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The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) constitute the leading global framework for achieving human progress, economic prosperity, and planetary health. This framework emphasizes issues such as public health, education for all, gender equality, zero hunger, adoption of clean and renewable energy, and biodiversity conservation. Yet, despite this comprehensive agenda, questions remain about how different nations navigate their own paths toward these goals.

A recent study, published in Nature Communications provides insights into the trajectories of 166 countries as they have worked toward the SDGs over the past two decades.

By applying and the Product Space methodology, commonly used in the field of complexity economics, the researchers constructed the “SDG Space of Nations.” The elaborate model shows that countries do not simply march in lockstep toward sustainable development; instead, they cluster into distinctive groups, each with its own strengths and specializations, sometimes quite unexpected.

Researchers have made a significant step in the study of a new class of high-temperature superconductors: creating superconductors that work at room pressure. That advance lays the groundwork for deeper exploration of these materials, bringing us closer to real-world applications such as lossless power grids and advanced quantum technologies.

Superconductivity, the ability of certain materials to conduct electricity with zero resistance, typically occurs at extremely low temperatures, or in some cases, under high pressures. For decades, researchers have focused on a class of materials called cuprates, known for their ability to achieve superconductivity at relatively high temperatures.

About five years ago, a team of researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University discovered superconductivity in nickelates, materials chemically similar to cuprates—and last summer, another group of researchers reported superconductivity in a new class of nickel oxides at temperatures comparable to cuprates.

Harnessing Static Electricity for Power

Static electricity might be an everyday nuisance, especially in winter, but for some scientists, it holds untapped potential as an energy source. Using a device called a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG), mechanical movement can be converted into electrical energy through the triboelectric effect.

The work garnered impressive results. The enhanced electrolyte had an 84.3% energy retention rate after 700 charge/discharge cycles. Traditional versions typically produce a 37.1% retention rate after 300 cycles, all according to the summary.

The Pohang team is not alone in its impressive battery innovations. Plenty of them are happening in Korea. A pack that can extinguish its own fires is being developed by a team at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology, as another example.

So-called Rayleigh–Bloch waves can release an enormous amount of energy that can damage technical systems under certain circumstances. They only exist below a precisely defined cut-off frequency; above this, they disappear abruptly. Strangely enough, however, there are isolated high frequencies at which they can also be detected.

Mathematicians from the Universities of Augsburg and Adelaide have recently proposed an explanation for this puzzling phenomenon. Together with researchers from the University of Exeter, they have now been able to prove experimentally that their theory is indeed correct. The study has just been published in the journal Communications Physics.

Suppose you had a gigantic barbecue grill that could easily accommodate several hundreds of sausages. Then, you could not only use it to invite your children’s entire school to a barbecue. The numerous stainless steel struts aligned parallel to each other are also ideal for generating Rayleigh–Bloch waves.

Challenging centuries-old assumptions about thermodynamics, a new study published in Physical Review Letters has shown that it is theoretically possible to design a heat engine that achieves maximum power output while approaching Carnot efficiency.

The Carnot heat engine is a thermodynamic device that converts heat into by operating between two temperature reservoirs, a hot and cold one.

The engine works by taking heat from the hot reservoir, converting some of it into useful work, and rejecting the remaining heat to the cold reservoir. The thermodynamic cycle followed by the engine is known as the Carnot cycle.

In a new study published in Nature Physics, researchers have developed the first controlled method for exciting and observing Kelvin waves in superfluid helium-4.

First described by Lord Kelvin in 1880, Kelvin waves are helical (spiral-shaped) waves that travel along the lines, playing a vital role in how energy dissipates in . However, they are difficult to study experimentally.

Creating a controlled setting to observe them has been the biggest challenge that the researchers overcame. Phys.org spoke to the first author of the study, Associate Prof. Yosuke Minowa from Kyoto University.