Gizmorama - May 6, 2015

Good Morning,

Would you like to know your age? I guess you could look at your driver's license or birth certificate, but who's got that kind of time? Microsoft has developed a new website that will guess your age with the help of facial recognition technology. That's if you can face the truth.

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Scientists build battery entirely out of one material --*
COLLEGE PARK, Md. (UPI) - One is the loneliest number. It's also the number of materials needed to store and transfer energy -- that is if you are an inventive engineer from the University of Maryland.

Researchers there have developed a working battery made entirely out of a single material. As the scientists explain, most batteries resemble an Oreo cookie. A soft center (the electrolyte) sandwiched by two solid ends (the electrodes).

But in this single-material battery, there is no discernible differentiation between middle and ends. The team at the University of Maryland's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering was able to create a two-in-one material that integrates the properties and functionality of both the electrodes and electrolyte.

"To my knowledge, there has never been any similar work reported," Dr. Kang Xu, an engineer at Maryland's Army Research Laboratory who was only loosely involved in the study, explained in a press release. "It could lead to revolutionary progress in area of solid state batteries."

A powder-like mixture of sulfur, germanium, phosphorus and lithium form the bulk of the material and serve as the electrolyte highway, across which the charged electrons travel. Engineers added carbon to the material at each end, which moves electrons from one end to the other.

The battery was designed by a team of researcher led by Chunsheng Wang, an engineering professor at Maryland.

To build the battery, the powder is compressed into a steel and plastic cylinder. The advantage of a single-material battery is that the walls that traditionally separate different materials are no longer necessary. These walls resist energy flow, and thus diminish a battery's efficiency.

"Our battery is 600 microns thick, about the size of a dime, whereas conventional solid state batteries are thin films -- forty times thinner," said Fudong Han, the lead author of a new paper on the battery. "This means that more energy can be stored in our battery."

While the battery is powder-based -- safer than ubiquitous leak-prone liquid batteries -- sulfide-based compounds aren't the most environmentally friendly. The researchers plan to incorporate safer chemicals as they perfect their invention.

Han, a grad student under the tutelage of Professor Wang, said: "We are still testing how many times it can change and discharge electricity to see if it is a real candidate for manufacturing."

The battery's development is detailed in the journal Advanced Materials.


* Microsoft guesses your age with new website *
REDMOND, Wash. (UPI) - Microsoft quietly released a distinct new website this week called How-Old.net that uses facial recognition software to guess your age. It's not always right, but it sure makes for a fun way to kill time on the Internet.

At Thursday's Microsoft Build 2015 developer conference, Microsoft officially introduced the site to promote what it's been up to behind the scenes, Business Insider reports. It intends to use similar software to build smarter applications that recognize even slight features in a person's face.

Site engineers Corom Thompson and Santosh Balasubramanian said about the surprise launch, "We sent email to a group of several hundred people asking them to try the page for a few minutes and give us feedback -- optimistically hoping that at least 50 people would give it a shot ...We were shocked. Within a few hours, over 35,000 users had hit the page from all over the world."

The site uses loads of data to intelligently guess a person's gender age from a photo under 3MB in size, but it isn't always right.

The app reportedly learns over time, making closer guesses as more users upload and add to the data pool. Essentially, participants take part in training the software, although it's more like a game than an exercise. Many have taken to Twitter to share screenshots of their funny How-Old.net guesses.

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