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Category: transportation

New catalyst unlocks aluminum’s ability to switch between oxidation states

Aluminum’s journey has been remarkable, going from being more expensive than gold to one of the most widely used materials, from beverage cans to window frames and car parts. Scientists from the Southern University of Science and Technology have added a new feather in aluminum’s cap by expanding its use beyond the metallic form. They created a new aluminum-based redox catalyst —carbazolylaluminylene—that can flip back and forth between two oxidation states: Al(I) and Al(III). This catalyst drove chemical transformations long considered exclusive to transition metals.

This unique feature allowed the team to carry out selective aromatic reactions that bring together three separate alkyne molecules and assemble them into a single benzene ring, resulting in a wide range of benzene derivatives. Carbazolylaluminylene also stood out for its remarkable durability, completing up to 2,290 reaction cycles without losing any catalytic activity. The findings are published in Nature.

Eurail says stolen traveler data now up for sale on dark web

Eurail B.V., the operator that provides access to 250,000 kilometers of European railways, confirmed that data stolen in a breach earlier this year is being offered for sale on the dark web.

The company said that a threat actor also published a sample of the data on the Telegram messaging platform but it is still trying to determine the type of records and number of customers affected.

Eurail B.V. is a Netherlands-based firm that manages and sells passes (Eurail and Interrail) for train travel across Europe, offering flexibility for multi-country trips.

AI learns to perform analog layout design

Researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) have developed an artificial intelligence approach that addresses a key bottleneck in analog semiconductor layout design, a process that has traditionally depended heavily on engineers’ experience. The work was recently published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers.

Semiconductors are used in a wide range of technologies, including smartphones, vehicles, and AI servers. However, analog layout design remains difficult to automate because designers must manually arrange structures that determine performance and reliability while meeting a large number of design rules.

Automation has been especially challenging in analog design because layouts are too complex and design strategies differ significantly by circuit. In addition, training data is scarce, since layout data is typically treated as proprietary and is rarely shared outside companies.

Lithium alternatives? Calcium-ion batteries show strong 1,000-cycle performance in new test

Researchers at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have achieved a breakthrough in calcium-ion battery (CIB) technology, which could transform energy storage solutions in everyday life. Utilizing quasi-solid-state electrolytes (QSSEs), these innovative CIBs promise to enhance the efficiency and sustainability of energy storage, impacting a wide range of applications from renewable energy systems to electric vehicles.

The findings, titled “High-Performance Quasi-Solid-State Calcium-Ion Batteries from Redox-Active Covalent Organic Framework Electrolytes,” are published in the journal Advanced Science.

The urgency for sustainable energy storage solutions is growing critical worldwide. As the world accelerates its shift to green energy, the demand for efficient and stable battery systems has never been more pressing. Today’s mainstream lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) face challenges due to resource scarcity and near-limited energy density, making the exploration of alternatives like CIBs essential for a sustainable future.

A forgotten battery design from Thomas Edison—how scientists helped reimagine it

A little-known fact: In the year 1900, electric cars outnumbered gas-powered ones on the American road. The lead-acid auto battery of the time, courtesy of Thomas Edison, was expensive and had a range of only about 30 miles. Seeking to improve on this, Edison believed the nickel-iron battery was the future, with the promise of a 100-mile range, a long life and a recharge time of seven hours, fast for that era.

Alas, that promise never reached fruition. Early electric car batteries still suffered from serious limitations, and advances in the internal combustion engine won the day.

Now, an international research collaboration co-led by UCLA has taken a page from Edison’s book, developing nickel-iron battery technology that may be well-suited for storing energy generated at solar farms. The prototype was able to recharge in only seconds, instead of hours, and achieved over 12,000 cycles of draining and recharging—the equivalent of more than 30 years of daily recharges.

Supercomputer simulations test turbulence theories at record 35 trillion grid points

Using the Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have performed the largest direct numerical simulation (DNS) of turbulence in three dimensions, attaining a record resolution of 35 trillion grid points. Tackling such a complex problem required the exascale (1 billion billion or more calculations per second) capabilities of Frontier, the world’s most powerful supercomputer for open science.

The team’s results offer new insights into the underlying properties of the turbulent fluid flows that govern the behaviors of a variety of natural and engineered phenomena—from ocean and air currents to combustion chambers and airfoils. Improving our understanding of turbulent fluctuations can lead to practical advancements in many areas, including more accurately predicting the weather and designing more efficient vehicles.

The work is published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

Solar-powered seesaw extractor simultaneously extracts lithium and desalinates water

The global demand for lithium has skyrocketed over the last several years due to the rapid growth of the electric vehicle market and grid-storage solutions. Currently, production capacity is limited and unlikely to meet future needs. However, researchers are making headway in innovative lithium capture technologies. A new study, published in Device, describes one such technology that extracts lithium from seawater more efficiently than previous extraction methods, with an added benefit of seawater desalination.

3D ‘polar chiral bobbers’ identified in ferroelectric thin films

A novel type of three-dimensional (3D) polar topological structure, termed the “polar chiral bobber,” has been discovered in ferroelectric oxide thin films, demonstrating promising potential for high-density multistate non-volatile memory and logic devices. The result was achieved by a collaborative research team from the Institute of Metal Research (IMR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, and other institutions. The findings were published in Advanced Materials on January 30.

Topological polar textures in ferroelectrics, such as flux-closures, vortices, skyrmions, merons, Bloch points, and high-order radial vortices discovered in recent years, have attracted wide interest for future electronic applications. However, most known polar states possess limited configurational degrees of freedom, constraining their potential for multilevel data storage.

In this study, the researchers used phase-field simulations and aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy to predict and experimentally confirm the existence of polar chiral bobbers in (111)-oriented ultrathin PbTiO₃ ferroelectric films. This 3D topological structure is characterized by a nanoscale domain with out-of-plane polarization opposite to its surroundings, which starts from the film surface and terminates at a Bloch point inside the film.

How fast can a microlaser switch ‘modes?’ A simple rule reveals a power-law time scaling

Modern technologies increasingly rely on light sources that can be reconfigured on demand. Think of microlasers that can quickly switch between different operating states—much like a car shifting gears—so that an optical chip can route signals, perform computations, or adapt to changing conditions in real time. The microlaser switching is not a smooth, leisurely process, but can be sudden and fast. Generally, nearly identical “candidate” lasing states compete with each other in a microcavity, and the laser may abruptly jump from one state to another when external conditions are tuned.

This raises a practical question: How fast can such a switch be, in principle? For physicists, it raises a deeper one: Does the switching follow a universal rule, like other phase transitions in nature?

A team at Peking University has now provided a clear picture of an ultrahigh-quality microcavity laser—the time the laser needs to complete a state switch follows a remarkably simple power-law rule. When the control knob is swept faster, the switch becomes faster—but not arbitrarily so. Instead, the switching time decreases with the square root of the sweep speed, corresponding to a robust exponent close to half. This result effectively sets a speed limit for how quickly such microlasers can “change gears.” The findings are published in Physical Review Letters.

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