Category Physics

A team of engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has recently shown that nearly any material can be turned into a device that continuously harvests electricity from humidity in the air. The secret lies in being able to pepper the material with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter. The research appeared in the journal Advanced Materials.

“This is very exciting,” says Xiaomeng Liu, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering in UMass Amherst’s College of Engineering and the paper’s lead author. “We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air.”

“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,” says Jun Yao, assistant...

Researchers at Oregon State University and Baylor University have made a breakthrough toward reducing the energy consumption of the photonic chips used in data centers and supercomputers.

The findings are important because a data center can consume up to 50 times more energy per square foot of floor space than a typical office building, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

A data center houses an organization’s information technology operations and equipment; it stores, processes and disseminates data and applications. Data centers account for roughly 2% of all electricity use in the United States, the DOE says.

According to the U.S. International Trade Commission, the number of data centers has risen rapidly as data demand has soared...

New technique paves the way for easy oxidation of historically ‘stubborn’ metals. A University of Minnesota Twin Cities-led team has developed a first-of-its-kind, breakthrough method that makes it easier to create high-quality metal oxide thin films out of “stubborn” metals that have historically been difficult to synthesize in an atomically precise manner...

Over the past decades, researchers and companies worldwide have been trying to develop increasingly advanced quantum computers. The key objective of their efforts is to create systems that will outperform classical computers on specific tasks, which is also known as realizing “quantum advantage.”

A research team at D-Wave Quantum Inc., a Canadian quantum computing company, recently created a new quantum computing system that outperforms classical computing systems on optimization problems...