It's not just the heat, it's the humidity

29-04-2013

In spring a person's thoughts turn to important matters, like how best to keep your drink cold on a hot day. Though this quest is probably as old as civilization, University of Washington climate scientists have provided new insight. It turns out that in sultry weather condensation on the ...

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13-03-2013

A breakthrough in nanolaser technology has been made by Arizona State University researchers. Electrically powered nano-scale lasers have been able to operate effectively only in cold temperatures. Researchers in the field have been striving to enable them to perform reliably at room ...

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New room-temperature process could lead to less expensive solar cells and other electronic devices

15-02-2013

Silicon, the material of high-tech devices from computer chips to solar cells, requires a surface coating before use in these applications. The coating "passivates" the material, tying up loose atomic bonds to prevent oxidation that would ruin its electrical properties. But this passivation ...

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26-11-2012

The idea of harvesting ambient energy from the environment that would otherwise not be purposefully used is, in theory, a great way to produce green, renewable energy. But the biggest problem in this fairly new area of research is that scientists have yet to find a method that can harvest ...

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30-11-2010

A new chemical analysis technique developed by a research group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) uses the shifting ultrasonic pitch of a small quartz crystal to test the purity of only a few micrograms of material. Since it works with samples close to a thousand ...

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03-11-2010

Engineers at Oregon State University have discovered a new method to speed the production rate of nanoparticles by 500 times, an advance that could play an important role in making nanotechnology products more commercially practical. The approach uses an arrayed microchannel reactor and a ...

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25-10-2010

Being the right size and existing in the limbo between a solid and a liquid state appear to be the secrets to improving the efficiency of chemical catalysts that can create better nanoparticles or more efficient energy sources. When matter is in this transitional state, a catalyst can ...

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19-10-2010

A four-step process to produce alkanes in the range of jet and diesel fuel from the biomass of wood processing and pulp mills has been reported in Green Chemistry. In the search for alkanes more suited for transport fuels, previous researchers in this area carried out tests using model ...

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11-10-2010

Measuring a fuel cell's overall performance is relatively easy, but measuring its components individually as they work together is a challenge. That's because one of the best experimental techniques for investigating the details of an electrochemical device while it's operating is x-ray ...

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Rice researchers find metallacarboranes may meet DOE storage goals

04-10-2010

New research by Rice University scientists suggests that a class of material known as metallacarborane could store hydrogen at or better than benchmarks set by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) Hydrogen Program for 2015. The work could receive wide attention as hydrogen comes into ...

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