In this Perspective, Maizels and Briscoe discuss the limitations of current models of gene regulatory networks and outline solutions to harness data abundance without compromising explanatory power.
Category: energy
These blazing blue explosions may be born when a compact dead star slams into a Wolf-Rayet star
Luminous fast blue optical transients (LFBOTs) are among the universe’s brightest and fastest explosions but their origin is not completely understood. A new study takes a closer look at the galaxies they occur in, offering two important clues about their nature. A paper outlining these results was uploaded to the preprint server arXiv on March 24.
LFBOTs are called cow-like events, nicknamed after the first member of this class—AT2018cow—discovered in 2018. They are extremely bright explosions whose brightness peaks within a week and fades to half its peak value in the following week. Their peak brightness is typically greater than 1043 erg per second at optical wavelengths. This is comparable with that of superluminous supernovae, which take a few weeks to months to peak and are generally 10 to 100 times brighter than normal supernovae.
Moreover, LFBOTs’ light curve—a graph that shows changes in their brightness over time—cannot be explained by the decay of nickel-56, which is a common energy source for normal and core-collapse supernovae. There are several theories for their origins; however, there is a lack of consensus.
Transparent cooling film cuts car cabin temperature by 6.1°C without electricity
A transparent radiative cooling film technology that dissipates heat directly to the outside without consuming electricity has been developed to reduce vehicle overheating during summer. The technology was validated through real-vehicle experiments conducted under diverse conditions—including different countries, seasons, and both parking and driving scenarios—and demonstrated the ability to lower cabin temperatures by up to 6.1°C and reduce cooling energy consumption by more than 20%.
Seoul National University College of Engineering announced that a research team led by Prof. Seung Hwan Ko (Department of Mechanical Engineering, SNU), in collaboration with Prof. Gang Chen at MIT and research teams from Hyundai Motor Company and Kia (Materials Research & Engineering Center and Thermal Energy Total Development Group), has designed and fabricated a large-area Scalable Transparent Radiative Cooling (STRC) film applicable to vehicle windows. Through real-vehicle evaluations conducted under various climatic and driving conditions, the team demonstrated both energy-saving and carbon reduction effects.
This research was published online on February 4 in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.
Platinum-free catalyst splits hydrogen from water for energy, running 1,000 hours at industry standards
Using a renewable energy source has multiple benefits, including reducing harmful emissions and dependence on fossil fuels while increasing efficiency. But many renewable energy sources have a higher cost than fossil fuels due to the materials needed to make them usable, such as platinum group metals (PGMs), and the high cost of storage.
A team of researchers led by Gang Wu, a professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis is working to change that. The team is creating a heterostructure catalyst for an anion-exchange membrane water electrolyzer (AEMWE) that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity from renewable sources. They created the catalyst with two phosphides that gave them an efficient method to extract hydrogen, a valuable yet low-cost source of zero-emissions fuel. The study is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Wu’s team has been looking for alternatives to catalysts that use expensive platinum group metals. In this research, their idea began with using sunlight, wind or water to create electricity that they could then use to separate hydrogen from water.
Laser-plasma accelerator drives free-electron laser for record 8 hours
For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a laser-plasma accelerator can reliably drive a free-electron laser for more than eight hours. Published in Physical Review Accelerators and Beams, the result was achieved by a team led by Finn Kohrell at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in collaboration with Texas-based company Tau Systems—and could soon make the technology vastly more accessible for a broad range of applications in industry and research.
Free-electron lasers (FELs) generate intense, coherent pulses of light, most often in the ultraviolet to X-ray range. This involves sending high-energy electron bunches through an undulator: a device that alternates a magnetic field to accelerate electrons back and forth, causing them to emit increasingly bright and coherent radiation.
By harnessing this radiation as laser light, researchers can probe matter at the atomic scale and capture ultrafast processes in real time, making it invaluable to a vast array of applications.
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.