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"Remarkably, the device is able to generate electricity at night, when solar cells don't work," "Beyond lighting, we believe this could be a broadly enabling approach to power generation suitable for remote locations, and anywhere where power generation at night is needed The device developed by Raman and Stanford University scientists Wei Li and Shanhui Fan sidesteps the limitations of solar power by taking advantage of radiative cooling, in which a sky-facing surface passes its heat to the atmosphere as thermal radiation, losing some heat to space and reaching a cooler temperature than the surrounding air. This phenomenon explains how...

What do a car engine, a power plant, a factory and a solar panel have in common? They all generate heat -- a lot of which is wasted. University of Arizona physicists have discovered a new way of harvesting waste heat and turning it into electrical power. Using a theoretical model of a so-called molecular thermoelectric device, the technology holds great promise for making cars, power plants, factories and solar panels more efficient, to name a few possible applications. In addition, more efficient thermoelectric materials would make ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, obsolete. The research group led by Charles Stafford, associate...

LONDON — Nanofreeze Technologies Lund AB, a startup company that claims to have developed cooling technology that is 10 to 15 times more efficient than Peltier coolers, has won 300.000 Swedish krone (about $40,000) in a competition organized by Vinnova in conjunction with Energimyndigheten. "In 5 years you will own a refrigerator cooled by Nanofreeze," the company asserted at its Website although the company expects to start with less demanding applications such as mobile phones. Nanofreeze (Lund, Sweden) was founded in September 2005 to develop research in the field of thermoelectrics originally performed at Lund University. The Vinnova competition...