From solar power stations in space to stabilising melting glaciers, some researchers are proposing extremely ambitious and risky projects to fight climate change. Could they work?
Category: sustainability
Leather gets a power upgrade with laser-written microsupercapacitors
Researchers have developed a simple and eco-friendly way to use a laser to turn natural leather into flexible and wearable energy devices. The new approach could lay the groundwork for more sustainable wearable electronics. In a paper in Optics Letters, the researchers demonstrate the new technique by creating microsupercapacitors on leather in various patterns, including a tiger, dragon and rabbit.
“Using a laser, we directly write conductive patterns onto vegetable-tanned leather to create microsupercapacitors that can store energy and help smooth electrical signals so that wearable electronics run more reliably,” said the research team leader Dong-Dong Han from Jilin University in China.
Unlike conventional devices that rely on synthetic materials and complex, chemical-heavy processes, our approach uses a natural, skin-friendly material and a one-step fabrication method. The microsupercapacitors are well-suited for flexible and comfortable wearable electronics because they are built on soft materials and can be shaped freely and integrated directly into products.
Light-driven method enables sustainable production of porous semiconducting polymers
Researchers at Koç University have developed a light-driven method to produce porous semiconducting polymers under ambient conditions without the need for metal catalysts. The study, led by Prof. Dr. Önder Metin from the Department of Chemistry, in collaboration with Dr. Melek Sermin Özer, Dr. Zafer Eroğlu, and Prof. Dr. Sermet Koyuncu, was published in Nature Communications.
Porous semiconducting organic polymers have attracted growing attention due to their high thermal and chemical stability, as well as their tunable structures. With a high density of molecular-scale pores, these materials exhibit strong charge transport and light-harvesting capabilities, making them promising for applications ranging from gas storage and energy technologies to photocatalysis and optoelectronics.
However, conventional synthesis methods are often complex, costly, and difficult to scale. They typically require high temperatures, expensive metal catalysts, and multi-step reaction processes, limiting their broader applicability.
No battery needed: Single organic device can act as both indoor solar cell and photodetector
Next-generation optoelectronic systems (devices that convert light to electrical energy) leverage organic semiconductor-based indoor energy-autonomous architectures for cutting-edge applications. Notably, organic semiconductors possess mechanical flexibility, solution processability, and bandgap-tunable optoelectronic properties, making them highly lucrative for indoor power generation via organic photovoltaics (OPVs), as well as for spectrally selective photodetection through organic photodetectors (OPDs). Unfortunately, technological progress made in the fields of OPVs and OPDs has largely been separate, necessitating further research for the development of bifunctional OPV-OPD systems for concurrent energy harvesting and photodetection.
Additionally, the potential self-powered operation of such systems is restricted by conflicting charge transport kinetics, especially in the electron and hole transport layers (ETLs and HTLs, respectively). This limitation impacts device durability and stability and increases fabrication costs, making it indispensable to find new HTL materials such as poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene), 2-(9H-carbazol-9-yl)ethyl]phosphonic acid self-assembled monolayer, MoOx, NiOx, and V2O5, beyond conventional options.
Quasi-liquid layer controls growth mechanisms of ice-like materials
Clathrate hydrates are crystalline structures formed at the bottom of seafloors, created by water molecules trapping methane, carbon dioxide or other molecules. While these materials are underutilized in technology, a University of Oklahoma researcher is helping scientists better understand them through a trailblazing study.
Alberto Striolo, a professor in OU’s Gallogly College of Engineering, co-authored an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that addresses a key challenge toward utilizing hydrates: their slow growth rates. He and his fellow researchers have discovered an unusual interfacial layer on the hydrate that impacts its growth rate.
Striolo is the college’s Asahi Glass Chair in Chemical Engineering and Lloyd and Jane Austin Presidential Professor. He is also the director of the college’s Online Master of Science in Sustainability and the Materials Science and Engineering doctoral program.
Integrated strategy unlocks 29.76% efficiency for all-perovskite tandem solar cells
Two stacked layers comprise tandem solar cells (TSCs), with each subcell absorbing different wavelengths of sunlight, which makes TSCs more efficient than single-layer solar cells. All-perovskite TSCs hold great promise for next-generation photovoltaics, with a theoretical efficiency exceeding 40%. However, their practical performance is hampered by mismatched crystallization kinetics between their wide-bandgap (WBG) and narrow-bandgap (NBG) subcells, leading to phase segregation and defect accumulation.
To address this challenge, a research group led by Prof. Ge Ziyi and Prof. Liu Chang from the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed an innovative colloidal chemistry strategy to enhance the performance of these TSCs, achieving a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 29.76%. Their study is published in Joule.
The researchers designed a unified carboxylate-based modulator system using two graded carboxylate anions—tartrate (Ta-) and citrate (Cit-)—to precisely regulate the nucleation dynamics of the two subcells.
Scientists Just Broke the Solar Power Limit Everyone Thought Was Absolute
A new “energy-multiplying” solar breakthrough could push efficiency beyond 100% and transform how we capture sunlight.
Solar energy is widely seen as a key tool in reducing reliance on fossil fuels and slowing climate change. The Sun delivers a vast amount of energy to Earth every second, but today’s solar cells can only capture a small portion of it. This limitation comes from a so-called “physical ceiling” that has long been considered unavoidable.
Breakthrough spin-flip technology boosts solar efficiency.
Shrinking the carbon footprint of chemical manufacturing with lasers and solar radiation
Researchers have found a way to use solar energy to power a key chemical reaction that drives many manufacturing industries. This new method can significantly reduce the energy required to run these operations, eliminate harsh oxidizing byproducts and minimize carbon emissions.
Olefin epoxidation is not a process many are familiar with, but the epoxide chemicals it produces are the backbone of the textile, plastic, chemical and pharmaceutical industries. However, the current industry-standard process uses harsh peroxides to facilitate oxidation reactions, which are difficult to dispose of safely and emit carbon dioxide.
Water can be used as an oxidant instead of peroxides, but H2O bonds are difficult to break, requiring high-temperature conditions, making it highly energy-intensive and further contributing to CO2 emissions.