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Category: climatology

Carbon nanotube ‘smart windows’ offer energy savings

Half of the sun’s radiant energy falls outside of the visible spectrum. On a cold day, this extra infrared light provides additional warmth to residential and commercial buildings. On a warm day, it leads to unwanted heating that must be dealt with through energy-intensive climate control methods such as air-conditioning. Visibly transparent “smart windows” that can modulate the transmission of near infrared light offer one potential cost- and energy-saving measure for modern infrastructure. To work towards solving this technological challenge, a multidisciplinary team of researchers at

Ultra-thin materials twist light into optical vortices for faster data transmission

Imagine a whirlpool spinning in a river, or a tornado swirling through the sky. They don’t just spin on the spot: they travel forward while maintaining that spiraling motion inside them. These twisting motions, called vortices, are powerful and organized spirals. Now, imagine light that behaves the same way: a beam of light that spins as it moves forward. This “twisted” light, known as an optical vortex, can carry more information than normal light, opening the door to faster internet and ultra-secure communications.

Carbon nanotube ‘smart windows’ offer energy savings by modulating near-infrared light transmission

Half of the sun’s radiant energy falls outside of the visible spectrum. On a cold day, this extra infrared light provides additional warmth to residential and commercial buildings. On a warm day, it leads to unwanted heating that must be dealt with through energy-intensive climate control methods such as air-conditioning.

Scientists explore real-time tsunami warning system on world’s fastest supercomputer

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have helped develop an advanced, real-time tsunami forecasting system—powered by El Capitan, the world’s fastest supercomputer—that could dramatically improve early warning capabilities for coastal communities near earthquake zones.

The exascale El Capitan, which has a theoretical peak performance of 2.79 quintillion calculations per second, was developed at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). As described in a preprint paper selected as a finalist for the 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize, researchers at LLNL harnessed the machine’s full computing power in a one-time, offline precomputation step, prior to the system’s transition to classified national-security work. The goal: to generate an immense library of physics-based simulations, linking earthquake-induced seafloor motion to resulting .

The paper is published on the arXiv preprint server.

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