News
Physicists Want to Run Sunlight Through a Tiny Engine
1+ day, 3+ hour ago (343+ words) Paul Eastham and Luisa Toledo Tude Most solar energy slips away as heat. Panels convert a fraction; the rest dissipates. Physicists at Trinity College Dublin think there's a step missing from that process. What if we could reorganize sunlight before…...
Conductive Plastic Nanoparticles Generate Hydrogen Without Platinum
1+ day, 20+ hour ago (310+ words) In a chemistry lab at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, a beaker of water sits under a lamp. Within seconds, tiny bubbles start rising to the surface. It looks unremarkable, like someone poured a glass of sparkling water. But…...
Fuel Cell Catalysts Change the Rules as Voltage Rises
5+ day, 3+ hour ago (428+ words) Engineers designing fuel cells for heavy-duty trucks have long assumed they know where the problem sits: one stubborn, slow step in the oxygen reduction...
The Humble Crystal That Thrives in the Deep Freeze
2+ mon, 2+ week ago (461+ words) At the low temperatures required in quantum devices, strontium titanate crystals (purple atom and bipyramids) let electric fields sculpt light fields (blue) orders of magnitude better than any other material. | Second Bay Studios Most materials throw in the towel when…...
How One Molecule Became a Window Into the Atomic Nucleus
2+ mon, 2+ week ago (516+ words) This image depicts the radium atom's pear-shaped nucleus of protons and neutrons in the center, surrounded by a cloud of electrons (yellow), and an electron (yellow ball with arrow) that has a probability to be inside the nucleus. In the…...
Scientists Keep Droplets Bouncing Indefinitely
2+ mon, 3+ week ago (592+ words) Schematic of the experimental setup. If you have ever watched water droplets skitter across a hot pan, you have witnessed a fleeting moment of physics magic. Now, scientists at Switzerland's EPFL have coaxed tiny oil droplets to bounce on a…...
Vitamin B2 And Sugar Power A Safer Home Flow Battery Design
2+ mon, 3+ week ago (416+ words) Household batteries rarely draw inspiration from breakfast....
Quantum Electrides Could Transform Computing and Chemistry
2+ mon, 3+ week ago (307+ words) Scientists at Auburn University created a new type of material where electrons can move freely across a solid surface. By arranging these electrons in different patterns, the material could one day be used to build faster computers or design better…...
Scientists Convert Discarded Bottles Into Power Storage
3+ mon, 1+ day ago (432+ words) Every year, humans toss out more than 500 billion plastic water bottles. Most end up in landfills or oceans, stubbornly resisting decomposition for centuries. But what if those discarded bottles could store electricity instead? Researchers at Michigan Technological University have figured…...