Physicists in the Netherlands have built a heat engine that might be the tiniest ever created. Based on “piezoresistive” silicon, and smaller than a typical biological cell, the engine could find ...

The heat engine works as its intrinsic spin converts heat absorbed from laser beams into oscillations of a trapped ion. Credit: John Goold, Trinity College Dublin A new heat engine made from a ...

The smaller the better, and in a world of fast-developing technology, that’s called innovation. Just this month, a desk-sized turbine capable of powering a small town was announced to be under ...

Tabletop experiments by Indian physicists have broken a barrier proposed 200 years ago by a legendary French engineer, Sadi Carnot, raising hopes of new high-efficiency heat engines hitherto ...

Researchers who are studying a new magnetic effect that converts heat to electricity have discovered how to amplify it a thousand times over -- a first step in making the technology more practical.

ACCORDING to Dr. George Saintsbury, “A review … is a thing addressed to the general body of educated people, telling them whether it is or is not worth their while to make further acquaintance with ...

Scientists are working on a heat engine that consists of just a single ion. Such a nano-heat engine could be far more efficient than, for example, a car engine or a coal-fired power plant. Scientists ...

For the first time, a quantum engine has outperformed its traditional equivalent, without any special tweaks to its environment. The device harnesses the weird physics of very small objects to produce ...