ScienceDaily: Top Technology News

Passive day cooling is a promising technology for the sustainable reduction of energy consumption. Researchers have now created a test system with which the materials used for passive cooling can be reliably characterized and compared -- regardless of weather conditions and environmental conditions.

Precisely applied mechanical pressure can improve the electronic properties of a widely used polymer material. This requires that the material be mechanically processed to an accuracy of a few nanometers. In their new study, the researchers show how this previously unknown physical effect works and how it could also be used for new storage technologies. The team has also succeeded in sketching the coat of arms of the city of Halle as an electrical pattern with a spatial resolution of 50 nanometers in the material.

Fuel cells often fall short when it comes to operating at temperatures beyond 100 degrees Celsius owing to their dependence on water as a proton conduction medium. To overcome this issue, a team of researchers designed a new hydrogen-bonded starburst-shaped metal complex consisting of ruthenium (III) ion and six imidazole-imidazolate groups. The resulting single molecular crystal shows excellent proton conductivity even at temperatures as high as 180°C and as low as --70 °C.

A team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries, have found a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor galaxy to our own. The researchers found that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished without any sign of a powerful explosion.

Like a newborn animal, a four-legged robot stumbles around during its first walking attempts. But while a foal or a giraffe needs much longer to master walking, the robot learns to move forward fluently in just one hour. A computer program acts as the artificial presentation of the animal's spinal cord, and learns to optimize the robot's movement in a short time. The artificial neural network is not yet ideally adjusted at the beginning, but rapidly self-adjusts.