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Category: energy

Novel membrane boosts water electrolysis performance in low-alkalinity conditions

As green hydrogen emerges as a key next-generation clean energy source, securing technologies that enable its stable and cost-effective production has become a critical challenge. However, conventional water electrolysis technologies face limitations in large-scale deployment due to high system costs and operational burdens.

In particular, long-term operation often leads to performance degradation and increased maintenance costs, hindering commercialization. As a result, there is growing demand for new electrolysis technologies that can simultaneously improve efficiency, stability, and cost competitiveness.

A research team led by Dr. Dirk Henkensmeier at the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Research Center of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) has developed a novel membrane material for water electrolysis that operates stably and has significantly higher conductivity under low alkalinity conditions than existing systems.

Shining a light on sustainable sulfur-rich polymers that stay recyclable

For the first time, scientists have used ultraviolet (UV) light, a low-cost and readily available energy source, to successfully synthesize more sustainable and recyclable polymer materials. Led by green chemistry experts at Flinders University, the development is a major step in making polymers high in sulfur content for more sustainable plastic alternatives using waste materials.

Their paper, “Making and Unmaking Poly(trisulfides) with Light: Precise Regulation of Radical Concentrations via Pulsed LED Irradiation” is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Random driving on a 78-qubit processor reveals controllable prethermal plateau

Time-dependent driving has become a powerful tool for creating novel nonequilibrium phases such as discrete time crystals and Floquet topological phases, which do not exist in static systems. Breaking continuous time-translation symmetry typically leads to the outcome that driven quantum systems absorb energy and eventually heat up toward a featureless infinite-temperature state, where coherent structure is lost.

Understanding how fast this heating process occurs and whether it can be controlled has become a challenge in nonequilibrium physics. High-frequency periodic driving is known to delay heating, but much less is known about heating dynamics under more general, non-periodic driving protocols.

Biomolecular condensates sustain pH gradients at equilibrium through charge neutralization

PH is a critical regulator of (bio)chemical processes and therefore tightly regulated in nature. Now, proteins have been shown to possess the functionality to drive pH gradients without requiring energy input or membrane enclosure but through condensation. Protein condensates can drive unique pH gradients that modulate biochemical activity in both living and artificial systems.

Metabolically regulated proteasome supramolecular organization in situ

Now online! Structural steps along the assembly of proteasome storage granules—membraneless organelles that form in response to metabolic shifts in yeast—are visualized inside cells by cryo-electron tomography. Inactive 26S proteasomes oligomerize into trimers, which assemble into paracrystalline arrays that serve as reservoirs of fully assembled proteasomes under conditions of low energy, ready for reactivation when glucose is restored.

NASA researchers probe tangled magnetospheres of merging neutron stars

New simulations performed on a NASA supercomputer are providing scientists with the most comprehensive look yet into the maelstrom of interacting magnetic structures around city-sized neutron stars in the moments before they crash. The team identified potential signals emitted during the stars’ final moments that may be detectable by future observatories.

“Just before neutron stars crash, the highly magnetized, plasma-filled regions around them, called magnetospheres, start to interact strongly. We studied the last several orbits before the merger, when the entwined magnetic fields undergo rapid and dramatic changes, and modeled potentially observable high-energy signals,” said lead scientist Dimitrios Skiathas, a graduate student at the University of Patras, Greece, who is conducting research for the Southeastern Universities Research Association in Washington at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

A paper describing the findings is published in the The Astrophysical Journal.

MXene nanoscrolls could improve energy storage, biosensors and more

Researchers from Drexel University who discovered a versatile type of two-dimensional conductive nanomaterial called MXene nearly a decade and a half ago, have now reported on a process for producing its one-dimensional cousin: the MXene nanoscroll. The group posits that these materials, which are 100 times thinner than human hair yet more conductive than their two-dimensional counterparts, could be used to improve the performance of energy storage devices, biosensors and wearable technology.

Their finding, published in the journal Advanced Materials, offers a scalable method for producing the nanoscrolls from a MXene precursor with precise control over their shape and chemical structures.

“Two-dimensional morphology is very important in many applications. However, there are applications where 1D morphology is superior,” said Yury Gogotsi, Ph.D., Distinguished University and Bach professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering, who was a corresponding author of the paper.

Superfluids are supposed to flow indefinitely. Physicists just watched one stop moving

Ordinary matter, when cooled, transitions from a gas into a liquid. Cool it further still, and it freezes into a solid. Quantum matter, however, can behave very differently. In the early 20th century, researchers discovered that when helium is cooled, it transitions from a seemingly ordinary gas into a so-called superfluid. Superfluids flow without losing any energy, among other quantum quirks, like an ability to climb out of containers.

What happens when you cool a superfluid down even more? The answer to this question has eluded physicists since they first started asking it half a century ago.

Ultrathin kagome metal hosts robust 3D flat electronic band state

A team of researchers at Monash University has uncovered a powerful new way to engineer exotic quantum states, revealing a robust and tunable three-dimensional flat electronic band in an ultrathin kagome metal, an achievement long thought to be nearly impossible. The study, “3D Flat Band in Ultra-Thin Kagome Metal Mn₃Sn Film,” by M. Zhao, J. Blyth, T. Yu and collaborators appears in Advanced Materials.

The discovery centers on Mn₃Sn films just three nanometers thick. Despite their extreme thinness, these films host a 3D flat band that spans the entire momentum space, offering an unprecedented platform for exploring strongly correlated quantum phases and designing future low-energy electronic technologies.

“Until now, 3D flat bands had only been observed in a few bulk materials with special lattice geometries,” said Ph.D. candidate and co-lead author James Blyth, from the Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy.

NASA Launches Its Most Powerful, Efficient Supercomputer

NASA is announcing the availability of its newest supercomputer, Athena, an advanced system designed to support a new generation of missions and research projects. The newest member of the agency’s High-End Computing Capability project expands the resources available to help scientists and engineers tackle some of the most complex challenges in space, aeronautics, and science.

Housed in the agency’s Modular Supercomputing Facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, Athena delivers more computing power than any other NASA system, surpassing the capabilities of its predecessors, Aitken and Pleiades, in power and efficiency. The new system, which was rolled out in January to existing users after a beta testing period, delivers over 20 petaflops of peak performance – a measurement of the number of calculations it can make per second – while reducing the agency’s supercomputing utility costs.

“Exploration has always driven NASA to the edge of what’s computationally possible,” said Kevin Murphy, chief science data officer and lead for the agency’s High-End Computing Capability portfolio at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Now with Athena, NASA will expand its efforts to provide tailored computing resources that meet the evolving needs of its missions.”

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