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If there's one thing we humans are good at, it's producing heat: significant amounts, and in many cases most of the energy we generate and put into our systems we lose as heat, whether it be our appliances, our transportation, our factories, even our electrical grid. "Waste heat is everywhere," said UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineering professor Bolin Liao, who specializes in thermal science and renewable energy. "Our power plants, our car exhaust pipes—there are so many places where we create excess heat waste." For the moment, we're fairly limited as to how we can make the most out of this dissipating heat. But Liao and UCSB colleagues, alongside collaborators from Ohio State University and University of Hong Kong, are making headway toward putting that heat to use, with a first-time comprehensive characterization of the thermoelectric properties of high-quality cadmium arsenide thin films.