Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency — a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines. The...
Engineers enlist AI to help scale up advanced solar cell manufacturing
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Perovskites are a family of materials that are currently the leading contender to potentially replace today’s silicon-based solar photovoltaics. They hold the promise of panels that are far thinner and lighter, that could be made with ultra-high throughput at room temperature instead of at hundreds...
Hubble sheds light on origins of supermassive black holes
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Astronomers have identified a rapidly growing black hole in the early universe that is considered a crucial "missing link" between young star-forming galaxies and the first supermassive black holes. They used data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to make this discovery. Until now, the monster,...
New polymer materials make fabricating optical interconnects easier
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Researchers have developed new polymer materials that are ideal for making the optical links necessary to connect chip-based photonic components with board-level circuits or optical fibers. The polymers can be used to easily create interconnects between photonic chips and optical printed circuit boards, the light-based...
Rotating blue laser light reveals unimagined dynamics in living cells
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) When cities transform into a colorful world of lights as darkness falls, it’s often only possible to estimate their contours, which depending on the perspective can draw the attention to key details or trivia. In fluorescence microscopy, biological cells are marked with fluorescent dyes and...
Feel the attraction of zwitterionic Janus particles
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Researchers from The Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology and The Institute of Industrial Science at The University of Tokyo used a new computer simulation to model the electrostatic self-organization of zwitterionic nanoparticles, which are useful for drug delivery (Physical Review Letters, "Impact of...
Quantum light with modular waveguide device
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) For the first time, researchers have successfully generated strongly nonclassical light using a modular waveguide-based light source. The achievement represents a crucial step toward creating faster and more practical optical quantum computers. “Our goal is to dramatically improve information processing by developing faster quantum computers...
A 4 V-class metal-free organic lithium-ion battery gets closer to reality
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) A joint research team from Tohoku University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has made a significant advancement towards high-voltage metal-free lithium-ion batteries that use a small organic molecule, croconic acid. The breakthrough moves us closer to realizing metal-free, high-energy, and inexpensive lithium-ion...
a new strategy in tissue engineering
Apr 12, 2022 (Nanowerk News) It is an age old dream of medicine: if arbitrary kinds of tissue could be produced artificially from stem cells, then injuries could be healed with the body's own cells, and one day it might even be possible to produce artificial organs. However, it is...
A game changer for medical testing devices (w/video)
Apr 12, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Microfluidic devices are compact testing tools made up of tiny channels carved on a chip, which allow biomedical researchers to test the properties of liquids, particles and cells at a microscale. They are crucial to drug development, diagnostic testing and medical research in areas such...