Energy
11 articles in this category
Hydrogen under lock and key. Without 300 degrees.
Hydrogen is the best fuel we know — and the hardest to store. Japanese scientists found a way to lock it in metal and release it again at 90 degrees, without heating it to three hundred.
The element that appeared out of nowhere. Caesium unlocked lead-free perovskite
For a decade, labs tried to replace lead with tin in perovskite solar cells. It never worked. A team in Brisbane found the hidden reason — and fixed it with caesium, an element nobody considered.
0.04 percent. The machine that breathes at night and exhales fuel at dawn
A Cambridge machine captures CO2 from the air at night and turns it into fuel at dawn, using only sunlight and plastic from a bottle. Direct air capture from Nature Energy 2025.
Anatomy of a lithium-free battery. Four layers no one could stack
Sodium instead of lithium: Yang-Kook Sun's team stacked four cathode layers that blocked sodium batteries for 20 years. 82.9% capacity after 300 cycles.
27.2 percent. How China solved the problem blocking silicon's successor
Perovskite reached silicon's efficiency in 15 years — yet it is on no rooftop. Beijing just removed the last obstacle: an invisible chlorine problem. Europe still bets on compromise.
Squeeze to cool. 200 years of physics in search of a better refrigerator
In 1824, Sadi Carnot described the cycle that still powers every refrigerator in the world. 200 years later, an Australian team has found a way to cool without a compressor and without greenhouse gases - by squeezing crystals.
A safe made of four atoms opened. No fire.
Methane is a safe made of four atoms that no one could open without heating it to 800°C. A team from UCL has just found the key - the CTF-1 catalyst, which turns methane into ethanol under a regular LED, at room temperature. 9.4% efficiency per photon. No other photocatalyst has come close to this result.
A leaf that died to give electricity. Dead energy paradox
A dead leaf should not produce electricity. Alive - yes. Photosynthesis is, after all, the world's oldest power plant: sunlight converted into chemical energy with an efficiency that artificial cells still cannot match. But a dead leaf? The one who fell from the tree is lying on the sidewalk and in a week
58 percent less. Why no one believed in battery recycling for 20 years
A team from Stanford University has proven that recycling lithium-ion batteries reduces the environmental impact by at least 58% compared to mining. Poland, as the largest battery producer in Europe, has 5 years to build its own recycling.
A sensor that feeds on waves
A Faraday cage-inspired triboelectric nanogenerator produces 1,276 volts just from swinging on a wave. Measuring buoys without batteries, without replacement every three months, without ship and crew.
Supposed to Be Better Than the Tokamak. It Lost for 70 Years. Now It's Back
In December 2015, physicists in Greifswald, Germany, fired up Wendelstein 7-X — the world's largest stellarator. The plasma held. Why a concept theoretically free of the tokamak's biggest flaws is now racing back, powered by HTS magnets and private capital.