A great invention by an 18-year-old high school student grew out of a simple problem most teenagers meet with.

“I'm a teenager and I have a cellphone and my cellphone battery always dies，so I was really looking for a way to improve energy storage，” Eesha Khare said on Tuesday. “That's how I came across the super capacitor.”

The teenager who came from California, and graduated from high school last week，won a $50，000 prize on May 17，2013 at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for creating a device that can store enough energy to charge a cellphone in 20 to 30 seconds.

“It charges very quickly and can store a lot of energy，” Khare said. “The cool thing is that it's a lot thinner than one strand of hair.”

Khare hasn't used her invention to recharge a cellphone yet，but she used it to power a light-emitting diode (LED) in order to show its capability(容量). If used on cellphones，the supercharger would slide on to the phone's battery to juice it up in a matter of seconds. The technology isn't available to consumers yet，and it could be years until it is.

At an Intel event in Phoenix，Khare won the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award，taking second place overall in the world's largest high school science research competition. She beat out more than 1，600 finalists from 70 countries. She said that she has been approached by several companies to continue her research，but she is now focused on attending Harvard University in autumn.

“Right now，just my education，but hopefully we'll see what happens in the future，” she said about her plans. “I have a lot of interests，so we'll see what I do in the future.”

This year researchers expect the world to take 1. 35 trillion photographs, or about 3. 7 billion per day. All those pixels (像素) take up a lot of room if they are stored on personal computers or phones, which is one reason why many people store their images in the cloud. But unlike a hard drive which can be encrypted (加密) to protect its data, cloud storage users have to trust that a tech platform will keep their private pictures safe. Now a team of Columbia University computer scientists have developed a tool to encrypt images stored on many popular cloud services while allowing authorized users to view and show their photographs as usual.

Getting cloud-based photographs with bad intentions (意图) can leak (泄露) personal information. In November 2019, for example, a bug in the popular photograph storage app Google Photos mistakenly shared some users’ private videos with strangers. Safety experts also worry about employees at cloud storage companies getting users’ images without being allowed.

So the Columbia researchers came up with a system called Easy Secure Photos (ESP), which they presented at a recent meeting. “We wanted to see if we could make it possible to encrypt data while using existing services, ” says a computer scientist Jason Nieh, one of the developers of ESP. “Everyone wants to stay with the storage app and does not have to register on a new encrypted-image cloud storage service.”

To overcome this problem, they created a tool that protects blocks of pixels but moves them around to hide the photography successfully. First, ESP’s algorithm (算法) divides a photograph into three separate parts, each one including the image s red, green or blue color data. Then the system hides the pixel blocks around among these three parts (allowing a block from the red color, for example to hide in the green or blue ones). But the program does nothing within the pixel blocks. As a result, the photograph remains unchanged but ends up looking like unclear black-and-white ones to anyone who gets them without the decryption (解密) key.

Wood has many great characteristics that make it the perfect building material. It is cheap, durable, easily available, and most importantly, environmentally sustainable. The one thing it is not, is transparent! Now thanks to a team of scientists at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology the material may even be able to add that feature to its already impressive list. Lead researcher Dr.Lars Berglund said he was inspired to create the transparent wood after learning how Japanese researchers had developed a see-through paper for use in flexible display screens for electronic devices. The team began by pulling out the wood’s lignin (木质素). The lignin-free wood was then dipped into a polymer (聚合物) and baked at a temperature of 158°F for four hours. The result was a hybrid product that was not only stronger and lighter than the original wood but also, almost transparent. The researchers were able to adjust the level of transparency by varying the amount of the polymer injected and also by changing the thickness of the wood.

While scientists have previously created a see-through wood for small-scale applications like computer chips, the transparent wood is the first one being considered for large scale applications.The researchers, who revealed their findings in Biomacromolecules on April 11, picture using the transparent wood in buildings to allow for more natural light, or to create windows that let in the desired amount of light without sacrificing privacy.

Wood that allows light to pass through could lead to a brighter future for homes and buildings. Berglund also thinks the wood could play a significant role in the design of solar panels. The semitransparent material would be able to keep light longer and give it more time to interact with the conductor, thus resulting in better solar efficiency. Additionally, substituting the currently used glass with this new product would help solar energy manufacturers improve their carbon footprint and lower the cost. They are now experimenting with ways to scale up the manufacturing process so that the transparent material is cost-effective to make and easy to use.