Category Technology/Electronics

This is the exsolution of a B-site cation with oxygen from layered perovskite in a reducing atmosphere. Credit: UNIST

The commercialization of the ‘natural gas fuel cell’ has finally come to the fore, thanks to the recent development of electrode materials that maintain long-term stability in hydrocarbon fuels. Advantage of using this material includes that it uses internal transition metal as a further catalyst in a fuel cell operating condition. The collaborative results, published online in the June issue of the journal Nature Communications, have emerged as the promising candidate for the next generation direct hydrocarbon solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) technology.

A solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) is an electrochemical conversion device that produces electricity by oxidizing a fuel...

10 cubic millimetre cube in the rock, where only the nitrogen fluid blobs are being shown. They are coloured in accordance with how connected they are to other fluid blobs. For example, pink and red blobs are fully connected throughout. Purple are blobs connected only across a handful of pores, and blue nitrogen blobs only inhabit one pore.

The discovery could lead to a range of improvements including advances in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). This is where industrial emissions will be captured by CCS technology, before reaching the atmosphere, and safely stored in rock deep underground. Miles below the surface of Earth different types of fluids are flowing through the microscopic spaces between the grains inside rocks...

The neutron spectrometer used in this study. Credit: EPFL/PSI

Many physical phenomena can be modeled with relatively simple math. But, in the quantum world there are a vast number of intriguing phenomena that emerge from the interactions of multiple particles – “many bodies” – which are notoriously difficult to model and simulate, even with powerful computers. Examples of quantum many body states with no classical analogue include superconductivity, superfluids, Bose-Einstein condensation,quark-gluon plasmas etc. As a result, many “quantum many-body” models remain theoretical, with little experimental backing...

When fed 3-D models of household items in bird’s-eye view (left), a new algorithm is able to guess what the objects are, and what their overall 3-D shapes should be. This image shows the guess in the center, and the actual 3-D model on the right. Credit: Courtesy of Ben Burchfiel

Robots need to guess what they’re seeing better, even when parts are hidden from view. Autonomous robots can inspect nuclear power plants, clean up oil spills in the ocean, accompany fighter planes into combat and explore the surface of Mars. Yet for all their talents, robots still can’t make a cup of tea. That’s because tasks such as turning the stove on, fetching the kettle and finding the milk and sugar require perceptual abilities that, for most machines, are still a fantasy.

Among them is the ability to make ...