- What modern technologies trace back directly to the photoelectric effect?
Energy Technology
Technologies for generating, storing, and using energy.
- How did Friedrich Bergius apply high-pressure hydrogenation to turn coal into synthetic fuel?
- Why did Edison oppose alternating current, and how did he lose that argument to Tesla and Westinghouse?
- What share of the world's electricity does nuclear power generate today, decades after Chicago Pile-1?
- What efficiency did the Bell Labs silicon p-n junction cell achieve, and how did that compare to the selenium cells that came before it?
- What roles did Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller, and Gerald Pearson each play in developing the first practical solar cell?
- How did the New York Times cover the 1954 solar cell announcement, and how accurate did that coverage turn out to be?
- What discrepancy in beta decay led Wolfgang Pauli to propose the neutrino in 1930?
- What long-term effect did Three Mile Island have on new nuclear plant orders in the US?
- What technologies did the discovery of high-temperature superconductors open up for future research?
- What problem does the Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS) address in concurrent computing?
- What modern technologies rely on Marcus's framework for electron transfer?
- Why does combining red, green, and blue LEDs into white light matter for global energy use?
- What eventually ended InSight's mission in 2022?
- How much energy did the December 2022 fusion reaction release compared to the laser energy that triggered it?
- Why does achieving ignition not yet mean fusion power is net-positive overall?
- What practical applications rely on MOFs' huge internal surface area, from carbon capture to drug delivery?