Lifeboat Foundation

The rate at which a raft made of ants is stretched determines its properties because the ants take time to fix holes.

Jan 9 (Reuters) — Microsoft (MSFT.O) has worked with a U.S. national laboratory to use artificial intelligence to rapidly identify a material that could mean producing batteries that require 70% less lithium than now, the company said on Tuesday.

The replacement of much of the lithium with sodium, a common element found in table salt, still needs extensive evaluation by scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington to determine whether it will be suitable for mass production.

“Something that could have taken years, we did in two weeks,” Jason Zander, an executive vice president at Microsoft, told Reuters. “That’s the part we’re most excited about. … We just picked one problem. There are thousands of problems to go solve, and it’s applicable to all of them.”

The design solves dendrite-related issues by creating a multilayer battery with diverse materials and managing dendrites by containment.

Research unveils novel solid-state batteries with lithium metal anode and provides insights into revolutionary battery materials.

Advanced Functional Materials, part of the prestigious Advanced portfolio and a top-tier materials science journal, publishes outstanding research across the field.

The process of crystallization fouling is a phenomenon where scale forms on surfaces. It is widespread in nature and technology and affects the energy and water industries. Despite previous attempts, rationally designed surfaces with intrinsic resistance remain elusive due to a lack of understanding of how microfoulants adhere in dynamic aqueous environments.

In a study now published in Science Advances, Julian Schmid and a team of researchers in surface engineering in Switzerland and the U.S. studied the interfacial dynamics of microfoulants by using a micro-scanning fluid dynamic gauge system to demonstrate a rationally developed coating that removes 98% of deposits under shear flow conditions.

Scientists have created unique Slater-Pauling Heusler materials with semiconductor properties, offering significant potential in thermoelectric applications. Their research reveals these materials’ unique electron redistribution and thermal properties.

Recently, researchers from Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) designed Slater-Pauling (S-P) Heusler materials with a unique structure resembling a Rubik’s cube. These materials showed potential in thermoelectric applications due to their semiconductor-like properties.

Unique Semiconductor Behavior

Inspired by the ‘whitest beetle known to science,’ PolyU researchers reveal an advanced cooling material for sustainable indoor cooling.

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab researchers use computational methods to describe an approach for optimizing the LK99 material as a superconductor.

Some will say, hey why is Nextbigfuture still covering LK99. Didn’t some angry scientists say that LK99 was not a superconductor? I have been covering science for over 20 years and there are a lot of angry scientists who believe many things will not work. Scientists going into experiments looking to debunk something will not be the ones who figure out how to make it work.

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab researchers spent time and worked on supercomputers to try to figure out how to make LK99 work. There computational work is showing promise.

In a thin film of phase-change materials, photonic circuits can be directly written, erased, and modified by a laser writer.