6+ hour, 9+ min ago  (218+ words) At any given moment, 89,000 terawatts of solar power hits the Earth's surface. While significant advancements have been made in harvesting this power, existing technologies do not capture the full potential of the entire solar spectrum. This limitation primarily lies in…...

3+ week, 2+ day ago  (314+ words) Scientists have already learned how to make helmets, batteries, and even sports cars from wood, so applying it to something like thermal paper might not sound that exciting. Yet it could actually affect our lives far more than we realize....

1+ mon, 1+ day ago  (285+ words) A team at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems (IKTS) has developed a new type of sodium-ion battery that uses lignin as a key electrode material. Lignin is a natural polymer found in trees. It basically acts like…...

2+ mon, 1+ week ago  (260+ words) Most commercial adhesives are made to stay permanently set once bonded, so electronics or other goods that are assembled using them are quite difficult to take apart for recycling. With that problem in mind, scientists have developed "smart" adhesives that…...

2+ mon, 3+ week ago  (338+ words) Who doesn't love beautifully hued clothing? Well, how about Mother Nature? But can you blame her? Industrial dyes are absolute poison. But hold on "is the current industrial cloth-dyeing method really as bad as I'm saying? As senior author and…...

2+ mon, 3+ week ago  (327+ words) While lithium extraction technologies generally focus on ways to get the essential metal out of the ground, there's another source to mine: existing batteries that no longer work. A new technique could now make that process economically viable. Enter the…...

2+ mon, 3+ week ago  (307+ words) That's what propelled researchers at Canada's McGill University to develop an eco-friendly alternative. Inspired by children's science projects that used a lemon and copper wire to power a lightbulb, the small team explored how citric acid could enhance a gelatin-based…...

2+ mon, 3+ week ago  (453+ words) Earth's earliest life left behind very few chemical traces. Fragile remains, like ancient cells and microbial mats, were buried, squeezed, heated, and broken apart by the planet's shifting crust before reappearing at the surface. These drastic changes erased most traces…...

2+ mon, 3+ week ago  (300+ words) Nobody wants harmful bacteria colonizing the surfaces of objects such as medical implants, yet we also don't want them building up a resistance to antibiotics. Well, help may be on the way, in the form of tiny metal structures that…...

2+ mon, 3+ week ago  (251+ words) What we think of as polyester fabric is most often actually a blend of polyester and cotton, which has proven very difficult to recycle. A new solvent, however, breaks the blend down into its two components, leaving both almost completely…...