Category Technology/Electronics

Purdue researcher Jialiang Tang helped resolve charging issues in sodium-ion batteries that have prevented the technology from advancing to industry testing and use.
Credit: Purdue University Marketing and Media photo

Worldwide efforts to make sodium-ion batteries just as functional as lithium-ion batteries have long since controlled sodium’s tendency to explode, but not yet resolved how to prevent sodium-ions from ‘getting lost’ during the first few times a battery charges and discharges. Now, researchers made a sodium powder version that fixes this problem and holds a charge properly.

Most of today’s batteries are made up of rare lithium mined from the mountains of South America. If the world depletes this source, then battery production could stagnate...

Their ultrathin, conductive, and transparent hybrid NMs can be applied to the fabrication of skin-attachable NM loudspeakers and voice-recognition microphones, which would be unobtrusive in appearance due to their excellent transparency and conformal contact capability.
Credit: UNIST

An international team, affiliated with UNIST has presented an innovative wearable technology that will turn your skin into a loudspeaker. This breakthrough has been led by Professor Hyunhyub Ko in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST. Created in part to help the hearing and speech impaired, the new technology can be further explored for various potential applications, such as wearable IoT sensors and conformal health care devices.

In the study, the research team has developed ultrathin, transp...

In this artist’s conception of the Nebraska experiment, the white orbs represent two laser pulses, with plasma waves in their wakes. The waves interfere with one another after the laser pulses cross, and electrons ride the wakefield waves to higher energy.
Credit: Extreme Light Laboratory, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Force of light boosts electrons close to speed of light. In a recent experiment at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, plasma electrons in the paths of intense laser light pulses were almost instantly accelerated close to the speed of light.

Physics professor Donald Umstadter, who led the research, said the new application might aptly be called an “optical rocket” because of the tremendous amount of force that light exerted in the experiment...

Diagram of a six-stage cooling cycle for magnetic shape-memory alloys developed by researchers at the TU Darmstadt and the HZDR. Illustration: Alexey Karpenkov

A novel technology could provide a solution for cooling processes: refrigeration using magnetic materials in magnetic fields. Researchers have developed the idea of a cooling cycle based on the ‘magnetic memory’ of special alloys.

As a result of climate change, population growth, and rising expectations regarding quality of life, energy requirements for cooling processes are growing much faster worldwide than for heating. Another problem that besets today’s refrigeration systems is that most coolants cause environmental and health damage...