University of Illinois electrical engineers have cleared another hurdle in high-power semiconductor fabrication by adding the field’s hottest material – beta-gallium oxide – to their arsenal. Beta-gallium oxide is readily available and promises to convert power faster and more efficiently than today’s leading semiconductor materials – gallium nitride and silicon, the researchers said. Their findings are published in the journal ACS Nano.

Flat transistors have become about as small as is physically possible, but researchers addressed this problem by going vertical...

Gas-giant planets orbiting close to other stars have powerful magnetic fields, many times stronger than our own Jupiter, according to a new study by a team of astrophysicists. It is the first time the strength of these fields has been calculated from observations.

The team, led by Wilson Cauley of the University of Colorado, also includes associate professor Evgenya Shkolnik of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Expl...

A study puts a sequence to the events which gave rise to our Galaxy. The universe 13,000 million years ago was very different from the universe we know today. It is understood that stars were forming at a very rapid rate, forming the first dwarf galaxies, whose mergers gave rise to the more massive present-day galaxies, including our own. However the exact chain of the events which produced the Milky Way was not known until now.

Exact measurements of position, brightness and distance for around a million stars of our galaxy within 6,500 light years of the sun, obtained with the Gaia space telescope, have allowed a team from the IAC to reveal some of its early stages...

Scientists have developed a wastewater treatment process that uses a common agricultural byproduct to effectively remove pollutants and environmental hormones, which are known to be endocrine disruptors.

The performance of the catalyst that is currently being used to process sewage and wastewater drops significantly with time. Because high efficiency is difficult to achieve given the conditions, the biggest disadvantage of the existing process is the high cost involved...