Slow-motion earthquakes, as you might guess from the name, involve the release of pent-up geological energy over the course of days or weeks rather than minutes – and scientists have now recorded some as they were happening.
Category: energy – Page 5
Quasi-periodic oscillations detected in unusual multi-trigger gamma-ray burst
A new study led by the Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has detected quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) signals in an unusual gamma-ray burst (GRB) event. The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal.
GRBs are short-timescale, highly energetic explosive phenomena typically associated with the collapse of massive stars or the mergers of compact objects. On July 2, 2025, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) aboard NASA’s Fermi satellite detected an unusual high-energy burst—designated GRB 250702DBE—that triggered the Fermi/GBM system three times.
Despite being named in accordance with standard GRB conventions, the event exhibited striking anomalies: its duration spanned several hours, far exceeding that of typical GRBs. The same source, also detected in the X-ray band by the Einstein Probe (EP) as EP250702a, has drawn scientific interest due to its long duration and unclear physical origin and radiation mechanisms.
Mexico Reveals 314-Petaflop Supercomputer Named After Aztec Goddess
The Mexican government will build a supercomputer with a processing capacity seven times greater than the current most powerful computer in Latin America, officials responsible for the project said Wednesday.
Named Coatlicue, after a goddess in Aztec mythology representing the source of power and life, the computer will have a processing capacity of 314 petaflops.
“We want it to be a public supercomputer, a supercomputer for the people,” President Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters.
Dirty water boosts prospects for clean hydrogen
Wastewater can replace clean water as a source for hydrogen, eliminating a major drawback to hydrogen fuel and reducing water treatment costs of hydrogen production by up to 47%, according to new research from Princeton Engineering.
The findings, reported Sept. 24 in the journal Water Research, are a step toward making hydrogen a practical pathway to decarbonize industries that are difficult to electrify, such as steel and fertilizer production.
Z. Jason Ren, the senior study author, said that current electrolytic hydrogen production requires a large amount of clean water, increasing costs and straining local water supplies. His research team wanted to find out whether treated water processed by wastewater plants could be substituted.
Ammonia could power ships, industries with 70% more efficient tech
“No one has showcased that ammonia can be used to power things at the scale of ships and trucks like us,” said CEO Seonghoon Woo, who founded the company with Hyunho Kim, Jongwon Choi, and Young Suk Jo. “We’ve demonstrated this approach works and is scalable.”
The company is targeting power-hungry industries like maritime shipping, power generation, construction, and mining for its early systems as the power density advantages of ammonia over renewables and batteries.
With a manufacturing contract secured with Samsung Heavy Industries, Amogy is set to start delivering more of its systems to customers next year. The company will deploy a 1-megawatt ammonia-to-power pilot project with the South Korean city of Pohang in 2026, with plans to scale up to 40 megawatts at that site by 2028 or 2029, according to a press release.
Physicist delineates limits on the precision of quantum thermal machines
Quantum thermal machines are devices that leverage quantum mechanical effects to convert energy into useful work or cooling, similarly to traditional heat engines or refrigerators. Thermodynamics theory suggests that increasing the reliability with which all thermal machines produce the same thermodynamic processes in time comes at a cost, such as the wasted heat or the need for extra energy.
Drawing from theories and concepts rooted in thermodynamics, physicist Yoshihiko Hasegawa at the University of Tokyo recently set out to pinpoint the limits that would constrain the precision of finite-dimensional quantum thermal machines. In a recent paper, published in Physical Review Letters, he delineates these limits and shows that quantum coherence could reduce fluctuations, improving the accuracy of quantum thermal machines.
“Thermodynamic uncertainty relations have clarified an important ‘no free lunch’ principle: if you want an operation to be more precise, you must pay more thermodynamic cost, i.e., entropy production,” Hasegawa told Phys.org. “However, those thermodynamic uncertainty relations do not forbid, in principle, pushing entropy production arbitrarily high.
OLEDs can now switch light’s handedness with an electrical signal
Researchers from the University of Oxford have for the first time discovered an approach to electrically switch organic LEDs (OLEDs) to emit either left- or right-handed circularly polarized light without changing the light-emitting molecules. This could be useful for a range of technological applications, from more energy efficient OLED displays, to optical information transfer.
Anomalous electronic state opens pathway to room-temperature superconductivity
Superconductive materials can conduct electricity with no resistance, but typically only at very low temperatures. Realizing superconductivity at room temperature could enable advanced, energy-efficient electronics and other technologies.
Now, an international research team is one step closer to such an achievement. The researchers made the first observation of a special electronic state known as a “nodal metal,” which provides more insight into electronic behavior at different temperatures, in a multilayer system comprising copper and oxygen.
The team, which includes researchers based in Japan, Taiwan and the United States, published their results in Nature Communications.
