Sep 30, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Motivated by the need to eliminate expensive rare-earth magnets in utility-scale direct-drive wind turbines, Sandia National Laboratories researchers developed a fundamentally new type of rotary electrical contact. Sandia is now ready to partner with the renewable energy industry to develop the next generation of direct-drive...
Milky Way’s graveyard of dead stars found
Sep 30, 2022 (Nanowerk News) The first map of the ‘galactic underworld’ – a chart of the corpses of once massive suns that have since collapsed into black holes and neutron stars – has revealed a graveyard that stretches three times the height of the Milky Way, and that almost...
Metastable states of floating crystals
Sep 30, 2022 (Nanowerk News) research team led by the GRASP - Group of Research and Applications in Statistical Physics - at the University of Liège (Belgium), demonstrates how to manipulate the mesh, shape and symmetry of floating crystals by wandering, in a controlled way, between their metastable states. This...
The road to future AI is paved with trust
Sep 30, 2022 (Nanowerk News) The place of artificial intelligence (AI) in our everyday life is increasing and many researchers believe that what we have seen so far is only the beginning. However, AI must be trustworthy in all situations. Linköping University is coordinating TAILOR, a EU project that has...
Neural net computing in water
Sep 30, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Microprocessors in smartphones, computers, and data centers process information by manipulating electrons through solid semiconductors but our brains have a different system. They rely on the manipulation of ions in liquid to process information. Inspired by the brain, researchers have long been seeking to develop...
A long-awaited solution for hard-to-abate sectors?
Sep 30, 2022 (Nanowerk News) One of the world's biggest climate challenges is decarbonizing fossil energy uses that cannot be directly electrified using renewable power. Among so-called “hard-to-abate” (HTA) sectors are major industries that rely on fossil fuels, either for high-temperature energy or for chemical feedstocks. These include iron and...
Roll-to-roll fabrication of flexible printed perovskite solar cells under ambient conditions
Sep 29, 2022 (Nanowerk Spotlight) Lightweight and flexible perovskite solar cells are a new technology in which photovoltaic cells are manufactured using roll-to-roll printing and coating methods to deposit all the functional materials such as perovskites on flexible plastic substrates. The ability to print them simply like printing newspapers also...
New light for shaping electron beams
Sep 29, 2022 (Nanowerk News) A new technique that combines electron microscopy and laser technology enables programmable, arbitrary shaping of electron beams. It can potentially be used for optimizing electron optics and for adaptive electron microscopy, maximizing sensitivity while minimizing beam-induced damage. This fundamental and disruptive technology was now demonstrated...
Webb reveals a galaxy sparkling with the universe’s oldest star clusters
Sep 29, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers from the CAnadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS) team have identified the most distant globular clusters ever discovered. These dense groups of millions of stars may be relics that contain the first and oldest stars in the...
Engineers develop ultra-strong aerogels with materials used in bullet-proof vests
Sep 29, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Aerogels are lightweight materials with extensive microscale pores, which could be used in thermal insulation, energy devices, aerospace structures, as well as emerging technologies of flexible electronics. However, traditional aerogels based on ceramics tend to be brittle, which limits their performance in load-bearing structures. Due...