URINE THAT'S USED TO CHARGE SMARTPHONE

It sounds outlandish, but earlier this year, at the Reinvent the Toilet Fair in New Delhi, India – co-hosted by the Indian Department of Biotechnology and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – the team exhibited a functional urinal that was able to charge a phone using just urine, a world first.

Scientists at Bristol Robotics Lab in the UK have also worked out how to turn urine into electricity.A collection of cylinders is filled with electro-active micro-organisms.
They feed off things they find in waste water and urine.

Electrons are created as a by-product, which can then be turned into electricity and used to charge phones and power some lights.The microbial fuel cells – or MFCs – Ieropoulos refers to contain live, naturally occurring microorganisms. These feed on the urine and produce electrons as a respiratory by-product. Electrodes in the MFCs facilitate the transfer of these electrons and create current when connected via a circuit.

"It's very simple. The down pipe from the urinal goes straight into the box which contains the microbial fuel cells, it's as simple as that," Yannis Ieropoulos, professor and director of the Bristol BioEnergy Center at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory,

Together with his team, he is now looking at ways of implementing the technology in the developing world, where the lack of both adequate sanitation and reliable energy supplies presents a huge challenge.

Sources:
https://info.uwe.ac.uk/news/uwenews/news.aspx?id=2598

MIRACLE MATERIAL MAY MAKE SMARTPHONES UNBREAKABLE

Most parts of a smartphone are made of silicon and other compounds, which are expensive and break easily, but with almost 1.5 billion smartphones purchased worldwide last year, manufacturers are on the lookout for something more durable and less costly.Researchers, including those from Queen's University Belfast in the UK, found that by combining semiconducting molecules C60 with layered materials, such as graphene and hBN, they could produce a unique material technology, which could revolutionise the concept of smart devices.

Any smart device made from this combination would benefit from the mix of unique features, which do not exist in materials naturally.This process, which is called van der Waals solids, allows compounds to be brought together and assembled in a pre-defined way.

The material also could mean that devices use less energy than before because of the device architecture so could have improved battery life and less electric shockOne issue that still needs to be solved is that graphene and the new material architecture is lacking a 'band gap', which is the key to the on-off switching operations performed by electronic devices.

However, the team is already looking at a potential solution - transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs).These are a hot topic at the moment as they are very chemically stable, have large sources for production and band gaps that rival Silicon.

Which smartphone has the best camera?

Smartphone cameras are now amazingly good, and if you buy a top-end smartphone, it’s increasingly hard to take a bad photograph with it.Some manufacturers have improved the
front-facing camera to target people who mainly take selfies.

Some phones are waterproof, like the Apple iPhone 7 and the Samsung Galaxy S7.have added 4K video facilities. Many offer HDR for high dynamic range images, and some use “stacking”, such as the Google Pixel (it captures a short sequence and combines the results into a single image).

Some have dual lenses and dual sensors and combine the results, like the LG G6. Some phones shoot 4K video or raw images, possibly by using accessory software to extract the image data
before it has been processed.Possible options The Nokia 808 PureView smartphone, launched in 2012, really boosted progress in smartphone photography. Its 38-megapixel sensor captured an amazing amount of detail, and changed the perception of how good a smartphone camera could be.

The 808 and its Windows smartphone
cousin, the Lumia 1020, are still competitive today, though they have been surpassed by more recent models.
Today’s better smartphone cameras typically have f/1.8 lenses and 12MP 1/3in sensors providing a resolution of 4032 x 3024 pixels.That’s the specification of Apple’s iPhone 7, so
try to match or beat that. The Google Pixel –which may have the best smartphone camera – has a slightly bigger 12.3MP 1/2.3in sensor and
an f/2.0 lens.you want something cheaper, the OnePlus 3T has a 16MP 1/2.8in sensor and an f/2.0 lens.

Samsung has also had a couple of goes at the genre with its Samsung Galaxy K Zoom and older S4 Zoom smartphones. Both have 10x optical zoom lenses, much like compact cameras. The most recent example is the 21MP Kodak Ektra ,
which was launched in Europe last year and in the US this week.However, if you’re serious about the photographic aspect, consider buying a good compact camera and a cheap phone. Not only do
you get better results over a wider range of subjects and situations, the camera h handling is dramatically better. This includes faster zooming, framing and shooting.