Category Technology/Electronics

With the addition of sensors and enhanced communication tools, providing lightweight, portable power has become even more challenging. Army-funded research demonstrated a new approach to turning thermal energy into electricity that could provide compact and efficient power for Soldiers on future battlefields.

Hot objects radiate light in the form of photons into their surroundings. The emitted photons can be captured by a photovoltaic cell and converted to useful electric energy. This approach to energy conversion is called far-field thermophotovoltaics, or FF-TPVs, and has been under development for many years; however, it suffers from low power density and therefore requires high operating temperatures of the emitter.

The research, conducted at the University of Michigan and p...

A new paper from the University of Surrey and the University of Cambridge has detailed how two relatively unexplored semiconducting materials can satisfy the telecommunication industry’s hunger for enormous amounts of data at ever-greater speeds.

Light-emitting diode (LED)-based communications techniques allow computing devices, including mobile phones, to communicate with one another by using infrared light. However, LED techniques are underused because in its current state LED transmits data at far slower speeds than other wireless technologies such as light-fidelity (Li-Fi).

In a paper published by Nature Electronics, the researchers from Surrey and Cambridge, along with partners from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, examine how organic semicond...

Scientists around the world are developing new hardware for quantum computers, a new type of device that could accelerate drug design, financial modeling, and weather prediction. These computers rely on qubits but these are fickle, degrading into regular bits when interactions with surrounding matter interfere. But new research at MIT suggests a way to protect their states, using a phenomenon called many-body localization (MBL).

MBL is a peculiar phase of matter, proposed decades ago, that is unlike solid or liquid. Typically, matter comes to thermal equilibrium with its environment...

The sale of electric vehicles (EVs) has grown exponentially in the past few years as has the need for renewable energy sources to power them, such as solar and wind. There were nearly 1.8 million registered electric vehicles in the U.S. as of 2020, which is more than three times as many in 2016, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Electric vehicles require power to be available anywhere and anytime, without delays in recharging, but solar and wind are intermittent energy sources that are not available on demand. And the electricity they do generate needs to be stored for later use and not go to waste. That’s where Dr...