CHESS thin-film materials nearly double refrigeration efficiency compared to traditional methods. Scalable and versatile, they promise applications from household cooling to space exploration.
Improved thermoelectrics would also be useful in reverse for harvesting otherwise wasted heat energy from anywhere hot and cold surfaces intersect. Instead of replacing active cooling on a CPU, use passive cooling and use the Peltier/Seebeck/Thomson effect to harvest some of the heat into power. Of course, the most effective use would probably be on engines and other devices that get much hotter than CPUs.
Improved thermoelectrics would also be useful in reverse for harvesting otherwise wasted heat energy from anywhere hot and cold surfaces intersect. Instead of replacing active cooling on a CPU, use passive cooling and use the Peltier/Seebeck/Thomson effect to harvest some of the heat into power. Of course, the most effective use would probably be on engines and other devices that get much hotter than CPUs.