15 results found for electricity

Early lighthouses used coil and wood fires before moving on to gas and then electricity powered lights.  Massive improvements took place by using a lens system around the light.  The development of the Fresnel lens brought what we now regard as the....

Using solar cells to convert sunlight to electricity is an attractive way to reduce carbon emissions, but solar cells are still too expensive to be installed on the scale required. The next generation of solar cells aim to solve this problem using st....

Succulent, cretaceous, technology, parasitical, electricity . . . Scientific investigation in the seventeenth century generated new ideas, and scientists needed new words to express them. Experimentalists, observers, collectors, and technicians all c....

Energy storage technologies such as fuel cells, batteries, electrolysis and super capacitors will need to be improved to enable better use of intermittent renewable electricity sources and the development of sustainable transport in the future.

This presentation reviews how magnets work and their uses in the world today. It also explains how magnets and electricity are related and what future inventions could come from using magnets.

An examination of the usefulness of fuel cells

Peeling sticky tape emits energy that extends into the X-ray regime, reports a study in Nature. The research provides evidence for a phenomenon that was first observed more than 50 years ago.nnIt is well known that unwinding sticky tape produces spar....

Fine tuning the frequencies of light gave John Hall a Nobel Prize, and helped transform the fields of precision measurement and information transmission. Iris Choi and Andrei Ghicov are young scientists excited by the ways physics can change our worl....

Emily Dougherty presents on the nature and physics of lightning.

A short clip showing the experimental measurement of the speed of electrical pulses in a cable - a large fraction of the speed of light.

Some minerals such as quartz can produce electricity simply by squeezing or bending them - these are called piezoelectric crystals. Here is a simple and cheap demonstration you can do.