Homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car interiors that don’t heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid expanses of outer space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say? Well, maybe not any more.

A team of researchers at Stanford has designed an entirely new form of cooling structure that cools even when the sun is shining. Such a structure could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars, and other structures by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space. The team’s paper describing the device, “Ultrabroadband Photonic Structures To Achieve High-Performance Daytime Radiative Cooling,” was published March 5, 2013, in Nano Letters.

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