Energy
Humankind's insatiable appetite for energy has put the planet in a very precarious position environmentally, but it also drives prosperity and improved living standards. New Atlas keeps you up to date with the latest breakthroughs in the energy sector, from the expanding field of renewable energy production to the exponential rise of battery technology and the slow march towards nuclear fusion.
Latest News
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We've already heard about hoses that get wrapped around existing hot water pipes, using heat radiated from the pipe to heat water inside the hose. A new wrap-around device, however, uses that same pipe-heat to generate electricity. -
Perovskite solar cells have come a long way in a short time, but there’s still room for improvement. Engineers have now added a layer of quantum dots to the recipe, resulting in a more stable solar cell with near-record efficiency.
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For quantum batteries, the bigger the battery, the faster it charges. For the first time, team of scientists has now demonstrated the quantum mechanical principle of superabsorption that underpins quantum batteries in a proof-of-concept device.
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With the capacity to store up to five times the energy of lithium-ion solutions, researchers have a keen interest in lithium-sulfur batteries, and a team at the University of Michigan has taken a step toward realizing their real-world potential.
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Rubber might not seem like a great candidate for an electrolyte material in a battery, but Georgia Tech researchers have developed a new rubbery material with a high conductivity, which could make for safer electric vehicle batteries with longer range.
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As useful as renewable energy sources are, they need to be backed up by storage systems. Ocean Battery is a new design for an energy storage system that functions a bit like a hydroelectric dam at the bottom of the sea.
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Heating and cooling buildings is a major consumer of energy, especially older ones that weren’t built with modern energy efficiencies in mind. Now Fraunhofer engineers have developed a modular solar-powered facade that can heat or cool rooms.
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Good news for fusion energy progress and a new world record for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as its Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), or "artifical sun," maintains 70 million degrees Celsius (126 million °F) for 1,056 seconds.
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GAF Energy has launched Timberline Solar Energy Shingles (ES) at CES 2022. The ultra-thin, flat-mounted shingles install just like a regular shingle, bringing low-profile solar energy to a home's rooftop.
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NYC-based designer Joe Doucet doesn't see why renewable energy generation shouldn't actively make a home more beautiful, so he's putting together a series of "kinetic walls" using rotary wind turbines to achieve some hypnotic visual effects.
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This year served up a stellar crop of battery advances that resulted from researchers thinking outside the box, reimagining these devices and the way they function. Let's take a look at the most creative and interesting examples.
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Scientists have taken aim at inactive clumps of lithium that build up over a battery's lifetime and shown how they can be brought back to life to boost the performance of the device and potentially unlock next-gen designs with far greater densities.
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