Category Physics

Imagine being able to hear people whispering in the next room, while the raucous party in your own room is inaudible to the whisperers. Yale researchers have found a way to do just that – make sound flow in one direction – within a fundamental technology found in everything from cell phones to gravitational wave detectors.

What’s more, the researchers have used the same idea to control the flow of heat in one direction...

An international team of researchers has put a theory speculated by the late Stephen Hawking to its most rigorous test to date, and their results have ruled out the possibility that primordial black holes smaller than a tenth of a millimeter make up most of dark matter. Details of their study have been published in this week’s Nature Astronomy.

Scientists know that 85% of the matter in the Universe is made up of dark matter. Its gravitational force prevents stars in our Milky Way from flying apart...

New research explores graphene-silicon devices for photonics applications. If you use a smartphone, laptop, or tablet, then you benefit from research in photonics, the study of light. At the University of Delaware, a team led by Tingyi Gu, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, is developing cutting-edge technology for photonics devices that could enable faster communications between devices and thus, the people who use them.

The research group recently engineered a silicon-graphene device that can transmit radiofrequency waves in less than a picoseco...

‘Hybrid’ cathodes could provide more power for a given weight and volume. Researchers around the globe have been on a quest for batteries that pack a punch but are smaller and lighter than today’s versions, potentially enabling electric cars to travel further or portable electronics to run for longer without recharging. Now, researchers at MIT and in China say they’ve made a major advance in this area, with a new version of a key component for lithium batteries, the cathode.

The team describes their concept as a “hybrid” cathode, because it combines aspects of two different approaches that have b...