From a laptop warming a knee to a supercomputer heating a room, the fact that computers generate heat is familiar to everyone. But theoretical physicists have discovered something astonishing: not ...

Entropy gets a bad rap. Typically associated with randomness and chaos, it can also correlate with freedom and diversity.

Three recent studies offer deeper understanding of thermodynamic behaviors with potential to impact materials engineering and energy systems. One shows how increasing elemental diversity in layered ...

A challenge in materials design is that in both natural and manmade materials, volume sometimes decreases, or increases, with increasing temperature. While there are mechanical explanations for this ...

Science popularization has its legends and heroes, just like any other field, though I’ve heard no plans as yet to open a Hall of Fame. Should that day come, one of the first inductees would ...

A multi-university research collaboration including Drexel University, Purdue University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Pennsylvania, Argonne National Laboratory, and the Institute of ...

The universe, in all its vastness, is governed by physical laws that dictate the ebb and flow of matter and energy. A cornerstone among these laws is the second law of thermodynamics, which suggests a ...