sound of it, and is paying for a two year research project starting in a few weeks. Naturally their interest may be less than egalitarian, but if the technology works then the cost of getting material into orbit will start to drop dramatically – for everyone.

Unrepentent space geeks such as myself, when we complain about the snail’s pace of current efforts to explore the universe beyond our planet’s orbit, are often told that things have to happen slowly because space projects are expensive. And indeed they are – but rarely more expensive than the annual advertising budget for a global corporation, and definitely smaller than the arms budgets of certain nations. There’s plenty of money about, it seems, just a lack of willing on the part of the keepers of that money. Centauri Dreams discusses a new paper on this subject, asking the question ‘How Far A Frontier?’

Another hands-free computer interface announcement, but this one doesn’t need feet either. Eye-tracking systems for GUI control of computers have been tricky to implement up till now, thanks to the levels of false positive generated by the nature of the human gaze. But a team of German researchers have used psychological know-how to refine their Eye-Controlled Interaction (EYCIN) system, by factoring out the minute random movements of the eye and laying out GUI pages in a more user-friendly fashion.