Best of Last Year: The top Tech Xplore articles of 2021

And a team at University wondered why Spotify still did not have a "dislike" button, considering that its business model revolved around keeping listeners listening. To find out, the group developed an algorithm that showed that listeners were 20 percent more likely to "like" a song if the algorithm used by the music platform was trained on 400,000 likes and dislikes, compared to an algorithm trained only on the number of likes. Also, many people around the world began to wonder this past year if the Metaverse is going to be the next big internet revolution. This came after Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company that makes the social media platform was changing its name to Meta. Other entities had also recently begun touting products as a means for allowing users to get in on the still evolving technology And a team at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg found that a layer of three crystals produced a thousand times more power in solar cells, if the three materials were arranged periodically in a lattice. They proved their ideas by creating crystalline layers of barium, strontium and calcium which they alternately placed on top of one another to build a new kind of solar cell. Colin Johnson, an associate professor at the University of Nottingham, developed a deep-learning technique that could learn a so-called "fitness function" from a set of sample solutions to a problem. It could be used to solve a Rubik's cube and other problems step by step. In speaking with Techxplore. Johnson noted that the Rubik's cube is a complex puzzle, but any of its huge number of combinations are at most 20 steps from a solution. Last May, newly discovered Wi-Fi vulnerabilities called Frag Attacks put all mobile devices at risk. The fragmentation and aggregation attacks allowed an attacker with the requisite skills and who was within radio range of a target to potentially exploit such flaws. Hackers could exploit programming vulnerabilities by adding frames into protected Wi-Fi networks. Also, a team working at the South China University of Technology developed a compound that might lead to sustainable, cost-effective, large-scale energy storage. Their work involved synthesizing a molecular compound that served as a low-cost electrolyte, thus enabling a stable flow battery that retained 99.98% of its capacity per cycle. And Swiss startup Clime works in the began operations at its Orca carbon removal plant near Iceland. The plant cost $10 to15 million to build and is expected to pull approximately 4,000 tons of CO2 out of the air every year. The direct air capture technology plant converts the carbon to rock using a procedure that mimics the Carb fix method—a natural process that takes nature hundreds of thousands of years. The plant is powered by a nearby geothermal power plant. In November, the cargo ship to Birkeland made headlines when it departed a small port in Norway. It was the first such ship to be powered by electricity and to run autonomously. Officials involved with the deployment described it as the first step toward reducing the maritime industry's climate footprint. On its maiden voyage, the ship hauled fertilizer from the 12-kilometer journey. Officials also suggested that in the future, all ships could run autonomously, dramatically reducing shipping costs.