Credit: TU Delft/Northwestern University. Last year, computer engineers from Northwestern University and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) introduced the world’s first battery-free Game Boy, which harvests both solar energy and the user’s kinetic energy from button mashing to power an unlimited lifetime of game play. The same team now

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A laser heats up ultra-thin bars of silicon. Credit: Steven Burrows/JILA. A team of physicists at CU Boulder has solved the mystery behind a perplexing phenomenon in the nano realm: why some ultra-small heat sources cool down faster if you pack them closer together. The findings, published today in the

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Credit: whoalice-moore/Pixabay. Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have developed extremely powerful microscopic lasers that are even smaller than the wavelength of the light they produce. So called ‘nanolasers’ have a huge variety of medical, surgical, industrial and military uses, covering everything from hair removal to laser printers and night-time surveillance. According to lead

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Credit: Public Domain CC0. By confining the transport of electrons and ions in a patterned thin film, scientists find a way to potentially enhance material properties for design of next-generation electronics. Like ripples in a pond, electrons travel like waves through materials, and when they collide and interact, they can

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Credit: Nynke Wijbenga. An electronic “nose” can detect with 86% accuracy when a lung transplant is beginning to fail, according to research presented at the ‘virtual’ European Respiratory Society International Congress. Ms Nynke Wijbenga, a PhD student and technical physician at Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, told the

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Credit: Fredrik Solli Wandem/Pixabay. Modern devices that use lithium-ion batteries, like smartphones and electric cars, seem pretty robust. But try to use one in extreme heat or cold, and you’ll see how susceptible they are to malfunctions and low performance due to temperature. Purdue University engineers have developed a solution:

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Credit: University of Notre Dame. There’s nothing like the smell of freshly brewed coffee in the morning. But how does one measure that smell? There’s no energy in a smell to help estimate how potent the coffee might be. Instead, it’s the gases emitted from brewed coffee that contribute to

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