Lifeboat Foundation

Revolutionary ‘Lab-on-a-drone’ system detects airborne pollutants in real time.

In a significant stride towards better understanding and combating air pollution, researchers have unveiled an innovative “lab-on-a-drone” system. Published in the American Chemical Society’s journal, Analytical Chemistry.

Credit: Naypong/iStock.

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TouchWind.

For years, the wind energy industry has adopted the three-blade model for its turbines. As the world looks for cleaner sources of energy, the turbines are getting larger and are also going deeper into the seas, where winds blow stronger.

At the recent launch of its new BEV factory, Toyota vowed its next-generation electric vehicles will deliver longer range and faster charging at a lower price. The Japanese automaker now says its new EVs, due out in 2026, will feature nearly 500 miles of range.

At a technical briefing in June, Toyota revealed several new innovations, including advanced battery plans, improvements in aerodynamics, and manufacturing upgrades as it looks to boost EV sales with its next-gen electric models.

The company shared at the launch of its BEV factory, which is not an actual plant but rather “an organization dedicated to battery EVs,” that production of Toyota’s new EVs will begin in 2026.

The need for modern technologies to dismantle existing underwater infrastructure is growing due to increasing demand for renewable energy sources. For example, to bring a wind power plant in the sea up to higher powers, the existing old steel frames, which may be below sea level, must first be dismantled so that engineers can rebuild them to obtain these higher powers.

In laboratory tests, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology IWS (Fraunhofer IWS) have developed a shortwave green laser method for beneath-sea cutting that offers multiple advantages over commonly used techniques that use saws, automatic saw wires, and plasma cutters, for example.

According to the researchers, the technique is possible because of the availability of shortwave green lasers in the more-than-1-Kw-class, which are required to achieve the necessary cutting power. In the future, the researchers said, shorter-wavelength versions with blue lasers are conceivable.

Scientists have shown that the biomass of 12 previously unstudied strains of cyanobacteria from around the globe is efficient at the biosorption of the rare earth elements lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, and terbium from aqueous solutions. This allows these rare elements, for which demand is steadily growing, to be collected from wastewater from mining, metallurgy, and the recycling of e-waste, and reused.

Rare earth elements (REEs) are a group of 17 chemically similar metals, which got their name because they typically occur at low concentrations (between 0.5 and 67 parts per million) within the Earth’s crust. Because they are indispensable in modern technology such as light emitting diodes, mobile phones, electromotors, wind turbines, hard disks, cameras, magnets, and low-energy lightbulbs, the demand for them has increased steadily over the past few decades, and is predicted to rise further by 2030.

From zero to 100 km/h in less than a second: a racing car built by students has broken the world record for electric vehicle acceleration, a Swiss university said Tuesday.

Students from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences designed and built the “Mythen” vehicle that achieved the feat, ETHZ said in a statement.

“Now, Guinness World Records has confirmed that Mythen broke the previous world acceleration record for electric vehicles,” it said.

Metal halide perovskites are semiconducting materials with advantageous optoelectronic properties, low defects and low costs of production. In contrast with other emerging semiconductors, these materials can be easily synthesized via affordable solution processing methods.

In recent years, some engineers have been exploring the potential of metal halide perovskites for creating highly solar cells and light emitting diodes (LEDs). Their favorable characteristics, however, could also facilitate their use for fabricating next-generation electronic components, including transistors.

Researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, the Chinse Academy of Sciences and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China recently introduced a new strategy to develop transistors based on a metal halide perovskite, specifically tin perovskite. In their paper, published in Nature Electronics, they showed that the resulting tin perovskite-based transistors could attain performances comparable to those of existing silicon-based transistors.

In a nutshell: Every September, the Guinness Book of World Records sits in on a little drag race between college students. The seat is reserved because these mostly untelevised races are known for pushing the absolute limits of tiny electric cars, and frequently, a team makes acceleration history.

Applied sciences students from ETH Zurich and Lucerne University have broken the world record for acceleration in an electric car. The University of Stuttgart held the previous record, set last year when it sent its car screaming down the track, going from zero to 100 km/h (62.15 mph) in 1.461 of a second. This week, the students from Zurich crushed that showing with a time of just under one second (0.956 of a second) and a distance of 12.3 meters.

The students are Academic Motorsports Club Zurich (AMZ) members and spent a year building the car they named “Mythen.” The team suffered several setbacks and had to spend every minute of their free time tuning and swapping components. All their hard work paid off as driver Kate Maggetti set the world acceleration record for electric vehicles in front of Guinness judges on a test track in Duebendorf, Switzerland.

Researchers are even exploring the possibility of extracting lithium from seawater, potentially a game-changer for lithium accessibility globally.

A recent breakthrough by researchers at Princeton University provides renewed optimism for the future of the battery industry. An innovative method for extracting lithium presents a high potential to revolutionize clean energy sectors, such as electric vehicles and grid storage, while also reducing the environmental impact of lithium production.

Lithium, the silvery-white metal found in abundance in saline waters, has been a cornerstone of the clean energy transition. However, the environmental footprint of traditional lithium extraction is far from pure, requiring expansive plots of land and prolonged extraction processes. The solution? A new groundbreaking method that reduces both land use and time.