Cooling

If you often pack food and drinks for outdoor trips, you know the struggle of keeping those items cool. This new piece of kit for camping and hiking looks like a simple way to keep your stuff chilled for longer.

You can’t brighten a room with darkness, you can’t dry a towel by soaking it, and you surely can’t cool things with heat. Right? Well, maybe. Scientists have just built a solid-state cooling device that can use heat to generate cold.

Portable fans are a great way to beat the heat that's bearing down on us in more places around the world lately. This upcoming model packs an extra feature that could help cool you down in a pinch. Oh, and did I mention it's also a power bank?

You know that frustration after you gear up for a snowy day, only to take it all off in a heated office? Well, penguins don't. Come heat or cold, they just chill. Inspired, scientists have created a material that switches between heating and cooling.

In 2025, data centers consumed 485 TWh of electricity. 30% of that, more than the entire annual power consumption of Sweden, went to cooling. Scientists have developed a 3D-printed copper plate cooling tech that can slash this figure by over 90%!

Barocal is developing a class of solid materials that can absorb and transfer heat when subjected to pressure, with a high degree of efficiency and safety. Expect to see these in action in future refrigerators and air conditioning systems.

The race to achieve the extreme cold that quantum technologies demand may have a frontrunner. Chinese scientists have developed an alloy that almost reaches absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature, without using the scarce isotope, helium-3.

Li-ion batteries need complex cooling systems. Yet, the human body, which generates enough heat to boil over 100 cups of tea daily, is literally just chillin’. The secret? Our skin’s ability to sweat. Scientists may have given batteries this ability.

Indian studio Sanjay Puri Architects dreamed up plans for a university that are quite unlike the usual imposing structures that immediately come to mind. It's a marvel from every angle, and especially so when you look at the roof.

Metallic theta-phase tantalum nitride exhibits an ultra-high thermal conductivity like no other material. This could be a desirable alternative to copper for computers and AI hardware, and even aerospace systems that need to run cool.

A roof paint that can cool your home and pull fresh water straight out of the air? It's within reach, as scientists scale up production of a new kind of paint-like coating that shields roofing from the sun's rays and harvests dew from its surface.

As our personal devices get smaller and are expected to do more – your phone, smartwatch, or wearable AI assistant – they can get hotter on the inside. xMEMS' tech can deliver airflow in these products with a chip smaller than a microSD card.