Lifeboat Foundation

When cars, planes, ships or computers are built from a material that functions as both a battery and a load-bearing structure, the weight and energy consumption are radically reduced. A research group at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden is now presenting a world-leading advance in so-called massless energy storage — a structural battery that could halve the weight of a laptop, make the mobile phone as thin as a credit card or increase the driving range of an electric car by up to 70% on a single charge.

“We have succeeded in creating a battery made of carbon fiber composite that is as stiff as aluminum and energy-dense enough to be used commercially. Just like a human skeleton, the battery has several functions at the same time,” says Chalmers researcher Richa Chaudhary, who is the first author of an article recently published in Advanced Materials.

Research on structural batteries has been going on for many years at Chalmers, and in some stages also together with researchers at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. When Professor Leif Asp and colleagues published their first results in 2018 on how stiff, strong carbon fibers could store electrical energy chemically, the advance attracted massive attention.

A new way of diagnosing lung cancer with a blood draw is 10 times faster and 14 times more sensitive than earlier methods, according to University of Michigan researchers.

Physicists from the University of Basel have succeeded in coupling two Andreev qubits coherently over a macroscopic distance for the first time. They achieved this with the help of microwave photons generated in a narrow superconducting resonator. The results of the experiments and accompanying calculations were recently published in Nature Physics, laying the foundation for the use of coupled Andreev qubits in quantum communication and quantum computing.

Traditional optical tweezers, which trap and manipulate particles using light, usually require bulky microscope setups, but chip-based optical tweezers could offer a more compact, mass manufacturable, broadly accessible, and high-throughput solution for optical manipulation in biological experiments.

However, other similar integrated optical tweezers can only capture and manipulate cells that are very close to or directly on the chip surface. This contaminates the chip and can stress the cells, limiting compatibility with standard biological experiments.

Using a system called an integrated optical phased array, the MIT researchers have developed a new modality for integrated optical tweezers that enables trapping and tweezing of cells more than a hundred times further away from the chip surface.

The next generation of handheld devices requires a novel solution. Spintronics, or spin electronics, is a revolutionary new field in condensed-matter physics that can increase the memory and logic processing capability of nano-electronic devices while reducing power consumption and production costs. This is accomplished by using inexpensive materials and the magnetic properties of an electron’s spin to perform memory and logic functions instead of using the flow of electron charge used in typical electronics.

New work by Florida State University scientists is propelling spintronics research forward.

Professors Biwu Ma in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Peng Xiong in the Department of Physics work with low-dimensional organic metal halide hybrids, a new class of hybrid materials that can power optoelectronic devices like solar cells, light-emitting diodes, or LEDs and photodetectors.

Whether it’s the smartphone in your pocket or the laptop on your desk, all current computer devices are based on electronic technology. But this has some inherent drawbacks; in particular, they necessarily generate a lot of heat, especially as they increase in performance, not to mention that fabrication technologies are approaching the fundamental limits of what is theoretically possible.

As a result, researchers explore alternative ways to perform computation that can tackle these problems and ideally offer some new functionality or features too.

One possibility lies in an idea that has existed for several decades but has yet to break through and become commercially viable, and that’s in optical computing.

Understanding this unique form of superconductivity is crucial and could lead to exciting applications, like functional quantum computers.

A newly synthesized material made from rhodium, selenium, and tellurium, has been found to exhibit superconductivity at extremely low temperatures.

“The scientists believe the material’s behavior might stem from the excitation of quasiparticles — disturbances within the material that behave like particles — making it a ” topological” superconductor. This is significant because these quasiparticles’ quantum states could potentially be more resilient, remaining stable even when the material or its environment changes.

Tackling heat transfer, diamond layers help build 3D circuits with lower power consumption, faster signaling, and increased performance.

Scientists have discovered that adding diamond layers to computer chips significantly boosts heat transfer, paving the way for faster, more powerful computers.

Their research revealed that this combination improves heat transfer by tenfold, a feat that could lead to more efficient designs like 3D circuits, where electronic components are stacked vertically, and heterogeneous integration, which combines different types of components in a single chip.

Researchers have made an edible transistor out of a toothpaste ingredient, which could help with edible healthcare electronics.