Category Physics

Chilled panels use half the energy of conventional air conditioners and can be used outdoors or indoors. AC’s guzzle power and spew out millions of tons of carbon dioxide daily. They’re also not always good for your health – constant exposure to central A/C can increase risks of recirculating germs and causing breathing problems.

There’s a better alternative, say a team of researchers from the University of British Columbia, Princeton University, the University of California, Berkeley and the Singapore-ETH Centre.

They call it the Cold Tube, and they have shown it works.
“Air conditioners work by cooling down and dehumidifying the air around us – an expensive and not particularly environmentally friendly proposit...

An international team of physicists including Jennifer Cano, PhD, of Stony Brook University, has created a new material layered by two structures, forming a superlattice, that at a high temperature is a super-efficient insulator conducting current without dissipation and lost energy. The finding, detailed in a paper published in Nature Physics, could be the basis of research leading to new, better energy efficient electrical conductors.

The material is created and developed in a laboratory chamber. Over time atoms attach to it and the material appears to grow — similar to the way rock candy is formed...

New design overcomes long-standing LED efficiency problem – and can transform into a laser to boot. A new design for light-emitting diodes (LEDs) developed by a team including scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) may hold the key to overcoming a long-standing limitation in the light sources’ efficiency...

Simple innovation expected to open multiple new avenues for quantum science. If we can harness it, quantum technology promises fantastic new possibilities. But first, scientists need to coax quantum systems to stay yoked for longer than a few millionths of a second.

A team of scientists at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering announced the discovery of a simple modification that allows quantum systems to stay operational – or “coherent” – 10,000 times longer than before...