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Category: energy

From stillage to storage: Turning bourbon byproducts into supercapacitors

The state of Kentucky produces 95% of the world’s bourbon, and all that bourbon leaves behind an enormous amount of waste grain, called stillage. Now, researchers at the University of Kentucky have developed a process to transform that stillage into electrodes. With the bourbon byproduct electrodes, they created supercapacitors that could store more nergy than similarly sized commercial devices. The researchers will present their results at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS Spring 2026), held in Atlanta from March 22 to 26.

Turning bourbon stillage into carbon Josiel Barrios Cossio, a graduate student who will be presenting the work, first learned about the scale of American whiskey’s waste problem while working on a research traineeship to examine food, energy and water issues in Kentucky. “From the final volume of bourbon produced, you get 6 to 10 times that amount of stillage as waste,” says Barrios Cossio, “so it’s a big deal.”

This stillage is a sloppy mash that’s typically sold to farmers as livestock feed or a soil additive. But it is difficult to transport while wet, and it is expensive to dry.

Copper’s ‘gatekeeper’ could unlock cleaner energy future

A common mineral hiding in plain sight could hold the key to making copper production cleaner, faster and more efficient, just as global demand for the metal surges to power the energy transition. In an article published in Nature Geoscience, researchers from Monash University’s School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment describe why chalcopyrite, the source of around 70% of the world’s copper, has remained so difficult to process, and how its hidden chemistry could be harnessed to unlock more sustainable extraction.

Despite being known for more than 300 years, chalcopyrite continues to frustrate scientists and industry alike, resisting low-temperature leaching and slowing efforts to extract copper from lower-grade ores. This inefficiency is a major bottleneck at a time when copper is critical for renewable energy systems, electric vehicles and modern infrastructure.

“Chalcopyrite is the world’s primary copper mineral, but it behaves in surprisingly complex ways that have limited how efficiently we can extract copper from it,” said study lead Professor Joël Brugger from the School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment.

Catching distant gamma-ray explosions with precisely aligned X-ray optics

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) rank among the most powerful explosions in the universe, releasing immense energy in intense flashes of gamma rays. The most distant GRBs originate from the era when the first stars and galaxies formed. Detecting them allows astronomers to probe the early universe and understand how the first heavy elements formed and how the earliest stellar populations lived and died. Missions like HiZ-GUNDAM, a satellite planned for launch in the 2030s by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), aim to detect these distant explosions in real time.

However, detecting GRBs presents a major challenge. These explosions appear unpredictably across the sky, and their afterglows fade rapidly. Astronomers must therefore detect each burst quickly and determine its position immediately so that other telescopes can observe it. Wide-field X-ray monitors provide one solution, as they can observe large regions of the sky and determine the direction of incoming signals.

Some designs use lobster-eye X-ray optics, inspired by the way lobsters’ compound eyes collect light from many directions simultaneously. Yet building a single optical system from multiple lobster-eye segments and aligning them precisely remains a difficult technical task.

Phase-changing VO₂ turns methane into propane and hydrogen more efficiently

Converting methane, the primary component of natural gas, into higher alkanes and hydrogen, could be highly advantageous. Alkanes, such as propane and butane, are easier to transport than methane and are used in a wider range of industries. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is a promising clean fuel used to power electrochemical devices that can generate continuous power, known as fuel cells.

Over the past decades, some energy engineers have been exploring the possibility of converting methane into hydrogen or complex hydrocarbons using photocatalysts. These are materials activated by sunlight or other types of light and that can drive chemical reactions.

Researchers at Université de Lille—CNRS, Sorbonne Université and other institutes in France recently introduced a new strategy for the photocatalytic conversion of methane into propane, which is widely used for heating, cooking, and transportation.

A tiny twist and synthetic diamond put superconductivity on a switch, opening a new route to lossless electronics

Researchers have discovered evidence that superconductivity can be controlled by influencing the surrounding environment, a finding that may lead to more efficient electronics down the road, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Physics.

Superconductivity, or the ability of certain materials to conduct electric currents without any energy loss when cooled below a critical temperature, is a property still not very well understood. While a major challenge, understanding more about its formation mechanisms could lead to better, more long-lasting materials as well as more powerful quantum devices.

Unlocking unusual superconductivity in a lightweight element

Superconductors—materials that can conduct electricity without energy loss—are crucial for next-generation high-efficiency, ultrafast electronics. However, most superconductors share a critical limitation: they lose their superconducting properties in strong magnetic fields. In contrast, a class of superconductors containing heavy elements can sustain an unusual type of superconductivity in magnetic fields beyond the conventional limit. Now, new research has demonstrated that this limitation can be overcome by sandwiching atomically thin films of a lightweight element called gallium between two other materials to engineer quantum interactions at the interfaces between the layers.

A paper describing the research, led by an interdisciplinary team at Penn State’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) for Nanoscale Science, was published in the journal Nature Materials. The team showed that when just three atomic layers of gallium are layered between graphene and a silicon carbide substrate, the resulting structure maintains superconductivity in magnetic fields that are parallel to the surface of the material, or in-plane, well above the expected limit.

“This discovery highlights the strength of collaborative, cross-disciplinary research fostered by the Penn State MRSEC,” said Cui-Zu Chang, professor of physics at Penn State Eberly College of Science and leader of the research team. “By bringing together expertise in materials synthesis, quantum transport and theoretical modeling, we were able to uncover a phenomenon that would have been difficult to realize within a single research group.”

Non-Stationary Load Extrapolation over Long Horizons Based on a Frequency-Consistent Diffusion Model

【】 Full article: (Authored by Yu Bai and Fei Meng, from University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, China.)

Engineering load signals support durability analysis because they reflect real service conditions. Long-duration load histories are essential for fatigue-life prediction and reliability assessment. However, long-term field measurements are often costly and difficult to obtain. Therefore, extending short measurements into representative long histories is practically important. This study proposes a frequency-consistent diffusion_model (FCDM) for long-horizon extrapolation of non-stationary bearing load signals under turning conditions. load_extrapolation.

Abstract

This study proposes a frequency-consistent diffusion model (FCDM) for long-horizon extrapolation of non-stationary bearing load signals. Condition tokens and spectral-consistency constraints are introduced to preserve spectral and fatigue-related characteristics during tenfold extrapolation. The generated signals are evaluated using PSD, band-energy proportion, Range-Mean distribution, and unit pseudo-damage. Compared with DDPM, FCDM better preserves dominant frequencies, harmonic structure, and band-energy allocation. The dominant frequency error is 1.02%, and the mean harmonic error is 0.52%. FCDM also shows smaller band-energy allocation errors across all frequency bands. In addition, it reproduces the bimodal clustering pattern in the Range-Mean distribution more accurately. The unit pseudo-damage is 1.0978 for FCDM and 1.1280 for DDPM. These results indicate that FCDM improves spectral fidelity and fatigue-related consistency in long-sequence load extrapolation.

Diffusion Model, Load Extrapolation, Frequency-Consistency

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