Illustration: Eddie Guy Winter’s arrival in England adds an unpleasant chill to already dreary, drizzly days. I wasn’t surprised at the resigned mood in the conference room as graduate students and postdocs shuffled in for our weekly lab meeting in November 2011. Many of us hailed from balmier climates—California, Spain, Italy, the Caribbean islands. We […]
In the dark, dank depths of your home basement hangs a drab gray box that guards the building’s electrical circuits. The circuit breakers inside switch off current flow when there is risk of an overload or short circuit, keeping you safe from fires or electrocution. It’s a critical job, and one that breakers have been […]
Earlier this year, at a sprawling complex in the Texas Panhandle, a new type of nuclear weapon began rolling off the production line and into the United States arsenal. The ballistic missile warheads are low-yield and relatively small, and they reflect a growing push by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons program after decades […]
Better batteries for electric cars and grid-energy storage may be just one revolution away—whether in fuel cells or flow batteries or supercapacitors. But there’s a company in Massachusetts that’s betting the evolution of existing technology—rather than a revolution—will determine how we power future EVs and store renewable energy. “Lithium ion has this massive scale,” says Erik Terjesen, […]
Although racing airplanes for sport has been a popular pastime around the world since the 1930s, its essential technology hasn’t changed much. Although computer design and engineering have greatly enhanced race planes’ thrust, economy, and maneuverability, the air racers still rely on petroleum-fueled propeller engines the way they did decades ago. One entrepreneur is looking to […]
The stats are daunting. The Great Barrier Reef is 2,300 kilometers long, comprises 2,900 individual coral reefs, and covers an area greater than 344,000 square kilometers, making it the world’s largest living organism and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A team of researchers from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, is monitoring the reef, located off the coast […]
Electronics must perform and endure for 1,000 hours at 85 °C to pass a standard accelerated lifetime test. Coffee is best served at 85 °C—a fact that’s built right into the name of the fast-growing 85°C Bakery Café chain. Just another meaningless coincidence? Not for the photovoltaics researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles. For […]
Digitalization is a chance and an enabler. It empowers industries to tackle their current challenges like performance increase, health, safety & environmental topics, cost and risk reductions. However, to benefit from digitalization it is necessary to generate data in the first place. While these opportunities seem to be common sense in many industries already, the […]
Electric vehicles, rooftop solar panels, and microgrids aren’t only quickening the pulses of urban hipsters. Distributed energy resources are turning heads in rural parts of the United States, too. Indeed, the rise of distributed generation—the so-called democratization of the energy system—is a key driver behind the U.S. electric power grid’s steady trek to decentralize. Technology improvements along […]
Illustration: Greg Mably You can roughly track the advance of civilization by the state of its lighting—above all, its power, cost, and luminous efficacy. That last element refers to the ability of a light source to produce a meaningful response in the eye, and it is the total luminous flux (in lumens) divided by the rated […]