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Radical Plan to Beam ‘Sunlight on Demand’ at Night Sparks Concerns

A proposed constellation of satellites has astronomers very worried. Unlike satellites that reflect sunlight and produce light pollution as an unfortunate byproduct, the ones by US startup Reflect Orbital would produce light pollution by design.

The company promises to produce “sunlight on demand” with mirrors that beam sunlight down to Earth so solar farms can operate after sunset.

It plans to start with an 18-metre test satellite named Earendil-1 which the company has applied to launch in 2026. It would eventually be followed by about 4,000 satellites in orbit by 2030, according to the latest reports.

Climate-smart housing design helps cities beat the heat

Painting walls in light colors, insulating roofs, choosing medium-sized windows, and aligning buildings to the sun’s path may seem like simple choices. But they could provide powerful defenses against climate change for millions of people in the world’s most vulnerable regions.

That’s the message of a study, appearing in the journal Energy and Buildings, which identifies low-cost, climate-smart design strategies as crucial for future housing in Latin America’s rapidly warming cities.

Researchers used computer simulations to test how various climate-resilient building projects would perform under current and projected climate conditions in five major cities—Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, in Brazil, Santiago (Chile), Bogotá (Colombia), and Lima (Peru).

The Limits of AI: Generative AI, NLP, AGI, & What’s Next?

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Cambridge Scientists Unlock Century-Old Quantum Secret That Could Revolutionize Solar Power

Cambridge scientists have uncovered a hidden quantum mechanism in an organic semiconductor that could revolutionize solar energy. In a finding that connects modern research with ideas from a century ago, scientists have identified in an organic semiconductor a behavior that was long believed to o

Flash Joule heating lights up lithium extraction from ores

A new one‑step, water‑, acid‑, and alkali‑free method for extracting high‑purity lithium from spodumene ore has the potential to transform critical metal processing and enhance renewable energy supply chains. The study is published in Science Advances.

As the demand for lithium continues to rise, particularly for use in , smartphones and power storage, current extraction methods are struggling to keep pace. Extracting lithium from is a lengthy process, and traditional methods that use heat and chemicals to extract lithium from rock produce significant amounts of harmful waste.

Researchers led by James Tour, the T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Chemistry and professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University, have developed a faster and cleaner method using flash Joule heating (FJH). This technique rapidly heats materials to thousands of degrees within milliseconds and works in conjunction with chlorine gas, exposing the rock to intense heat and chlorine gas, they can quickly convert spodumene ore into usable lithium.

Thin solar-powered films purify water by killing bacteria even in low sunlight

Around 4.4 billion people worldwide still lack reliable access to safe drinking water. Newly designed, thin floating films that harness sunlight to eliminate over 99.99% of bacteria could help change that, turning contaminated water into a safe resource and offering a promising solution to this urgent global challenge.

In a recent study, researchers from Sun Yat-sen University, China, presented a self-floating photocatalytic film composed of a specially designed conjugated polymer photocatalyst (Cz-AQ) that generates oxygen-centered organic radicals (OCORs) in water.

These OCORs are efficiently formed due to the strong electron-donating and accepting groups incorporated into the polymer design, resulting in lifetimes orders of magnitude longer than those of conventional reactive oxygen species. With more time to act, the radicals enable the film to break down and suppress bacterial regrowth for at least five days.

From engines to nanochips: Physicists redefine how heat really moves

Heat has always been something we thought we understood. From baking bread to running engines, the idea seemed simple: heat spreads out smoothly, like water soaking through a sponge. That simple picture, written down by Joseph Fourier 200 years ago, became the foundation of modern science and engineering.

But zoom into the nanoscale—inside the chips that power your smartphone, AI hardware, or next-generation solar panels—and the story changes. Here, heat doesn’t just “diffuse.” It can ripple like , remember its past, or flow in elegant streams like a fluid in a pipe. For decades, scientists had pieces of this puzzle but no unifying explanation.

Now, researchers at Auburn University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory have delivered what they call a “unified statistical theory of heat conduction.”

Third dimension of data storage: Physicists demonstrate first hybrid skyrmion tubes for higher-density quantum computing

Typically, the charge of electrons is used to store and process information in electronics-based devices. In spintronics, the focus is instead on the magnetic moment or on magnetic vortices, so-called skyrmions—the goal is smaller, faster, and more sustainable computers. To further increase storage density, skyrmions will not only be two-dimensional in the future, but will also conquer the third dimension.

Researchers from the Institute of Physics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have now succeeded in creating three-dimensional skyrmions, so-called hybrid skyrmion tubes, in synthetic antiferromagnets and have demonstrated for the first time that these skyrmion tubes move differently than two-dimensional skyrmions.

“Three-dimensional skyrmions are of interest for and brain-inspired computing, among other things—here the higher resulting from the third dimension is essential,” says Mona Bhukta from Professor Mathias Kläui’s research group. The results were published on September 26 in Nature Communications.

Jeff Bezos envisions space-based data centers in 10 to 20 years

Jeff Bezos envisions gigawatt-scale orbital data centers within 10–20 years, powered by continuous solar energy and space-based cooling, but the concept remains commercially unviable today due to the immense cost and complexity of deploying thousands of tons of hardware, solar panels, and radiators into orbit.

Energy harvesters surpass Carnot efficiency using non-thermal electron states

Harnessing quantum states that avoid thermalization enables energy harvesters to surpass traditional thermodynamic limits such as Carnot efficiency, report researchers from Japan. The team developed a new approach using a non-thermal Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid to convert waste heat into electricity with higher efficiency than conventional approaches. These findings pave the way for more sustainable low-power electronics and quantum computing.

Energy harvesters, or devices that capture energy from environmental sources, have the potential to make electronics and industrial processes much more efficient. We are surrounded by waste heat, generated everywhere by computers, smartphones, , and factory equipment. Energy-harvesting technologies offer a way to recycle this lost energy into useful electricity, reducing our reliance on other power sources.

However, conventional energy-harvesting methods are constrained by the laws of thermodynamics. In systems that rely on , these laws impose fundamental caps on heat conversion efficiency, which describes the ratio of the generated electrical power and the extracted heat from the waste heat, for example, is known as the Carnot efficiency. Such thermodynamic limits, like the Curzon-Ahlborn efficiency, which is the heat conversion efficiency under the condition for obtaining the maximum electric power, have restricted the amount of useful power that can be extracted from waste heat.

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