CATL has unveiled Tener, a new large scale energy storage system to compete with Tesla Megapack.
The system has almost twice the energy capacity of the Megapack, and CATL claims zero degradation after 5 years.
Tesla Megapack is the poster boy of large-scale energy storage.
Researchers at Tohoku University have developed a paper-based Magnesium-air battery that is eco-friendly and powerful.
Notably, while other scientists have observed similar phenomena in their laboratory data, the mechanisms behind these observations remained elusive until now. Allan Johnson and his collaborators have elucidated the underlying processes, highlighting the formation of polarons and their ordering in specific directions as a key factor in reducing the energy penalty to the metallic phase. Driving the phase transition by exciting this disordered state of motion can be achieved with less energy.
Furthermore, the dynamic barrier lowering means that scientists are able to selectively reduce the energy required for the laser driven phase transition without increasing the probability of thermal switching, in contrast to other methods for improving the efficiency.
The results have been published in Nature Physics. The implications of this research extend beyond fundamental science, offering new avenues for precise material control and technological innovation. As the team continues to optimize the method and explore new materials, the potential for transformative advancements in material science and optical control remains high.
Kyushu University researchers have shed new light into a critical question on how baby stars develop. Using the ALMA radio telescope in Chile, the team found that in its infancy, the protostellar disk that surrounds a baby star discharges plumes of dust, gas, and electromagnetic energy.
These “sneezes,” as the researchers describe them, release the magnetic flux within the protostellar disk, and may be a vital part of star formation. Their findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Stars, including our sun, all develop from what are called stellar nurseries, large concentrations of gas and dust that eventually condense to form a stellar core, a baby star. During this process, gas and dust form a ring around the baby star called the protostellar disk.
Can you wirelessly power wireless devices, thus improving and advancing the technology known an “Internet of Things” (IoT)? This is what a recent study published in Energy & Environmental Science hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Utah investigated how pyroelectrochemical cell (PECs) could be used to self-charge IoT devices through changes in immediate surrounding temperature, also known as ambient temperature. This study holds the potential to help a myriad of industries, including agriculture and machinery, by allowing IoT devices to charge without the need for electrical outlets.
“We’re talking very low levels of energy harvesting, but the ability to have sensors that can be distributed and not need to be recharged in the field is the main advantage,” said Dr. Roseanne Warren, who is an associate professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Utah and a co-author on the study. “We explored the basic physics of it and found that it could generate a charge with an increase in temperature or a decrease in temperature.”
The technology can also be used to devise a range of advanced sensors for everyday use and to advance science. Twamley’s lab uses levitating materials to build oscillators, which can be used to develop ultra-sensitive sensors. Making these oscillators work without using external energy sources can make them easier to deploy, and this is what the research team at OIST set out to do. What they faced was a series of challenges.
The device that OIST researchers aimed for was a ‘frictionless’ platform. However, the system would lose energy over time without an external power source. This is known as ‘eddy damping’ since external forces make an oscillating system lose energy.
The other hurdle to overcome would be minimizing the system’s kinetic energy. This is necessary since it can help improve the system’s sensitivity if it were to be used as a sensor. If the kinetic motion can be further cooled to the quantum realm, it could also open up possibilities of more precision measurements.
The diffraction of light is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature where waves spread out as they propagate. This spreading of light beams during propagation limits the efficient transmission of energy and information. Therefore, scientists have endeavored to suppress diffraction effects to better maintain the shape and direction of light beams.
Scientists at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have introduced a groundbreaking concept known as “supercritical coupling,” which significantly boosts the efficiency of photon upconversion. This innovation not only overturns existing paradigms but also opens a new direction in the control of light emission.
Photon upconversion, the process of converting low-energy photons into higher-energy ones, is a crucial technique with broad applications, ranging from super-resolution imaging to advanced photonic devices. Despite considerable progress, the quest for efficient photon upconversion has faced challenges due to inherent limitations in the irradiance of lanthanide-doped nanoparticles and the critical coupling conditions of optical resonances.
The concept of “supercritical coupling” plays a pivotal role in addressing these challenges. This fundamentally new approach, proposed by a research team led by Professor LIU Xiaogang from the NUS Department of Chemistry and his collaborator, Dr Gianluigi ZITO from the National Research Council of Italy, leverages on the physics of “bound states in the continuum” (BICs). BICs are phenomena that enable light to be trapped in open structures with theoretically infinite lifetimes, surpassing the limits of critical coupling. These phenomena are different from the usual behavior of light.
The first full-size prototype of Manta Ray, an advanced uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV) produced by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has been revealed in new photos.
The images were released on Monday by Northrup Grumman, one of two prime contractors DARPA selected in late 2021 to produce unique full-scale demonstration vehicles for the program.
Whenever and wherever stars are born, which occurs whenever clouds of gas sufficiently collapse under their own gravity, they come in a wide variety of sizes, colors, temperatures, and masses. The largest, bluest, most massive stars contain the greatest amounts of nuclear fuel, but perhaps paradoxically, those stars are actually the shortest lived. The reason is straightforward: in any star’s core, where nuclear fusion occurs, it only occurs wherever temperatures exceed 4 million K, and the higher the temperature, the greater the rate of fusion.
So the most massive stars might have the most fuel available at the start, but that means they shine brightly as they burn through their fuel quickly. In particular, the hottest regions in the core will exhaust their fuel the fastest, leading the most massive stars to die the most quickly. The best method we have for measuring “How old is a collection of stars?” is to examine globular clusters, which form stars in isolation often all at once, and then never again. By looking at the cooler, fainter stars that remain (and the lack of hotter, bluer, brighter, more massive stars), we can state with confidence that the Universe must be at least ~12.5–13.0 billion years old.
