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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.
Two laboratories. Two continents. One problem: how to dress electronics in a power supply that doesn't need batteries.
On one side, a team from Hebei University of Technology and Penn State - Li Yang and Huanyu Cheng. On the other - Lin Zhang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiao-Lei Shi from the Queensland University of Technology and Zhi-Gang Chen from Brisbane. The goal is the same: a thermoelectric generator that converts body heat
A sensor that prints like a newspaper. The anatomy of a billion nanoparticles under the skin
Let's take it in hand. It is invisible to the naked eye and has a diameter of 200 nanometers. It has four layers inside, each representing a separate scientific breakthrough. An inkjet printer instead of an analytical laboratory. A sensor from Caltech that detects one molecule in a billion.
Twice as strong, twice as plastic. A paradox that refutes a hundred years of metallurgy
This metal is at the same time twice as strong and twice as malleable as its predecessor. Dislocations - linear defects in a metal crystal - have been a trade-off for a hundred years: strength at the expense of ductility. The team from Xi'an has just proven that this compromise does not exist.
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
Paper mill waste just solved a 40-year-old membrane problem. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before
Wentian Zhang from Sun Yat-sen University turned to alkaline lignin - a waste from paper production - and created a nanofiltration membrane that is both 3.6 times faster and 5.7 times more selective than commercial equivalents. How did waste that had been sitting in the furnace for decades solve a fundamental physical compromise?
Lithium that no one could get out. Lingchen Kong did just that.
77 sodium atoms for each lithium atom. 40 failed experiments. One graduate student from Washington, D.C., who solved a problem that billion-dollar companies were working on. Here's how Lingchen Kong extracted lithium from geothermal brine - without chemicals, at a third of the market price.
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.
One robot instead of a laboratory. The AI chemist just got a job
The first fully autonomous, multi-agent AI chemist completed six real-world wet experiments, from MOF network synthesis to Suzuki reaction optimization. Llama-3.1-70B on-premises, no cloud.
16 billion tons under roof. Why buildings can be the largest CO2 store on Earth
16.6 billion tons of CO2 per year - that's how much buildings made of carbon-absorbing materials could store. Science reviewers told us to count three times. The number was right.
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.