Category Technology/Electronics

Prototype turns car and helicopter exhaust into thermoelectric energy

Researchers design and test a waste-heat recovery system, illustrated here, that attaches to a car tailpipe and converts heat from exhaust into energy. The fanned grooves on the outside of the pipe are the cold side of the device’s heatsink and the triangular components inside the pipe are plate-fin heat exchangers.
Adapted from ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 2025, DOI: 10.1021/acsami.4c18023

Combustion engines, the engines in gas-powered cars, only use a quarter of the fuel’s potential energy while the rest is lost as heat through exhaust.

Now, a study published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces demonstrates how to convert exhaust heat into electricity...

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Entangling two physically separate resonators enables a major advance in the science of quantum sound

A symphony in quantum
A new paper from the lab of UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Prof. Andrew Cleland demonstrates entanglement between two physically separate resonators. Credit: Cleland Lab

Entanglement—linking distant particles or groups of particles so that one cannot be described without the other—is at the core of the quantum revolution changing the face of modern technology.

While entanglement has been demonstrated in very small particles, new research from the lab of University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) Prof. Andrew Cleland is thinking big, demonstrating high-fidelity entanglement between two acoustic wave resonators.

The paper is published in Nature Communications.

“A lot of research groups have demonstrated that they can enta...

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Is DOGE a cybersecurity threat? A security expert explains the dangers of violating protocols and regulations

cybersecurity
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), President Donald Trump’s special commission tasked with slashing federal spending, continues to disrupt Washington and the federal bureaucracy. According to published reports, its teams are dropping into federal agencies with a practically unlimited mandate to reform the federal government in accordance with recent executive orders.

As a 30-year cybersecurity veteran, I find the activities of DOGE thus far concerning. Its broad mandate across government, seemingly nonexistent oversight, and the apparent lack of operational competence of its employees have demonstrated that DOGE could create conditions that are ideal for cybersecurity or data privacy incidents that affect the entire nation.

Tradition...

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AI-powered method improves reliability of next-generation networks

Network technology focused on signal developed for faster, reliable 5G and 6G networks
mmWave Massive MIMO system with moving UE; The angle-delay reciprocity holds in stationary (quasi-static) but not in non-stationary scenarios. Credit: IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1109/TWC.2024.3476474

As 5G and 6G networks expand, they promise a future of incredibly fast and reliable wireless connections. A key technology behind this is millimeter-wave (mmWave), which uses very high-frequency radio waves to transmit huge amounts of data. To make the most of mmWave, networks use large groups of antennas working together, called massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO).

However, managing these complex antenna systems is challenging...

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