Hashtag Trends Oct 3 – The future of Touch ID.Brain Mapping; More Efficient Solar Panels

Apple’s Touch ID isn’t coming back to iPhones anytime soon. New international research to better understand the human brain begins, and the efficiency of new solar panels reaches new heights.

Welcome to hashtag trending. Monday, October 3rd, this is Tom Li, your host.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint scanner is unlikely to return to the iPhone. Since the feature was replaced by Face ID, Apple’s face scanning technology, speculation has been rife that the feature will return to the iPhone. Gurman said Apple was actually testing his in-screen and in-power button Touch ID functionality, but there’s no word on whether it’ll be added back. Gurman said Apple could potentially add his Touch ID to the power button on his lower-end iPhones, but so far that’s just speculation.

sauce: 9to5 mac

The human brain was famously described by physicist Michio Kaku as “the most complex object in the known universe”. Examining the function and structure of his 85 billion neurons is one of his most important studies in biology. In the latest effort to map the brain, the National Institutes of Health has advanced his BRAIN initiative. This is his $500 million project that spans academics from multiple countries. The new study applies mapping techniques established in previous studies done in mouse brains to studies of the human brain. But scaling the process is no easy task. Although the research is promising, the human brain is 1,000 times larger than her mouse brain and much more complex.

sauce: singularity hub

Dutch researchers have broken the 30% efficiency barrier for solar panels. The best solar panels are only 22% efficient at converting sunlight into electricity. This breakthrough could have a large impact, including reduced renewable energy costs and smaller or more efficient solar farms. This was achieved using a four-terminal tandem device that captures a wider gamut of light. The results of this study were presented at one of his largest events in solar energy research, the World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion in Milan.

sauce: interesting engineering

Tesla’s new humanoid robot landed with a bang at the company’s artificial intelligence event on Friday. The robot Optimus could walk slowly towards the participating crowd and throw waves. Tesla CEO Elon Musk told the audience that robots can do much more than waves, but they are also very delicate. It’s clear that the robot is still in its early stages of development, with exposed wires that appear to be wrapped around a metal skeleton. However, some critics were unimpressed, calling the robot boring and fraudulent.

sauce: ABC News

That’s all the tech news trending right now. Hashtag Trending is part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or Google Home Daily Briefing. Sign up for the Daily IT Wire newsletter to get all the important news straight to your inbox every day. Also, check out the next episode of Hashtag Tendances, our weekly Hashtag Trending episode in French, which airs every Thursday morning. If you have any suggestions or tips, let us know in the comments or email us. Thanks for listening, I’m Tom Lee.