The Electric Viking
Professional cycling teams can reduce air drag for their protected rider by up to 76% by adopting specific formations different from the traditional single paceline, according to new research from Heriot-Watt University in partnership with the simulation software company, Ansys, part of Synopsys.
Despite the seemingly individual aspect of competitive cycling, it’s very much a team sport. In the Tour de France, each of the 23 teams has eight cyclists who all play a crucial part in the overall success of the team.
When a team leader is involved in a crash or a flat tire and he drops from the peloton or leading group in the race, his teammates will have the task to bring this protected rider back into the peloton or leading group, where riders closely follow one another to reduce air resistance. In doing so, the teammates will try to shield their protected rider from the wind thereby allowing him to save energy resources, at the expense of investing their own energy resources.
The generation of electricity from heat, also known as thermoelectric energy conversion, has proved to be advantageous for various real-world applications. For instance, it proved useful for the generation of energy during space expeditions and military missions in difficult environments, as well as for the recovery of waste heat produced from industrial plants, power stations or even vehicles.
We propose and analyze a universal method to obtain fast charging of a quantum battery by a driven charger system using controlled, pure dephasing of the charger. While the battery displays coherent underdamped oscillations of energy for weak charger dephasing, the quantum Zeno freezing of the charger energy at high dephasing suppresses the rate of transfer of energy to the battery. Choosing an optimum dephasing rate between the regimes leads to a fast charging of the battery. We illustrate our results with the charger and battery modeled by either two-level systems or harmonic oscillators. Apart from the fast charging, the dephasing also renders the charging performance more robust to detuning between the charger, drive, and battery frequencies for the two-level systems case.
npj Quantum Inf ormation volume 11, Article number: 9 (2025) Cite this article.
Sand batteries are emerging as a viable alternative to lithium-ion for thermal energy storage, capable of holding heat with minimal loss.
IN A NUTSHELL 🚀 Nord Quantique introduces a revolutionary bosonic qubit design that integrates error correction directly into its structure. 🌱 The new quantum computers are significantly energy-efficient, using only a fraction of the power required by traditional systems. 🔧 Utilizing multimode encoding, Nord Quantique’s system achieves a 1:1 ratio of physical to logical qubits.
The chemical reaction to produce hydrogen from water is several times more effective when using a combination of new materials in three layers, according to researchers at Linköping University in Sweden. Hydrogen produced from water is a promising renewable energy source—especially if the hydrogen is produced using sunlight.
Researchers at Florida State University have created new polymer blends that could make batteries safer and longer-lasting.
Researchers at EPFL and Kyoto University have created a stable hydrogen-rich liquid formed by mixing two simple chemicals. This breakthrough could make hydrogen storage easier, safer, and more efficient at room temperature.
Hydrogen can be the clean fuel of the future, but getting it from the lab to everyday life isn’t simple. Most hydrogen-rich materials are solids at room temperature, or they only become liquids under extreme conditions like high pressure or freezing temperatures.
Even materials such as ammonia borane, a solid, hydrogen-rich compound that can store a lot of hydrogen, are difficult because they release hydrogen only when heated, often producing unwanted byproducts.