Lifeboat Foundation

Using a polymer to make a strong yet springy thin film, scientists led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are speeding the arrival of next-generation solid-state batteries. This effort advances the development of electric vehicle power enabled by flexible, durable sheets of solid-state electrolytes.

The sheets may allow scalable production of future solid-state batteries with higher energy density electrodes. By separating negative and positive electrodes, they would prevent dangerous electrical shorts while providing high-conduction paths for ion movement.

These achievements foreshadow greater safety, performance and energy density compared to current batteries that use liquid electrolytes, which are flammable, chemically reactive, thermally unstable and prone to leakage.

“There are many open clusters in the galaxy. However, not all open clusters have the same level of interest to astronomers,” Ignacio Negueruela, a researcher at the Universidad de Alicante who was part of the team behind the discovery of supergiants in Barbá 2, told Space.com. “Clusters rich in red supergiants are very rare and tend to be very far away, but they play a crucial role in understanding key aspects in the evolution of massive stars.”

The intimidating size and power of supergiants means these monster stars burn through their nuclear fuel much faster than stars like the sun. Whereas our star will exist in its main sequence lifetime for around 10 billion years, supergiants are estimated to last just a few million years.

The short lifetime of supergiants means that while open clusters like Barbá 2 are common, with over 1,100 already discovered in the Milky Way alone, finding one packed with red supergiants is extremely rare.

We present the direct experimental observation of the formation of a diamagnetic cavity and magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor (MRT) instability in a betaapprox1 high energy density plasma. Proton radiography is used to measure the two dimensional path-integrated magnetic field in a laser-produced plasma propagating parallel to a preimposed magnetic field. Flutelike structures, associated with the MRT instability, are observed to grow at the surface of the cavity, with a measured wavelength of 1.2 mm and growth time of 4 ns. These measurements are in good agreement with predictions of three dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations using the GORGON code.

Logistics companies on the ground solve similar problems every day and transport goods and commodities across the globe. So, researchers can study how these companies manage their logistics to help space companies and agencies figure out how to successfully plan their mission operations.

One NASA-funded study in the early 2000s had an idea for simulating space logistics operations. These researchers viewed orbits or planets as cities and the trajectories connecting them as routes. They also viewed the payload, consumables, fuel and other items to transport as commodities.

This approach helped them reframe the space mission problem as a commodity flow problem – a type of question that ground logistics companies work on all the time.

The fabric of spacetime is roiling with vibrating quantum fields, known as vacuum energy. It’s right there, everywhere we look. But could we ever get anything out of it?

A New Zealand-based startup has developed a method of safely and wirelessly transmitting electric power across long distances without the use of copper wire, and is working on implementing it with the country’s second-largest power distributor.

The dream of wireless power transmission is far from new; everyone’s favorite electrical genius Nikola Tesla once proved he could power light bulbs from more than two miles away with a 140-foot Tesla coil in the 1890s – never mind that in doing so he burned out the dynamo at the local powerplant and plunged the entire town of Colorado Springs into blackout.

Tesla’s dream was to place enormous towers all over the world that could transmit power wirelessly to any point on the globe, powering homes, businesses, industries and even giant electric ships on the ocean. Investor J.P. Morgan famously killed the idea with a single question: “where can I put the meter?”

To produce light, lasers typically rely on optical cavities, pairs of mirrors facing each other that amplify light by bouncing it back and forth. Recently, some physicists have been investigating the generation of “laser light” in open air without the use of optical cavities, a phenomenon known as cavity-free lasing in atmospheric air.

Built by Natron Energy, the Edgecombe County facility is planned for 24 GWh of annual capacity, which would turn Natron from a startup into the first sodium-ion battery production juggernaut on US soil.

Sodium-ion batteries are cheaper, safer, with much longer lifespan and faster charging than conventional Li-ion packs.

Chinese companies are already using them in grid-level energy storage systems of local utilities, to balance their renewable energy mix. Some sodium-ion battery packs are even making their way into electric vehicles there, even though the chemistry offers lower energy density than Li-ion batteries.

Japan is ignoring EVs and hydrogen, and has a good reason: They are producing the first-ever magnetic levitation engine, and works like that.