Via slashdot:
British researchers are working on a new form of cooling that could – counterintuitively – save energy by applying electricity directly to the object being cooled.
A team of physicists and materials scientists at the U.K.’s National Physical Laboratory have said it could take as little as three years to produce a refrigeration system based on a phenomenon known as the electrocaloric effect, in which a material changes temperature under the influence of electricity.
Saving energy by applying electricity directly to large systems that need cooling – in a datacenter, for example – would be more...
