Generating electrical power from waste heat
Directly converting electrical power to heat is easy. It regularly happens in your toaster, that is, if you make toast regularly. The opposite, converting heat into electrical power, isn't so easy.
Jul 09, 2018
in
Thermal camouflage disguises hot and cold
Hunters don camouflage clothing to blend in with their surroundings. But thermal camouflage—or the appearance of being the same temperature as one's environment—is much more difficult. Now researchers, reporting in ACS' ...
Engineers solve excessive heat removal from NASA's Webb Telescope
How will NASA's James Webb Space Telescope shed the heat generated by its science instruments and their supporting electronics? To anyone who is not an engineer or scientist, the answer might be complex and "baffling," and ...
80 years since the first calculations showed that the Earth was warming due to rising greenhouse gas emissions
Some people argue that concern for global warming is a modern phenomenon. And that scientists and environmental activists invented these worries to raise awareness of rising greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.
How your WiFi can protect against intruders
The applications of wireless networks go far beyond logging onto the free Airport WiFi while you wait to board your flight, or binge watching the latest Netflix series on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Australian fire beetle avoids the heat
The Australian jewel beetle Merimna atrata has several heat sensors. Originally, it was thought to use them to detect forest fires as it lays its eggs in the wood of burned eucalyptus trees. Researchers at the University ...
Innovative diode design uses ultrafast quantum tunneling to harvest infrared energy from the environment
Most sunlight striking the Earth is absorbed by its surfaces, oceans and atmosphere. As a result of this warming, infrared radiation is emitted constantly all around us-estimated to be millions of Gigawatts per second. A ...
Image: Saturn's north pole
Reflected sunlight is the source of the illumination for visible wavelength images such as the one above. However, at longer infrared wavelengths, direct thermal emission from objects dominates over reflected sunlight. This ...
High-resolution optical coherence tomography without particle accelerator
A visit to the optometrist often involves optical coherence tomography. This imaging process uses infrared radiation to penetrate the layers of the retina and examine it more closely in three dimensions without having to ...
VISTA peeks through the Small Magellanic Cloud's dusty veil
VISTA's infrared capabilities have now allowed astronomers to see the myriad of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy much more clearly than ever before. The result is this record-breaking image—the biggest infrared ...
