liquid

A unique telescope that focuses light with a slowly spinning bowl of liquid mercury instead of a solid mirror has opened its eye to the skies above India. Such telescopes have been built before, but the 4-meter-wide International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) is the first large one to be purpose-built for astronomy, at the kind of high-altitude site observers prize—the 2450-meter Devasthal Observatory in the Himalayas. Although astronomers must satisfy themselves with only…

Researchers have created a form of platinum that can remain liquid at room temperature, by mixing tiny amounts of the precious metal with gallium. This new liquid platinum performs catalytic reactions more efficiently than a solid platinum catalyst, using far less of the metal.Platinum is a powerful catalyst for many different reactions, most commonly used in fuel cells and in catalytic converters to clean up vehicle emissions. The problem, however, is that it’s one of the rarest and most expensive metals on Earth,…

Scientists have figured out how to make platinum more affordable as a catalyst: turn it into a low-temperature liquid.It's been known for centuries that noble metals like platinum, gold, ruthenium, and palladium make excellent catalysts for chemical reactions, because they help break the chemical bonds between atoms more efficiently than other metals.  But noble metals are rare and expensive, so large-scale industrial manufacturers generally opt for cheaper, less effective alternatives like iron. (Iron is used as a…

Whether you’re after impressive overclocks or just looking to build a PC that stays quiet under load, you should choose your cooler carefully. Picking the best CPU cooler for your processor is a key decision in any CPU upgrade or new PC build. The best CPU cooler will make a major difference in your system's temperatures, noise, and even performance -- especially if you're overclocking. If your CPU cooler can’t keep up with the heat your processor is generating, that may result in lower performance or possibly even a…

Nvidia has announced its new plan for reducing the energy use of data centers crunching massive amounts of data or training AI models: liquid-cooled graphics cards. The company announced at Computex that it’s introducing a liquid-cooled version of its A100 compute card, and says that it consumes 30 percent less power than the air-cooled version. Nvidia’s also pledging that this isn’t just a one-off, it’s already got more liquid-cooled server cards on its roadmap, and hints at bringing the tech to other applications…

Redmi K50 Pro and Redmi K50 were launched by Xiaomi on Thursday. The smartphones are the flagship models of the Redmi brand, and feature top-end MediaTek SoCs, apart from liquid cooling tech, as well as 120Hz refresh rate and Dolby Vision capable 2K resolution displays. The two 5G-enabled smartphones are currently up for pre-booking, and will go on sale from later this month. Read on for more details about the Redmi K50 Pro and Redmi K50 price and specifications.Redmi K50 Pro, Redmi K50 priceThe Redmi K50 Pro price starts…

Intel on Thursday said it would invest $700 million in its new research and development facility that will design next-generation immersion liquid cooling solutions and other data center-oriented technologies. In addition, the company rolled out the industry's first open intellectual property (open IP) immersion liquid cooling solution and reference design that enables data centers to start using immersion liquid cooling without investing in expensive custom solutions.The first step towards democratization of immersion…

There are water molecules and ice up on the Moon, so how did they get there? Asteroid and comet collisions are likely to have produced some of it, but a new study suggests another source of lunar water: the Earth's atmosphere.  Hydrogen and oxygen ions escaping from our planet's upper atmosphere and then combining on the Moon could have created as much as 3,500 cubic kilometers (840 cubic miles) of surface permafrost or subsurface liquid water, scientists say.The thinking is that hydrogen and oxygen ions are driven into…

When conducting cardiac research, it would be ideal if experiments could be performed on actual living human hearts. Scientists have developed what may be the next-best thing, in the form of a tiny mechanical heart powered by real cardiac cells.Created by a team at Boston University, the flat-bodied "cardiac miniaturized Precision-enabled Unidirectional Microfluidic Pump" – or miniPUMP, for short – measures just 3 sq cm (0.5 sq in). It replicates the function of a real heart's ventricle (lower chamber), pumping water…

A revolutionary cryogenic tank design promises to radically boost the range of hydrogen-powered aircraft – to the point where clean, fuel-cell airliners could fly up to four times farther than comparable planes running on today's dirty jet fuel.Weight is the enemy of all things aerospace – indeed, hydrogen's superior energy storage per weight is what makes it such an attractive alternative to lithium batteries in the aviation world. We've written before about HyPoint's turbo air-cooled fuel cell technology, but its key…