A new study found that a commercial sodium-ion battery from China rivals Tesla’s batteries in manufacturing quality and several key performance benchmarks.
With improvements to cold-weather charging and energy density, sodium-ion batteries could become a more affordable alternative for electric vehicles and grid-scale energy storage.
Sodium-ion battery shows tesla-like quality in new study.
The generative AI boom is fueled by staggering investments (including OpenAI’s multibillion-dollar chip deals), but for many companies, profitability as a result of these investments has remained elusive, leading some economists to warn of an AI bubble. In this Q&A, Harvard Business School’s Andy Wu wades through the potential and hype of the new technology. In particular, he highlights structural challenges facing most companies and warns of inevitable expiration dates on current legacy subscription models. He says that the industry’s future will depend on sustainable economics and business models that are able to capture value.
Researchers have discovered how certain photosynthetic bacteria use a sophisticated quantum mechanism to increase their efficiency when capturing sunlight. The study, published today in the journal Nature Chemistry and led by Professor Jenny Clark, reveals that nature has been using a process called “singlet fission,” effectively a “two-for-one” energy deal, to optimize solar harvesting. The findings provide a new blueprint for green technology, particularly as engineers attempt to copy this mechanism to build next-generation solar panels and quantum technologies.
While scientists have long understood the basic rules of how plants and bacteria convert light into chemical fuel, the biological role of singlet fission has historically remained poorly understood.
Although the efficiency of organic solar cells has now risen to more than 20%, there are physical limits that make it difficult to further increase their performance. A research team from Linköping University in Sweden, the University of Potsdam, the Paul-Drude-Institut in Berlin and other collaborators has now demonstrated which physical processes limit a key parameter in the performance of organic solar cells. This opens up the possibility of overcoming the long-standing efficiency limits of organic solar cells.
The work is published in the journal Nature Photonics.
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A Yale-led research team has developed the first standalone device that produces the liquid fuel methanol using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide as the ingredients.
The artificial “leaf,” like its namesake in nature, is a chemistry marvel. It brings the scientific mimicry of photosynthesis — the process of converting sunlight and water into chemical energy — to a new level, converting sunlight to methanol 32 times more efficiently than the previous conversion record for artificial leaf technologies that generate alcohol products.
In a recent study, Manish Garg, independent group leader at Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (MPI FKF), succeeded in probing the local properties of bright and dark excitons in the organic superconductor copper naphthalocyanine (CuNc). The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.
This study was the result of the efforts of an international collaboration that brought together the MPI for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, the Università della Calabria and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
By combining scanning tunneling microscopy with wave-packet interferometry, the authors gained remarkable—and previously inaccessible—insights into exciton dynamics. The insights gained with this technique can be of paramount importance both in the field of energy materials—where excitons play a central role in light-harvesting technologies such as solar cells—and in quantum technologies, as excitons are considered a promising platform for quantum computing.
Heatwaves across Europe and South Asia have dominated the news recently. But these events are really a surface expression of more fundamental changes affecting our planet: Earth itself is accumulating heat faster than ever before.
We lead a large international team of scientists who come together every year to provide an update on the state of the climate system. This year, we find that Earth’s energy imbalance—the difference between the amount of energy entering and leaving the planet—has doubled in recent decades and is now at record levels.
This extra heat is a key indicator of the pace and scale of human-caused climate change. In a climate unaffected by human greenhouse gas emissions, Earth’s energy imbalance would be zero. But since the 1970s, Earth has become increasingly out of balance. This rate of increase is faster than expected, and work is underway to understand exactly why this is happening.
Climate change as the macro engine for viral emergence The BA.3.2 “Cicada” variant’s hidden evolution Yeast-display technology and viral forecasting Pan-coronavirus vaccine development at La Jolla Institute How conserved viral regions unlock universal defenses.
Scientists can now force a virus to evolve in a test tube — and predict a pandemic before it starts. Heliox explores the 2026 yeast-display breakthrough that reproduced Omicron’s exact mutations in just two generations, connects it to the climate-driven migration of bat populations worldwide, and asks: are we approaching the day when we vaccinate against a pandemic that hasn’t happened yet?
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There are certain themes that movies in China can’t have, and one of them is time travel. In this clip we discuss China’s ban on time travel, how the CCP got Tesla and Elon Musk to heel, and why the CCP no longer needs Hollywood. Our guest is Chris Fenton, the producer of Bad Counselors, which comes to theaters July 22–27, 2026. https://www.badcounselors.com