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Category: energy – Page 9

An accidentally discovered class of nanostructured materials can passively harvest water from air

A serendipitous observation in a Chemical Engineering lab at Penn Engineering has led to a surprising discovery: a new class of nanostructured materials that can pull water from the air, collect it in pores and release it onto surfaces without the need for any external energy.

The research, published in Science Advances, describes a material that could open the door to new ways to collect water from the air in arid regions and devices that cool electronics or buildings using the power of evaporation.

The interdisciplinary team includes Daeyeon Lee, Russell Pearce and Elizabeth Crimian Heuer Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE); Amish Patel, Professor in CBE; Baekmin Kim, a postdoctoral scholar in Lee’s lab and first author; and Stefan Guldin, Professor in Complex Soft Matter at the Technical University of Munich.

Metal fleeces boost battery energy density by enabling thicker, faster-charging electrodes

Batteries are becoming more and more powerful. A discovery by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg could now give them a significant energy boost.

A team led by Max Planck Director Joachim Spatz has discovered that metal fleeces used as contact material in significantly accelerate the charge transport of metal ions, in particular. This makes it possible to build significantly thicker electrodes than is standard today. It means that roughly half of the contact metal and other materials that do not contribute to can be saved, and makes it possible for researchers to significantly increase the energy density in batteries.

The findings are published in the journal ACS Nano.

35% Efficiency Boost Seen in Spin-Torque Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording

In conventional heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), a laser is used to locally heat the recording medium to facilitate data writing. However, the thermal energy applied is largely dissipated within the medium and does not contribute directly to the recording efficiency. Moreover, this high-temperature process consumes substantial energy and raises concerns regarding the magnetic and physical degradation of the medium, especially under repeated use.

The research team focused on the temperature gradient generated within the recording medium during laser irradiation. They developed a novel structure by inserting an antiferromagnetic manganese-platinum (MnPt) layer beneath the iron-platinum (FePt) recording layer. This structure achieved approximately 35% improvement in recording efficiency compared to conventional HAMR.

This enhancement stems from generated by the , which induce spin torque that assists magnetic switching—effectively augmenting the conventional thermal assist effect. Furthermore, the study demonstrated that spin torque can be applied to (HDDs), paving the way for a new class of recording technologies.

Nano-engineered thermoelectrics enable scalable, compressor-free cooling

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, have developed a new, easily manufacturable solid-state thermoelectric refrigeration technology with nano-engineered materials that is twice as efficient as devices made with commercially available bulk thermoelectric materials.

As global demand grows for more energy-efficient, reliable and compact cooling solutions, this advancement offers a scalable alternative to traditional compressor-based refrigeration.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers from APL and refrigeration engineers from Samsung Electronics demonstrated improved heat-pumping efficiency and capacity in refrigeration systems attributable to high-performance nano-engineered thermoelectric materials invented at APL known as controlled hierarchically engineered superlattice structures (CHESS).

Aversive memories can be weakened during human sleep via the reactivation of positive interfering memories

Our behavioral findings indicated that TMR weakened earlier acquired aversive memories while increasing positive memory intrusions in the interference condition. To examine how TMR reactivated aversive and positive memories during NREM sleep, we extracted cue-locked, time-frequency resolved EEG responses in the interference and noninterference conditions, and compared them with the EEG responses elicited by control sounds.

We found that when compared to the control sounds that did not involve any memory pairs before sleep, both interference and noninterference memory cues increased EEG power across the delta, theta, sigma, and beta bands in frontal and central areas (Pclusters < 0.01, corrected for multiple comparisons across time, frequency, and space, Fig. 4 A–D). However, when contrasting interference with noninterference memory cues, we did not identify any significant clusters (Pclusters 0.05). These findings suggested that delta-theta and sigma-beta power increases may indicate memory reactivation during sleep.

We next examined whether cue-elicited theta and beta power were associated with subsequent memory accuracies (i.e., remembered vs. forgotten) for individual positive or aversive stimulus in the interference condition, given the relationship between theta activity and emotional processing (19), and between beta activity and memory interference during sleep (27, 34). Employing BLMM across all channels revealed that the cue-elicited theta power over the right central-parietal region (FC5, C2, C4, CP2, CP4, TP7) was significantly higher for subsequently remembered than for forgotten positive memories (mediandiff = 1.39, 95% HDI [0.32, 2.43], Fig. 4E). For aversive memories, a few channels’ (Fp2, F6, C5) theta power was higher for remembered than for forgotten aversive memories (mediandiff = 1.04, 95% HDI [0.16, 1.86]; Fig. 4F).

Historic quantum physics breakthrough reveals what an electron really looks like

In a discovery that’s already turning heads in the scientific world, a team of physicists has achieved what was once thought impossible: they’ve measured the actual shape of a moving electron. This leap forward could not only reshape how we understand matter at the smallest scale—it might also unlock a new era of smarter, faster, and more energy-efficient electronics.

Laser-powered fusion experiment more than doubles its power output

The world’s only net-positive fusion experiment has been steadily ramping up the amount of power it produces, TechCrunch has learned.

In recent attempts, the team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) increased the yield of the experiment, first to 5.2 megajoules and then to 8.6 megajoules, according to a source with knowledge of the experiment.

The new results are significant improvements over the historic experiment in 2022, which was the first controlled fusion reaction to generate more energy than it consumed.

Two distinct exciton states observed in 2H stacked bilayer molybdenum diselenide

Two-dimensional (2D) materials have proved to be a promising platform for studying exotic quasiparticles, such as excitons. Excitons are bound states that emerge when an electron in a material absorbs energy and rises to a higher energy level, leaving a hole (i.e., the absence of an electron) at the site that it used to occupy.

Researchers at Heriot-Watt University and other institutes recently observed two distinct exciton states in bilayer molybdenum diselenide (MoSe₂) with a 2H-stacked configuration, which involves the alignment of two monolayers with a characteristic rotational symmetry. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, reports the observation of one of these states known as quadrupolar excitons in 2H-MoSe₂

“Our work was inspired by the ongoing effort to explore and control excitonic phenomena in atomically thin semiconductor materials, which are rich platforms for studying ,” Mauro Brotons-Gisbert, senior author of the paper, told Phys.org. “In particular, bilayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) like MoSe₂ naturally host interlayer excitons with a dipolar character— of electrons and holes residing in adjacent layers.”

Synthetic materials mimic seashells to enhance energy absorption

Millions of years of evolution have enabled some marine animals to grow complex protective shells composed of multiple layers that work together to dissipate physical stress. In a new study, engineers have found a way to mimic the behavior of this type of layered material, such as seashell nacre, by programming individual layers of synthetic material to work collaboratively under stress. The new material design is poised to enhance energy-absorbing systems such as wearable bandages and car bumpers with multistage responses that adapt to collision severity.

Many past studies have focused on reverse engineering to replicate the behavior of natural materials like bone, feathers and wood to reproduce their nonlinear responses to mechanical stress. A new study, led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign civil and environmental engineering professor Shelly Zhang and professor Ole Sigmund of the Technical University of Denmark, looked beyond reverse engineering to develop a framework for programmable multilayered materials capable of responding to local disturbances through microscale interconnections.

The study findings are published in the journal Science Advances.

Light-to-electricity nanodevice found in cyanobacteria reveals how early life utilized sunlight to make oxygen

An international team of scientists have unlocked a key piece of Earth’s evolutionary puzzle by decoding the structure of a light-harvesting “nanodevice” in one of the planet’s most ancient lineages of cyanobacteria.

The discovery, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides an unprecedented glimpse into how harnessed sunlight to produce oxygen—a process that transformed our planet forever.

The team, including Dr. Tanai Cardona from Queen Mary University of London, focused on Photosystem I (PSI), a molecular complex that converts light into , purified from Anthocerotibacter panamensis —a recently discovered species representing a lineage that diverged from all other cyanobacteria roughly 3 billion years ago.