When electronic devices like laptops or smartphones overheat, they are fundamentally suffering from a nanoscale heat transfer problem. Pinpointing the source of that problem can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. "The building blocks of our modern electronics are transistors with nanoscale features, so to understand which parts of overheating, the first step is to get a detailed temperature map," says Andrea Pickel, an assistant professor from the University of Rochester's Department of Mechanical Engineering. "But you need something with nanoscale resolution to do that." Existing optical thermometry techniques are impractical because they have fundamental limits on the spatial resolution they can achieve. So Pickel and materials science Ph.D. students Ziyang Ye and Benjamin Harrington engineered a new approach to overcome these limitations by leveraging Nobel Prize in Chemistry–winning optical super-resolution fluorescence microscopy techniques used in biological imaging.....