Technology

A Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) research team has gained new insights about heat pump water heaters (HPWHs), an energy-efficient technology that extends the benefits of heat pumps to the task of warming domestic water. In a three-year project launched in 2017, the team studied the operation of HPWHs in Pacific Northwest homes and explored […]

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past. They also calculated the probability that an electron in empty interstellar space will spontaneously travel back into its recent past. The study is […]

Researchers at the University of Michigan and City University of New York have recently proposed and experimentally validated a transparent, electronically tunable metasurface. This metasurface, presented in a paper published in Physical Review X, can rotate the polarization of an arbitrarily polarized incident wave without changing its axial ratio. Metasurfaces are artificial sheet materials textured […]

A fascination with movie technology that showed robots perform self-repair through a liquid formula inspired a Purdue University professor to make his own discoveries—which are now helping to lead the way for advancements in self-powering devices such as consumer electronics and defense innovations. The Purdue team, led by Wenzhuo Wu, the Ravi and Eleanor Talwar […]

Researchers at the University of Florence and Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi, in Italy, have recently proved that the invasiveness of quantum measurements might not always be detrimental. In a study published in Physical Review Letters, they showed that this invasive quality can actually be exploited, using quantum measurements to fuel a cooling engine. Michele Campisi, […]

Scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark studying the effects of climate change on weather-dependent electricity systems have found a silver lining in Earth’s otherwise fraught future outlook. Temperatures may climb and seas may rise, but the lights (and, undoubtedly, the air conditioning) will still be on in nations with high capacities for wind and solar […]

“Everyone is trying to get free energy—from the wind, from the waves, from the sun,” said Dani Levin, a Duke MEMS Ph.D. student in the lab of Professor Earl Dowell. As an aerospace engineer who specializes in designing structures to avoid destructive vibrations, it was only natural for Levin to approach the quest for sustainable […]

A team of researchers led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has developed a simple method that could turn ordinary semiconducting materials into quantum machines—superthin devices marked by extraordinary electronic behavior. Such an advancement could help to revolutionize a number of industries aiming for energy-efficient electronic systems—and provide a platform […]

Researchers in the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering have developed a unique new device using the wonder material graphene that provides the first step toward ultrasensitive biosensors to detect diseases at the molecular level with near perfect efficiency. Ultrasensitive biosensors for probing protein structures could greatly improve the depth of diagnosis for […]

For the Kerker effect to occur, particles need to have electric and magnetic polarizabilities of the same strength. This, however, is very challenging to achieve, as magnetic optical resonances in small particles are relatively weak. Researchers at Ioffe Institute, in St. Petersburg, have recently shown that a similar effect can be attained when small particles […]