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News
A tiny iron piece smaller than a virus just outperformed the precious metal that has powered hydrogen fuel cells for decades
3+ hour, 39+ min ago (604+ words) Hydrogen fuel cells run on clean chemistry. Hydrogen meets oxygen, electricity flows, and only pure water leaves the exhaust pipe. For decades, one major obstacle blocked this dream. The reaction required platinum. Platinum is a rare, hyper-expensive precious metal. Its…...
Plants have been turning sunlight into fuel for millions of years and now chemists have finally cracked their secret
1+ hour, 39+ min ago (243+ words) Every leaf on every tree does something chemists have spent decades trying to copy: it catches sunlight and locks that energy into chemical bonds, quietly and without fuss. The obstacle in the lab has always been brute force — previous attempts…...
The plastic bottles you throw away every day could help produce clean hydrogen fuel using nothing but sunlight
4+ week, 2+ day ago (624+ words) Drop a plastic bottle into the recycling bin and you assume it gets a clean second life. Much of it still doesn’t — burned, buried, or processed at an energy cost that undermines the whole point. Professor Erwin Reisner’s team at…...
Scientists slipped algae's tiny ‘solar engines’ into hamster cells and now they think living solar panels may be possible
1+ mon, 2+ day ago (668+ words) Think about the rules of biology. Some lines are never meant to be crossed. Plants make energy from sunlight. Animals eat plants or other animals. That is how the world works. For billions of years, this boundary held fast. No…...
Scientists trying to build a "perfect" solar cell accidentally discovered that its flaws were the key to making it better
1+ mon, 4+ day ago (460+ words) For decades, the guiding principle of solar cell research has been simple: build a cleaner, more perfect interface between materials, and efficiency will follow. Remove every atomic flaw, and the energy flows better. Then a team at the University of…...
Avalanche Energy's compact fusion device Jyn reaches ion temperatures above 11 million degrees Celsius in plasma testing
1+ mon, 5+ day ago (882+ words) Avalanche Energy just announced that Jyn, its compact fusion plasma device, hit ion energies equivalent to temperatures above 1 keV — that’s roughly 20 million degrees Fahrenheit — during testing. The Seattle-based startup calls it a key plasma performance milestone in its compact fusion…...
Kyushu University scientists found a rare element hiding inside a crystal that finally makes hydrogen fuel cells cheap enough to use
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (503+ words) For decades, solid-oxide fuel cells have promised a cleaner energy future — then demanded temperatures hot enough to melt aluminum just to deliver it. Operating at 700–800°C, these hydrogen-powered devices require materials so specialized and costly that widespread adoption has remained…...
Bending a block of ice turns out to generate real electricity, and scientists say it could finally crack the mystery of lightning
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (543+ words) Yet a study published in Nature Physics suggests it has been hiding an electrical secret. When researchers placed a slab of ordinary ice between two metal plates and bent it, the ice produced a measurable electric signal—something it was…...
New York scientists coated a solar device in "black metal" and unlocked 15 times more power than anyone had managed before
1+ mon, 2+ week ago (519+ words) Credits: University of Rochester / J. Adam Fenster A team at the University of Rochester decided to ask a different question entirely. Instead of improving what everyone else had been improving, they left the semiconductors completely alone—and looked somewhere else. Solar…...
Chemists built a five-part molecule that captures sunlight and holds four electric charges at once, and it could change how we make fuel
1+ mon, 3+ week ago (391+ words) Every day, without effort, plants do something chemists have spent decades trying to copy: they catch sunlight and lock its energy into chemical bonds. Replicating that trick in a lab — well enough to actually power the world — has proven far…...