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Categories: Energy: Technology, Geoscience: Earthquakes

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Researchers have engineered an electrostatic face mask that can 'self-charge' through the user's breathing and continuously replenish its electrostatic charge as the user wears and breathes through the mask. This significantly increase the filtering performance in prolonged use of the mask for up to 60 hours, compared to four hours for a conventional surgical mask. This also benefits the environment.

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Researchers have found a way to use small shocks of electricity to disinfect water, reducing energy consumption, cost, and environmental impact. The technology could be integrated into the electric grid or even powered by batteries.

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New research on friction between faults could aid in predicting the world's most powerful earthquakes. Researchers discovered that fault surfaces bond together, or heal, after an earthquake. A fault that is slow to heal is more likely to move harmlessly, while one that heals quickly is more likely to stick until it breaks in a large, damaging earthquake. Tests allowed them to calculate a slow, harmless type of tremor. The discovery alone won't allow scientists to predict when the next big one will strike but it does give researchers a valuable new way to investigate the causes and potential for a large, damaging earthquake to happen, and guide efforts to monitor large faults like Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest.

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Physicists jumped a major hurdle standing in the way of the commercialization of solar cells created with halide perovskites as a lower-cost, higher-efficiency replacement for silicon when generating electricity from the sun.

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For all of the still-indistinguishable-from-magic wizardry packed into the three pounds of the adult human brain, it obeys the same rule as the other living tissue it controls: Oxygen is a must. So it was with a touch of irony that a scientists offered his explanation for a technological wonder -- movable, data-covered walls mere atoms wide -- that may eventually help computers behave more like a brain. 'There was unambiguous evidence that oxygen vacancies are responsible for this,' Tsymbal said.

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Researchers chiral phonons to convert wasted heat into spin information -- without needing magnetic materials. The finding could lead to new classes of less expensive, energy-efficient spintronic devices for use in applications ranging from computational memory to power grids.

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Researchers reveal the thermal instability that happens within the cells' interface layers, but also offers a path forward towards reliability and efficiency for halide perovskite solar technology.

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A research team has developed an operando reflection interference microscope (RIM) that provides a better understanding of how batteries work, which has significant implications for the next generation of batteries.

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Antiferroelectric materials have electrical properties that make them advantageous for use in high-density energy storage applications. Researchers have now discovered a size threshold beyond which antiferroelectrics lose those properties, becoming ferroelectric.

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Excessive use of fossil fuels leads to undesired carbon dioxide (CO2) generation, accelerating climate change. One way to tackle this is by converting CO2 into value-added chemicals. On this front, researchers have recently utilized a novel redox couple, for the purpose.

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Cornell University researchers have unearthed precise, microscopic clues to where magma is stored, offering a way to better assess the risk of volcanic eruptions.

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Some defects can be good. A new study shows that laser-induced defects in lithium-ion battery materials improve the performance of the battery.

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Concerns are mounting among policymakers and utility companies amid the impact of severe weather on the nation's electrical grids. In recent months, electrical grids in Texas have been tested to the point of near failure. So it seems like perfect timing that new research identifies a new method that provides the best way to utilize 'direct load control contracts' to mitigate electricity demand surges, increase grid reliability and reduce electricity cost. All of this right down to the individual household.

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A new sodium battery technology shows promise for helping integrate renewable energy into the electric grid. The battery uses Earth-abundant raw materials such as aluminum and sodium.

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Scientists have discovered a new layer of partly molten rock under the Earth's crust that might help settle a long-standing debate about how tectonic plates move. The molten layer is located about 100 miles from the surface and is part of the asthenosphere, which is important for plate tectonics because it forms a relatively soft boundary that lets tectonic plates move through the mantle. The researchers found, however that the melt does not appear to notably influence the flow of mantle rocks. Instead, they say, the discovery confirms that the convection of heat and rock in the mantle are the prevailing influence on the motion of the plates.

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Scientists have found the secret behind a property of solid materials known as ferroelectrics, showing that quasiparticles moving in wave-like patterns among vibrating atoms carry enough heat to turn the material into a thermal switch when an electrical field is applied externally.

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Energy-efficient ways of cooling buildings and vehicles will be required in a changing climate. Researchers have now shown that electrical tuning of passive radiative cooling can be used to control temperatures of a material at ambient temperatures and air pressure.

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Researchers are one step closer to making wearable textile technology a reality. Materials scientists have reported a new design of a flexible wearable supercapacitor patch. It uses MXene to create a textile-based supercapacitor that can charge in minutes and power an Arduino microcontroller temperature sensor and radio communication of data for almost two hours.

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A 'back-projection' technique reveals new details of the volcanic eruption in Tonga that literally shook the world.

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Nanotechnology researchers have made novel carbon nanotube yarns that convert mechanical movement into electricity more effectively than other material-based energy harvesters.