Emerging energy and water harvesting technologies encompass a suite of materials, devices, and systems designed to capture, convert, and store dispersed environmental resources such as solar radiation, wind, moisture, and ambient heat. Work in this area integrates atmospheric water harvesting architectures, triboelectric and moisture-induced generators, solar thermal and molecular solar thermal storage, barocaloric and magnetic cooling, and long-duration energy storage concepts. These approaches often rely on nanoengineered surfaces, phase-change and barocaloric materials, and hybrid thermodynamic cycles to improve efficiency, reliability, and sustainability of power, cooling, and freshwater supply.
Engineering
A research team from Taiwan has developed a novel hybrid air-conditioning system integrating shallow geothermal energy and a desiccant wheel. Field tests confirm it significantly reduces energy consumption by up to 34.3% ...
10 hours ago
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Electronics & Semiconductors
Consider the chief difference between living systems and electronics: The first is generally soft and squishy while the latter is hard and rigid. Now, in work that could impact human-machine interfaces, biocompatible devices, ...
12 hours ago
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Engineering
Solar energy is abundant and frustratingly ill-timed. A sunbeam can become either electricity (useful for running modern life) or heat (useful for keeping spaces warm). But conventional solar hardware is single-minded: Photovoltaic ...
Mar 25, 2026
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Engineering
Data centers—the warehouse-sized buildings that store photos, stream movies and train artificial intelligence—are voracious consumers of electricity. A surprisingly large share of that power never reaches a microchip. Instead, ...
Mar 4, 2026
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Engineering
Many governments and businesses worldwide have been trying to devise effective initiatives aimed at mitigating climate change and global warming. So far, their primary focus has been to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide ...
Energy & Green Tech
A new material can store energy from sunlight and convert it into hydrogen days later. The material, jointly developed by researchers from Ulm and Jena, can do this even in the dark. The process is reversible and can be reactivated ...
Feb 26, 2026
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Energy & Green Tech
Researchers have developed a solar cell system that uses mirrors to concentrate solar energy. In addition to electricity, it produces heat for a plant that will capture carbon from industrial emissions. The solar cells in ...
Feb 18, 2026
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Energy & Green Tech
Researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have set a record runtime with a new compressorless gas turbine. The burner, featuring a revolutionary pressure-gain combustion technology, operated for 303 seconds. ...
Feb 17, 2026
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390
Energy & Green Tech
When the sun goes down, solar panels stop working. This is the fundamental hurdle of renewable energy: how to save the sun's power for a rainy day—or a cold night. Chemists at UC Santa Barbara have developed a solution that ...
Feb 13, 2026
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Engineering
Ocean waves are one of the most abundant and predictable renewable energy sources on the planet, yet efficiently harnessing their power remains a major challenge. Traditional devices typically operate efficiently only within ...
Feb 12, 2026
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