Wearable thermoelectric technology uses thin films to generate electricity from body heat

Seoul National University College of Engineering has announced that a research team led by Prof. Jeonghun Kwak of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with co-first authors Dr. Juhyung Park and Dr. Sun Hong Kim, has developed a flexible and thin “pseudo-transverse thermoelectric generator” capable of producing electricity from body heat. The research findings appear in Science Advances.

Thermoelectric generators, which convert temperature differences into electricity, are attracting attention as a next-generation energy technology for wearable electronics because they can supply power without batteries. In particular, thin-film thermoelectric generators are lightweight and flexible, allowing them to be comfortably attached to skin or clothing.

However, this thi...

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How young galaxies grew magnetic fields faster than expected

How young galaxies grew magnetic fields faster than expected
Lower panel shows a collapsing plasma cloud with uniform magnetic field (red). Top Right: Compression alone amplifies the field. Bottom Right: Collapse-driven turbulence accelerates dynamo amplification (also generating a horizontal component (blue)), producing magnetic fields stronger than compression alone. Credit: Pallavi Bhat, Anvar Shukurov, Muhammed Irshad and Kandaswamy Subramanian. NASA; SOFIA; HAWC+; A. S. Borlaff/NASA; JPL-Caltech; ESA; Hubble.

How fast can a galaxy build ordered magnetic fields spanning thousands of light-years? Existing theories say several billion years, but observations of galaxies in our universe imply shorter timescales...

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Communication-aware neural networks could advance edge computing

Communication-aware neural networks that could advance edge computing
An overview of communication-aware in-memory wireless neural networks. Credit: Yang et al.

Edge computing is an emerging IT architecture that enables the processing of data locally by smartphones, autonomous vehicles, local servers, and other IoT devices instead of sending it to be processed at a centralized large data center. This approach could allow artificial intelligence (AI) models and other computational systems to perform tasks rapidly, while consuming less power.

Despite the potential of this approach, typically local devices have a limited battery capacity and restricted computing capabilities. This means they often need to send data to remote cloud servers via the internet to complete complex calculations...

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Physicists trace the sun’s magnetic engine, 200,000 kilometers below its surface

Above: Diagram of the Sun’s interior and outer atmosphere, showing the core, radiative and convection zones — separated by the tachocline — and surface features such as sunspots, flares, the chromosphere and corona. Credit: NASA

Every eleven years, the sun’s magnetic field flips. Sunspots—dark, cooler regions on the sun’s surface that mark intense magnetic activity and often trigger solar eruptions—appear at mid-latitudes and migrate toward the star’s equator in a butterfly-shape pattern before fading as the cycle resets. While this spectacle on the star’s surface has long been visible to astronomers, where this powerful cycle begins inside the star has remained hidden until now.

Researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) have analyzed nearly three dec...

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