Tech Xplore

It is the second day of a massive heat wave. Across the region, thermostats are cranked, air conditioners are laboring, and wind turbines have gone still. Without warning, a summer storm moves in, and the solar generation energy markets were counting on vanishes behind clouds. The heat saps the efficiency of conventional generators, too, and blackouts begin rolling through neighborhoods. People look up from their phones, annoyed and sweating, and wonder: Why isn't there enough power? Can't they just make more?

Manufacturers have traditionally relied on sales figures to understand where they stand with consumers, but by the time those numbers arrive, consumers' buying decisions have already been made. A study co-authored by UC Riverside business professor Hai Che offers a way to capture what consumers are thinking while they are still weighing options, comparing products and deciding whether to buy at all.

A critique from the University of St Andrews published in the journal Nature provides evidence that Microsoft's claimed quantum computing "breakthrough" was built on flawed foundations.

In 2022, global production of construction materials accounted for more than 7% of total carbon emissions. But how many of those materials were truly necessary to build houses, buildings and bridges?

An inchworm has provided the inspiration for a robot that can move without any rigid parts. The robot mimics a flexing muscle and can be used to inspect sewer pipes or as an explorer on the planet Mars, according to a thesis from the University of Gothenburg. The research is published on the arXiv preprint server.

A growing demand for energy storage is pushing lithium-ion batteries to their limits, advancing next-generation technologies through innovative materials research.

While biomethane is flowing into homes across the U.S., Asia and Europe, a renewable replacement for natural gas has yet to reach its full potential in Australia.

Next-generation electronic devices like newer computers and other high-power devices require more energy to run. When they are working hard, the intense heat they generate can limit their performance and reliability. That's why scientists are trying to find better and more sustainable materials to help cool devices down.

There is little evidence that Australia's Social Media Minimum Age Act has led to any immediate reductions in social media use by under-16s, according to an early analysis of survey data published by The BMJ.

A newly developed architecture for full-duplex wireless transceivers solves the long-standing problem of self-interference, as reported by researchers from Science Tokyo. They implemented an innovative switching strategy that isolates self-interference in the time domain by alternating transmission and reception faster than the wireless signal period, enabling effective simultaneous transmission and reception. Experiments using 400-MHz-wide millimeter-wave signals (5G-compatible) highlight the technology's potential for future Beyond 5G/6G infrastructure, including extended reality systems and smart factories.