Looking way ahead …

… all the way to next year’s tax season. Here’s some tips on using an offer in compromise on your total tax bill from the IRS. This is a tough, tough year and it doesn’t hurt to begin reviewing your options this early.

From the AICPA link:

In these economic times, more taxpayers are not able to fully pay their federal income taxes when due. There are several methods that may be used to pay tax liabilities in this situation, one of which is an offer in compromise (OIC).

Sec. 7122 permits the IRS to compromise a tax liability on one of the following grounds:

• Doubt as to liability;
• Doubt as to collectability; or
• To promote effective tax administration because either collection of the full amount would cause economic hardship for the taxpayer or compelling public policy or equity considerations provide a sufficient basis for compromising the liability.

Fiber optics on a chip

Now, this is really interesting (and to be fair to the story, the fiber ops are replacing wiring, the chip is key component in allowing this to happen.)

From the link:

The world of computing could change rapidly in coming years thanks to technology that replaces the metal wiring between components with faster, more efficient fiber-optic links.

“All communications over long distance are driven by lasers, but you’ve never had it inside devices,” says Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s photonics lab in Santa Clara, CA. “Our new integrated optical link makes that possible.”

Paniccia’s team has perfected tiny silicon chips capable of encoding and decoding laser signals sent via fiber optics. Today, when data arrives at a computer via a fiber optic connection it has to be moved from a separate photonic device to an electronic circuit. This new system promises to speed things up because everything works in silicon.

Last week, Paniccia’s team demonstrated the first complete photonic communications system made from components fully integrated into silicon chips. Electronic data piped into one chip is converted into laser light that travels down an optical fiber and is transferred back into electrical signals a few fractions of a second later. The system can carry data at a rate of 50 gigabytes per second, enough to transfer a full-length HD movie in less than a second.

The silicon photonic chips could replace the electronic connections between a computer’s key components, such as its processors and memory. Copper wiring used today can carry data signals at little more than 10 gigabytes per second. That means critical components like the central processing unit and the memory in a server cannot be too far apart, which restricts how computers can be built.

Seeing the light: A chip in the center of this circuit board contains four lasers that convert electrical signals into light pulses. The pulses travel at high speeds along a fiber-optic link. Credit: Intel

Lower cost solar cells

Yesterday I blogged about a new solar energy process that might supplant photovoltaics, at least in large-scale desert installations because of dramatically increased efficiency. Today it’s a breakthrough with photovoltaic solar cells in regards to production cost. I like seeing all this innovation is the solar space, especially since it’s a bit all over the map. Incremental improvement is always nice, but anytime research is going after all sorts of targets the odds of a major breakthrough go up.

From the second link:

One of the most promising technologies for making inexpensive but reasonably efficient solar photovoltaic cells just got much cheaper. Scientists at the University of Toronto in Canada have shown that inexpensive nickel can work just as well as gold for one of the critical electrical contacts that gather the electrical current produced by their colloidal quantum dot solar cells.

The change to nickel can reduce the cell’s already low material costs by 40 to 80 percent, says Lukasz Brzozowski, the director of the Photovoltaics Research Program in Professor Ted Sargent’s group. They present their research in the July 12, 2010 issue of Applied Physics Letters.

From the department of, “no duh” — corporate cash hoarding

Companies are hoarding cash at insanely high levels. Bad for the overall economy and bad for the companies who retain overly large cash reserves as well.

From the link:

It isn’t for a lack of resources. Non-financial companies in the S&P 500 index reported $837 billion in cash at end of March, a hefty 26% increase over the previous year’s $665 billion, according to S&P. These are unusually high levels — companies are holding cash reflecting 10% of their value today. Since 1999, companies on average held cash equal to 6.6% of their value.

In many ways, the record levels reflect the scars of the financial crisis. Chief executives learned the hard way what happens when credit markets freeze, as they did in late 2008 and early 2009. And the country’s relatively grimmer economic forecasts aren’t helping as consumer spending continues to slump. The U.S. Commerce Department reported last week that GDP growth slowed during the second quarter, growing by 2.4% compared to 3.7% the previous quarter.

But while companies try to play it safe by upping their stashes of cash, hoarding does little good in the way of improving the broader economy. What’s more, it could hinder companies from prepping for future growth.

A completely new path to solar efficiency?

Maybe so. And if so this sounds very promising. I’ll go ahead and repeat my solar energy mantra — two things both have to happen before solar is truly economically viable: costs must come down quite a bit, and the efficiency has to at least be within spitting distance of petroleum and other traditional natural resources. This sounds like very good news on the efficiency front. Might even offer some cost benefits as well.

From the link:

Stanford engineers have figured out how to simultaneously use the light and heat of the sun to generate electricity in a way that could make solar power production more than twice as efficient as existing methods and potentially cheap enough to compete with oil.

Unlike photovoltaic technology currently used in solar panels – which becomes less efficient as the temperature rises – the new process excels at higher temperatures.

Called ‘photon enhanced thermionic emission,’ or PETE, the process promises to surpass the efficiency of existing photovoltaic and thermal conversion technologies.

“This is really a conceptual breakthrough, a new energy conversion process, not just a new material or a slightly different tweak,” said Nick Melosh, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering, who led the research group. “It is actually something fundamentally different about how you can harvest energy.”

And the materials needed to build a device to make the process work are cheap and easily available, meaning the power that comes from it will be affordable.

A small PETE device made with cesium-coated gallium nitride glows while being tested inside an ultra-high vacuum chamber. The tests proved that the process simultaneously converted light and heat energy into electrical current. Credit: Photo courtesy of Nick Melosh, Stanford University

Platinum nanoparticles may radically improve fuel cells

This nanotech-based catalyst would put electric cars — among other ideas and products — on a much faster track.

From the link:

In the quest for efficient, cost-effective and commercially viable fuel cells, scientists at Cornell University’s Energy Materials Center have discovered a catalyst and catalyst-support combination that could make fuel cells more stable, conk-out free, inexpensive and more resistant to carbon monoxide poisoning.

The research, “Highly Stable and CO-Tolerant Pt/Ti_0.7W_0.3O₂ Electrocatalyst for Proton-Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells,” (Journal of the American Chemical Society, July 12, 2010) led by Hector D. Abruna, Cornell professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and director of the Energy Materials Center at Cornell (emc2); Francis J. DiSalvo, Cornell professor Chemistry and Chemical Biology; Deli Wang, post doctoral researcher; Chinmayee V. Subban, graduate student; Hongsen Wang, research associate; and Eric Rus, graduate student.

Hydrogen fuel cells offer an appealing alternative to gasoline-burning cars: They have the potential to power vehicles for long distances using hydrogen as fuel, mitigate carbon dioxide production and emit only water vapor.

However, fuel cells generally require very pure hydrogen to work. That means that conventional fuels must be stripped of carbon monoxide – a process that is too expensive to make fuel cells commercially viable.

Fuel cells work by electrochemically decomposing fuel instead of burning it, converting energy directly into electricity

The Great Recession, animated

A chilling look at unemployment from January 2007 to May 2010.

Ever heard of a white hole?

Me neither.

(And to be clear, the link goes to the physics arXiv blog and an astronomy story and not a NSFW site.)

“Smart grid” electric meters and hackers

Food for uneasy thought.

I have a smart grid meter on my house. At the time it was installed I liked the idea because they more easily allow you to sell electricity back to the grid, you know like if you have a solar array on your roof and produce more than you use (if you read this blog often at all you know I’m very interested in solar and I’d love to have an array on my sun-drenched roof right now). This news gives me quite a bit of pause on smart grid meters.

From the link:

The hurried deployment of smart-grid technology could leave critical infrastructure and private homes vulnerable to hackers. Security experts at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas last week warned that smart-grid hardware and software lacks the necessary safeguards to protect against meddling.

Utilities are being encouraged to install this smart-grid technology–network-connected devices to help intelligently monitor and manage power usage–through funding from the U.S. government’s 2009 stimulus package. The smart systems could save energy and automatically adjust usage within homes and businesses. Customers might, for example, agree to let a utility remotely turn off their air conditioners at times of peak use in exchange for a discount.

But to receive the stimulus money, utilities will have to install new devices across their entire customer base quickly. Security experts say that this could lead to problems down the road–as-yet-unknown vulnerabilities in hardware and software could open up new ways for attackers to manipulate equipment and take control of the energy supply.

Smart enough? This image shows the interior of a smart grid meter tested by Mike Davis of IOActive.
Credit: Mike Davis

Making nanofabrication better

This sounds very promising. Lower costs mean more freedom to tinker and more practical utilization. Totally different field here, but on-site 3D printing  is within reach of the small- to mid-sized business now with some of Objet‘s smaller models.

From the first link:

A Northwestern University research team has done just that — drawing 15,000 identical skylines with tiny beams of light using an innovative nanofabrication technology called beam-pen lithography (BPL).

Details of the new method, which could do for nanofabrication what the desktop printer has done for printing and information transfer, will be published Aug. 1 by the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The Northwestern technology offers a means to rapidly and inexpensively make and prototype circuits, optoelectronics and medical diagnostics and promises many other applications in the electronics, photonics and life sciences industries.

“It’s all about miniaturization,” said Chad A. Mirkin, George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and director of Northwestern’s International Institute for Nanotechnology. “Rapid and large-scale transfer of information drives the world. But conventional micro- and nanofabrication tools for making structures are very expensive. We are trying to change that with this new approach to photolithography and nanopatterning.”

And:

Beam-pen lithography could lead to the development of a desktop printer of sorts for nanofabrication, giving individual researchers a great deal of control of their work.

“Such an instrument would allow researchers at universities and in the electronics industry around the world to rapidly prototype — and possibly produce — high-resolution electronic devices and systems right in the lab,” Mirkin said. “They want to test their patterns immediately, not have to wait for a third-party to produce prototypes, which is what happens now.”