Over the past three decades, lithium-ion batteries, rechargeable batteries that move lithium ions back and forth to charge and discharge, have enabled smaller devices that juice up faster and last longer.
Now, X-ray experiments at the Department of Energy's SLAC...
High-energy X-ray beams and a clever experimental setup allowed researchers to watch a high-pressure, high-temperature chemical reaction to determine for the first time what controls formation of two different nanoscale crystalline structures in the metal cobalt. The technique allowed...
Researchers led by the University of Manchester have designed a catalyst that converts biomass into fuel sources with remarkably high efficiency and offers new possibilities for manufacturing advanced renewable materials.
Neutron scattering experiments at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge...
Purdue engineers have figured out a way to tackle plastic landfills while also improving batteries – by putting ink-free plastic soaked in sulfur-containing solvent into a microwave, and then into batteries as a carbon scaffold.
Lithium-sulfur batteries have been hailed...
Researchers from the Department of Atomically Resolved Dynamics of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science in Hamburg, the University of Potsdam (both in Germany) and the...
McGill University researchers have gained tantalizing new insights into the properties of perovskites, one of the world's most promising materials in the quest to produce a more efficient, robust and cheaper solar cell.
In a study published today in Nature Communications,...
Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) have developed a hybrid material constructed from a metal oxide nanosheet and a light-absorbing molecule for splitting water molecules to obtain dihydrogen (H2) under sunlight. Since H2 can be used as carbon-free...
Changes in microstructure, such as this void and fibrils created by straining a polymer sheet, appear to control how the material charges through friction.
Credit: Case Western Reserve University
For centuries, scientists have tried to understand triboelectric charging, commonly...
A promising approach to treating cancer—called targeted alpha-particle therapy or TAT—could better harness the curative power of radiation treatments and lessen the severity of their more debilitating side effects.
TAT recruits drugs containing radioactive materials called alpha-emitting radioisotopes or radionuclides...
An international team of scientists, led by the Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), have found a new compound of plutonium with an unexpected, pentavalent oxidation state, using the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, Grenoble, France. This new phase of plutonium is...
It sounds like alchemy: take a clump of white dust, squeeze it in a diamond-studded pressure chamber, then blast it with a laser. Open the chamber and find a new microscopic speck of pure diamond inside.
A new study from...
