It was a good week for new technology as a team of researchers at Columbia University announced a way to get renewable energy from evaporating water—they have come up with two devices, one a piston-based engine that generates electricity while floating, and the other, a rotary engine that powers a tiny car.
Also, another team with members from the U.S. and Korea demonstrated for the first time an on-chip visible light source using graphene—the world’s thinnest light bulb. And a team of chemists at UCLA announced that they had devised technology that could transform solar energy storage—it is a way to extend energy storage in solar cells from microseconds to weeks. Read more