In lots of situations, the ideal energy storage device is not a battery, which stores lots of energy but can't deliver it particularly quickly. Nor is it a supercapacitor, which has limited storage but delivers what it's got quickly. Instead it would be something that could do both. Scientists in China and the United States recently took a big step toward that ideal component when they showed that nitrogen can triple the energy storage capacity of carbon-based supercapacitors, potentially making them competitive with some batteries in terms of the amount of energy stored.

How we react to faces could be linked to our political affiliations. Psychologist Jacob M.

As microchips shrink, the inescapable electronic buzz that emerges from thermal fluctuations, cross talk between wires and other sources can endanger their proper function. A way around that problem could be stochastic resonance, a phenomenon in which noise can boost a weak signal and improve a system's performance.