Category Technology/Electronics

Georgia Tech professor Zhong Lin Wang poses with an array of 1,000 LED lights that can be illuminated by power produced by the force of a shoe striking a triboelectric generator placed on the floor. Credit: Rob Felt

Researchers have discovered more details about the way certain materials hold a static charge even after two surfaces separate, information that could help improve devices that leverage such energy as a power source. While the effects of static electricity have been fascinating casual observers and scientists for millennia, certain aspects of how the electricity is generated and stored on surfaces have remained a mystery.

Now, researchers have discovered more details about the way certain materials hold a charge even after two surfaces separate, information that could help impr...

Illustration of the non-line-of-sight imaging system. Credit: Stanford Computational Imaging Lab

Someday your self-driving car could react to hazards before you even see them, thanks to a laser-based imaging technology that can peek around corners. It sounds like magic but the idea of non-line-of-sight imaging is actually feasible,” said Gordon Wetzstein, assistant professor of electrical engineering and senior author of the paper describing this work, published March 5 in Nature.

The Stanford group isn’t alone in developing methods for bouncing lasers around corners to capture images of objects. Where this research advances the field is in the extremely efficient and effective algorithm the researchers developed to process the final image...

This is an artistic impression of a quantum ball lighting. Credit: Heikka Valja

This knotted skyrmion may provide insight into a stable ball of plasma that could enhance future fusion reactors. Scientists at Amherst College and Aalto University have created, for the first time a 3D skyrmion in a quantum gas. The skyrmion was predicted theoretically over 40 years ago, but only now has it been observed experimentally.

In an extremely sparse and cold quantum gas, the physicists have created knots made of the magnetic moments, or spins, of the constituent atoms. The knots exhibit many of the characteristics of ball lightning, which some scientists believe to consist of tangled streams of electric currents...

PCN nanolayers under sunlight can split water. Credit: Nannan Meng /Tianjin University

One of the major challenges of the energy transition is to supply energy even when the sun is not shining. Hydrogen production by splitting water with the help of sunlight could offer a solution. Hydrogen is a good energy storage medium and can be used in many ways. However, water does not simply split by itself. Catalysts are needed, for instance Platinum, which is rare and expensive. Research teams the world over are looking for more economical alternatives. Now a team headed by Dr. Tristan Petit from the HZB, together with colleagues led by Prof. Bin Zhang from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, has made important progress using a well-known class of metal-free photocatalysts.

Bin Zhang and his team ...