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Advances in delivering and storing electricity are crucial to the future of electric cars and otherwise reducing reliance on energy produced from burning fossil fuels. Yet a powerful means of running electronics that can charge and discharge quickly while also storing large amounts of energy has long eluded scientists

(PhysOrg.com) -- Extremely hydrophobic materials cause water to roll right off objects that have been coated with them. Up to now, it was assumed that aircraft or wind turbines coated in such a way did not ice up as easily. However, researchers from ETH Zurich have now shown that, under certain conditions, the surface materials do not influence ice formation.

a leading design concept for producing nuclear fusion energy—can, under certain rare fault conditions, produce beams of very energetic "runaway" electrons that have the potential to damage interior surfaces of the device. In the event of such a fault, a tokamak-based nuclear fusion power plant will have to employ protection systems to prevent any damage.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Subatomic events can be remarkably counterintuitive. Such is the case in theoretical physics when, under certain specific conditions, atoms exposed to intense infrared laser pulses remain stable rather than undergoing the ionization expected from electric fields at least as strong as the electrostatic forces binding the irradiated valence electrons. Inspired by the observed acceleration of neutral atoms1, and other recent experiments2, researchers at the Max-Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics in Berlin have shown that, in theory, angular resolved photoelectron spectroscopy can be used to directly image these so-called laser-dressed stable atoms.

From a laptop warming a knee to a supercomputer heating a room, the idea that computers generate heat is familiar to everyone. But theoretical physicists have discovered something astonishing: not only do computational processes sometimes generate no heat, under certain conditions they can even have a cooling effect