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You’re probably sitting still, right? Wrong, absolutely wrong. Not only are you on a spinning orb, but you’re also traveling around 70,000 miles per hour around a star, in a galaxy that, observations imply, is sailing through space at over a million miles per hour.

If the above numbers seem shocking, they shouldn’t be. The laws of physics look and feel the same for any object so long as it’s not accelerating, the way you can’t feel that a car is traveling at a steady 60 miles per hour unless you look out the window. But that also makes our galactic speed hard to measure from here on Earth. The million-plus mile per hour number is based on measurements of how the most distant objects in the Universe appear to move in comparison to us, but scientists want to try to measure our acceleration by looking at more nearby objects.

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Directly converting electrical power to heat is easy. It regularly happens in your toaster, that is, if you make toast regularly. The opposite, converting heat into electrical power, isn’t so easy.

Researchers from Sandia National Laboratories have developed a tiny -based that can harness what was previously called waste and turn it into DC power. Their advance was recently published in Physical Review Applied.

“We have developed a new method for essentially recovering energy from . Car engines produce a lot of heat and that heat is just waste, right? So imagine if you could convert that engine heat into for a hybrid car. This is the first step in that direction, but much more work needs to be done,” said Paul Davids, a physicist and the principal investigator for the study.

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