A digital twin helped operators of a Dutch battery energy storage system detect a hidden 4 percent degradation.
Category: energy
A groundbreaking fuel cell could be the key to unlocking electric planes, according to a new study.
The researchers suggest that these devices could hold three times as much energy per kg compared to today’s top-performing EV batteries, providing a lightweight solution for powering not just planes, but lorries and ships too.
Ultrasound is more tissue-friendly and less absorbed by the body, making it a reliable option for powering implantable and skin-adherent devices. As a result, ultrasonic energy is emerging as a next-generation solution for wireless charging.
A flexible, biocompatible solution
A research team led by Dr. Sunghoon Hur from the Electronic and Hybrid Materials Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), along with Professor Hyun-Cheol Song of Korea University, has developed a biocompatible ultrasonic receiver that maintains consistent performance even when bent.
IN A NUTSHELL 🔋 Revolutionary water-based flow battery offers safer, more affordable, and efficient energy storage for households. ⚡ Developed by researchers at Monash University, the battery features a new membrane that enhances speed and scalability. 🔍 The design improves ion selectivity, allowing fast and stable operation, outperforming industry-standard membranes. 🌿 Non-toxic and non-flammable, the
“To boldly go… where anime has never gone before.” 🌌🚀
Star Trek: The Anime Voyage (2025) is a fan-made concept teaser trailer, reimagining the legendary science fiction saga as an epic anime series.
With breathtaking cosmic visuals, stylized characters, and emotionally charged storytelling, this animated vision explores new worlds, strange civilizations, and the inner conflicts of Starfleet’s finest.
🚀 Featuring anime-inspired versions of:
Captain Kirk, reimagined with bold, stylized energy.
Spock, the logical soul with a conflicted heart.
Separating crude oil into products such as gasoline, diesel, and heating oil is an energy-intensive process that accounts for about 6% of the world’s CO2 emissions. Most of that energy goes into the heat needed to separate the components by their boiling point.
In an advance that could dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed for crude oil fractionation, MIT engineers have developed a membrane that filters the components of crude oil by their molecular size.
“This is a whole new way of envisioning a separation process. Instead of boiling mixtures to purify them, why not separate components based on shape and size? The key innovation is that the filters we developed can separate very small molecules at an atomistic length scale,” says Zachary P. Smith, an associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study.
Diamond is one of the most prized materials in advanced technologies due to its unmatched hardness, ability to conduct heat and capacity to host quantum-friendly defects. The same qualities that make diamond useful also make it difficult to process.
Engineers and researchers who work with diamond for quantum sensors, power electronics or thermal management technologies need it in ultrathin, ultrasmooth layers. But traditional techniques, like laser cutting and polishing, often damage the material or create surface defects.
Ion implantation and lift-off is a way to separate a thin layer of diamond from a larger crystal by bombarding a diamond substrate with high-energy carbon ions, which penetrate to a specific depth below the surface. The process creates a buried layer in the diamond substrate where the crystalline lattice has been disrupted. That damaged layer effectively acts like a seam: Through high-temperature annealing, it turns into smooth graphite, allowing for the diamond layer above it to be lifted off in one uniform, ultrathin wafer.
Improving energy conversion efficiency in power electronics is vital for a sustainable society, with wide-bandgap semiconductors like GaN and SiC power devices offering advantages due to their high-frequency capabilities. However, energy losses in passive components at high frequencies hinder efficiency and miniaturization. This underscores the need for advanced soft magnetic materials with lower energy losses.
In a study published in Communications Materials, a research team led by Professor Mutsuko Hatano from the School of Engineering, Institute of Science, Tokyo, Japan, has developed a novel method for analyzing such losses by simultaneously imaging the amplitude and phase of alternating current (AC) stray fields, which are key to understanding hysteresis losses.
Using a diamond quantum sensor with nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers and developing two protocols—qubit frequency tracking (Qurack) for kHz and quantum heterodyne (Qdyne) imaging for MHz frequencies—they realized wide-range AC magnetic field imaging. This study was carried out in collaboration with Harvard University and Hitachi, Ltd.
When you put your hand out the window of a moving car, you feel a force pushing against you called drag. This force opposes a moving vehicle, and it’s part of the reason why your car naturally slows to a stop if you take your foot off the gas pedal. But drag doesn’t just slow down cars.
Aerospace engineers are working on using the drag force in space to develop more fuel-efficient spacecraft and missions, deorbit spacecraft without creating as much space junk, and even place probes in orbit around other planets.
Space is not a complete vacuum − at least not all of it. Earth’s atmosphere gets thinner with altitude, but it has enough air to impart a force of drag on orbiting spacecraft, even up to about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers).
A serendipitous observation in a Chemical Engineering lab at Penn Engineering has led to a surprising discovery: a new class of nanostructured materials that can pull water from the air, collect it in pores and release it onto surfaces without the need for any external energy.
The research, published in Science Advances, describes a material that could open the door to new ways to collect water from the air in arid regions and devices that cool electronics or buildings using the power of evaporation.
The interdisciplinary team includes Daeyeon Lee, Russell Pearce and Elizabeth Crimian Heuer Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE); Amish Patel, Professor in CBE; Baekmin Kim, a postdoctoral scholar in Lee’s lab and first author; and Stefan Guldin, Professor in Complex Soft Matter at the Technical University of Munich.