110. Perovskite Solar Cells Improved, Cancer Fighting Cells, Most Efficient Passenger Plane

Summary: SHOW NOTES 01:50 The first perovskite solar cell with a commercially viable lifetime is here | Interesting Engineering  A team of researchers from Princeton University has built the first perovskite solar cells that last long enough to be commercially viable.Silicon-based cells, which many regard as an expensive and suboptimal component, have dominated the renewable energy market since their introduction in 1954. This new technology, which is not only incredibly durable but also meets common efficiency standards, has the potential to change that. Expected to outperform industry norms for roughly 30 years, well beyond the 20-year criterion for solar cell viability Perovskite solar cells are regarded as high-efficiency, low-cost modular technology for implementation in the renewable power industry. Less Energy = Less $$$ Would become more fragile in that case The name “perovskite” comes from the nickname for their crystal structure. Can be manufactured at room temperature, which means they need less energy than manufacturing silicon.  Can be modified to be flexible and transparent The new device created by these researchers estimated lifetime is a five-fold increase over the previous record, which was established by a lower efficiency perovskite solar cell in 2017. Additionally they created a new testing method allowing them to test the longevity of these particular types of solar cells. Ranging from a regular summer day's baseline temperature to an extreme of 230 degrees Fahrenheit (110 degrees Celsius). “accelerated aging technique” Chose four aging temperatures and measured outcomes over four independent data streams. Overall, they found that the device will run at or above 80 percent of its peak efficiency under continuous illumination for at least five years.According to the researchers, that is the equivalent of 30 years of outdoor operation in a city like Princeton, New Jersey.  Joseph Berry, a senior fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory who was not involved in the study, said:“This paper is likely going to be a prototype for anyone looking to analyze performance at the intersection of efficiency and stability … By producing a prototype to study stability, and showing what can be extrapolated [through accelerated testing], it’s doing the work everyone wants to see before we start field testing at scale. It allows you to project in a way that’s really impressive."   07:36 Immunotherapy booster produces 10,000 times more cancer-fighting cells | New Atlas Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have found that adding a booster protein can significantly improve the outcome of cancer immunotherapy.The research showed the protein produced 10,000 times more immune cells in mice, and all mice survived the entire experiment. We are talking about  CAR T cell immunotherapy, which is a promising new treatment where doctors extract T cells from a patient, genetically engineer them to target specific cancer cells, and return them to the body to hunt those cells down.  The effectiveness can start to drop over time. In the new study, the scientists investigated ways to combat this problem by boosting the number of T cells. Doesn’t naturally stick around very long, so the researchers modified it to circulate in the body for weeks. They turned to a protein called interleukin-7 (IL-7), which the body naturally expresses to ramp up T cell production in the event of illness. The team tested this longer-lasting IL-7 in mouse models of lymphoma, administering the protein on various days after the initial CAR T cell injection.3 groups: 1.) Control (no immunotherapy), 2.) Received CAR T cell therapy without IL-7, and 3.) with IL-7 John DiPersio, senior author of the study, talks on the findings:“When we give a long-acting type of IL-7 to tumor-bearing immunodeficient mice soon after CAR T cell treatment, we see a dramatic expansion of these CAR-T cells greater than ten-thousandfold compared to mice not