… for long-duration energy storage. Flow batteries are promising for energy storage due to their high safety, high reliability, long cycle life, and high efficiency. The development of commercial-scale flow batteries for long-duration energy storage requires to reduce the cost of flow batteries, especially the cost of ion-exchange membranes. Recently, a research group led by Prof. LI Xianfeng from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) realized pilot-scale synthesis and roll-to-roll manufacturing of hydrocarbon membranes with…
Researchers from Skoltech, MIPT, the RAS Institute of Solid State Physics, Aalto University, and elsewhere have proposed the first graphene synthesis technique that utilizes carbon monoxide as the carbon source. It is a fast and cheap way to produce high-quality graphene with relatively simple equipment for use in electronic circuits, gas sensors, optics, and beyond. The study came out in the prestigious journal Advanced Science. Chemical vapor deposition is the standard technology for synthesizing graphene, the one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms in…
Standard image sensors, like the billion or so already installed in practically every smartphone in use today, capture light intensity and color. Relying on common, off-the-shelf sensor technology – known as CMOS – these cameras have grown smaller and more powerful by the year and now offer tens-of-megapixels resolution. But they’ve still seen in only two dimensions, capturing images that are flat, like a drawing – until now. Researchers at Stanford University have created a new approach that allows standard…
Bacteria, fungi, and yeast are very good at excreting useful substances such as weak acids. One way in which they do this is through passive diffusion of molecules across the cell membrane. At the same time, cells need to prevent leakage of numerous small molecules. Yeast cells, for instance, can live in hostile environments thanks to a very robust and relatively impermeable membrane system. Biochemists at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, have studied how the composition of the membrane…
Vast stores of helium from the Big Bang lingering in the core suggest Earth formed inside a solar nebula. Helium-3, a rare isotope of helium gas, is leaking out of Earth’s core, a new study reports. Because almost all helium-3 is from the Big Bang, the gas leak adds evidence that Earth formed inside a solar nebula, which has long been debated. Helium-3 has been measured at Earth’s surface in relatively small quantities. But scientists did not know how much…
… could speed the study of many diseases. Scripps Research technique makes it easier to analyze body-wide biological processes and diseases such as COVID-19 infection. Scientists at Scripps Research have unveiled a new tissue-clearing method for rendering large biological samples transparent. The method makes it easier than ever for scientists to visualize and study healthy and disease-related biological processes occurring across multiple organ systems. Described in a paper in Nature Methods on March 28, 2022, and dubbed HYBRiD, the new…
According to the latest assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a considerable reduction in CO2 emissions is required to limit the consequences of climate change. Producing fuel from renewable sources such as waste wood and straw or renewable electricity would be one way to reduce carbon emissions from the area of transportation. This is an area which is being addressed by researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Ethanol is usually produced through the fermentation of…
Heat storage: A new heat storage material could help to significantly improve the energy efficiency of buildings. Developed by researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the University of Leipzig, it can be used to store surplus heat and release it back into the environment when needed. Unlike existing materials, the new one can absorb significantly more heat, is more stable, and is made of harmless substances. In the “Journal of Energy Storage” the team describes the formation mechanism…
Glass objects which glow in the dark, glass containers that heat up and cool down, or glass control knobs and switches that eliminate viruses and bacteria by themselves – all this seems to completely contradict our everyday experience of what glass can do. And yet, it is now within reach. To create such functionalized and precision-molded glasses, research teams at Fraunhofer IKTS in Dresden have transferred their experience with ceramic processes to glass manufacturing. Thanks to the new shaping possibilities,…
Scientists studying V Hydrae (V Hya) have witnessed the star’s mysterious death throes in unprecedented detail. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the team discovered six slowly-expanding rings and two hourglass-shaped structures caused by the high-speed ejection of matter out into space. The results of the study are published in The Astrophysical Journal. V Hya is a carbon-rich asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star located approximately 1,300 light-years from Earth in the constellation…
Neodymium-Bismuth crystals belong to the wide range of materials with interesting magnetic properties. The Fermi surface which is measured in the experiments contains information on the transport properties of charge carriers in the crystal. While usually the Fermi surface consists of closed contours, disconnected sections known as Fermi arcs are very rare and can be signatures of unusual electronic states. Unusual magnetic splittings In a study, published now in Nature, the team presents experimental evidence for such Fermi arcs. They…
… breaks activity limitation of predecessors. The key to chemical reactions is in the name — there needs to be something that causes the chemicals to react to one another. Called a catalyst, this component induces or speeds up reactions in a controlled manner to produce a desired outcome. The catalysts used in several industries are often composed of noble metals, which are not efficient enough to compensate for their high cost. To address this issue for the chemical reaction…
… at the LZH can precisely coat complex-shaped optics. With a new Spatial ALD system, the Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V. (LZH) can now also uniformly coat complex-shaped optics. The innovative system achieves higher deposition rates than previously possible – and is of interest, among others, for applications in the automotive lighting or VR/AR sectors. ALD (atomic layer deposition) technology can produce very thin, high-quality coatings. So far, the ALD process has been used primarily to produce thin functional layers in…
As we age, our immune system works less well. We become more susceptible to infections and vaccinations no longer work as effectively. A research team led by Dario Riccardo Valenzano investigated whether short-lived killifish undergo aging of the immune system. Indeed, they found that already at four months of age, killifish have less diverse circulating antibodies compared to younger fish, which may contribute to a generalized decrease in the immune function. The immune system must constantly respond to new attacks…
A new method for generating potent, specific binding proteins yields candidate medicines for cancer, diabetes, inflammation and more. A team of scientists has created a powerful new method for generating protein drugs. Using computers, they designed molecules that can target important proteins in the body, such as the insulin receptor, as well as vulnerable proteins on the surface of viruses. This solves a long-standing challenge in drug development and may lead to new treatments for cancer, diabetes, infection, inflammation, and…
Scientists use gate set tomography to discover and validate a silicon qubit breakthrough. The Science Tiny quantum computing processors built from silicon have finally surpassed 99 percent fidelity in certain logic operations (“gates”). Quantum computers store information in the quantum state of a physical system (in this case, two silicon qubits) then manipulate the quantum state to perform a calculation in a manner that isn’t possible on a classical computer. Fidelity is a measure of how close the final quantum…
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