174
A new cooling technology freezes food without warming the climate
(www.anthropocenemagazine.org)
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
174 points (91.0% liked)
Technology
79236 readers
1476 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You don’t overcome thermodynamics, but you can work around them. For example:
Or you can shunt it into space so that it doesn’t heat the atmosphere on its way out. That’s called radiative cooling and it’s brilliant.
And it can be done at home with household items. See Nighthawk’s YT channel for more info: https://youtu.be/N3bJnKmeNJY
And that’s just one out of many possible approaches. Interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_surfaces_(climate_engineering)
That's reflection of external heat not removal of internal heat. Refrigeration requires effort and therefore energy.
I was talking about cooling and a practical example of “working around the rules”.
As for refrigeration in particular: any similar mechanism can do this too. Example: if you can figure out a material that emits IR in the ballpark for that specific range of wavelengths, you can use it as an active shunt.
Also read somewhere before (not sure when or where tbh, but it might’ve been an old school 2000s forum discussion or something) about a way to possibly achieve it via phase change cooling at a molecular scale iirc. It wasn’t viable at the time and we made light of it, but with the material science advancements of today? Who knows. Maybe someone figured it out.