Research

  LightNOW has recently covered advances in green aluminum, copper, and textiles. There has now been a large advancement in creating more environmentally friendly glass. Researchers at Penn State University have created what they’re calling LionGlass, a new type of glass that cuts the carbon footprint in half and increases the strength by ten fold. [...]

The Nobel Prizes awarded, this month, in both Chemistry and Physics had some things in common. Both involved scientific breakthroughs involving light, as well as distance scales so small that quantum mechanical behavior is essential to understand the science. Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov were awarded the Nobel Prize in [...]

  New research by Assistant Professor of Physics Xiao-Feng Qian, at the Stevens Institute of Technology has linked two separate fields of physics: Coherence Optics and Classical Mechanics. It introduces a universal relationship between the polarization of light and its entanglement properties. A new quantitative relationship between certain quantum properties of light are connected and [...]

  Scientists from Fishtek Marine, a manufacturer of sustainable fishing gear, had a surprise discovery. Bright lights that they added to crab pots to catch more crabs instead attracted loads of scallops. The scallops swam into the traps to get to the lights. Traditional scallop fishing involves dredging the bottom of the ocean, causing considerable [...]

  I’ve previously written about China’s gallium export ban not impacting current global gallium supplies here. I’ve also written about the recent 2023 DOE Critical Materials Assessment, here. A deeper look at the Critical Materials Assessment shows the LED industry might be in for a rough ride. The majority of white light LEDs are made [...]

Researchers at Aalto University in Finland have achieved a new milestone in wireless charging. Efficiency had always dropped dramatically as the distance between wireless power transmitter and receive increased. The Aalto researchers, however, achieved 80+% efficiency at a distance of 7” between the transmitter and receiver antennas. To do this, the team developed a new [...]

Last year, I wrote about the release of the first Artificial Light At Night (ALAN): State of the Science Report 2022, available here. DarkSky (formerly the International Dark Sky Association – IDA), has now released an updated version of the report titled Artificial Light At Night: State of the Science 2023 Report. It is a [...]

  MIT researchers have created a silicon-based LED that is less than one micron across. This is less than one thousandth of a millimeter (mm) across. Despite the tiny size, the new LED has a high intensity, which allowed the researchers to create a holographic microscope. This advance could allow a smartphone camera to become [...]

  Researchers at Linköping University and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, have created the first functioning transistor made of wood. This represents an early step in the development of biodegradable electronics. The researchers started with balsa wood and removed the lignin that makes wood strong and rigid. This created cellulose fibers with [...]