Category Physics

Small mobile robots carrying sensors could perform tasks like catching gas leaks or tracking warehouse inventory. But moving robots demands a lot of energy, and batteries, the typical power source, limit lifetime and raise environmental concerns. Researchers have explored various alternatives: affixing sensors to insects, keeping charging mats nearby, or powering the robots with lasers. Each has drawbacks: Insects roam, chargers limit range, and lasers can burn people’s eyes.

Researchers at the University of Washington ...

Thermometers can do a lot of things: Measure the temperature at the center of your perfectly braised chicken or tell you whether to keep your child home from school due to illness. But because of their size, traditional thermometers’ uses are still limited.

“How do you non-invasively measure a temperature...

Researchers have determined how to build reliable machine learning models that can understand complex equations in real-world situations while using far less training data than is normally expected.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and Cornell University, found that for partial differential equations—a class of physics equations that describe how things in the natural world evolve in space and time—machine learning models can produce reliable results even when they are provided with limited data.

Their results, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could be useful for constructing more t...

Researchers discover excellent thermoelectric properties of nickel-gold alloys. These can be used to efficiently convert heat into electrical energy. Thermoelectrics enable the direct conversion of heat into electrical energy – and vice versa. This makes them interesting for a range of technological applications. In the search for thermoelectric materials with the best possible properties, a research team at TU Wien investigated various metallic alloys. A mixture of nickel and gold proved particularly promising. The researchers recently published their results in the journal Science Advances.

Using thermoelectrics to generate el...