Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: energy

Wearable thermoelectric technology uses thin films to generate electricity from body heat

Seoul National University College of Engineering has announced that a research team led by Prof. Jeonghun Kwak of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with co-first authors Dr. Juhyung Park and Dr. Sun Hong Kim, has developed a flexible and thin “pseudo-transverse thermoelectric generator” capable of producing electricity from body heat. The research findings appear in Science Advances.

Thermoelectric generators, which convert temperature differences into electricity, are attracting attention as a next-generation energy technology for wearable electronics because they can supply power without batteries. In particular, thin-film thermoelectric generators are lightweight and flexible, allowing them to be comfortably attached to skin or clothing.

However, this thin structure also presents a limitation. Thermoelectric generators require a temperature difference between hot and cold sides to generate electricity. When such a device is attached flat to the skin, body heat passes directly through the thin film and dissipates into the surrounding air—similar to heat passing through a sheet of paper. As a result, little to no temperature difference is formed across the device, making electricity generation difficult.

Redox regulation of the transcription factor HAT1 limits basal defenses and promotes responses to infection in Arabidopsis thaliana

A study in Science Signaling reveals a molecular “brake” in plants that fine-tunes the immune response to infection, casting light on the sophisticated and dynamic pathways that enable plants to balance energy between growth and immune defense.

📄

The redox status of cysteine residues in a transcription factor balances plant defense gene expression.

Physicists break longstanding high-temperature superconductivity record at ambient pressure

Researchers from the Texas Center for Superconductivity (TcSUH) and the department of physics at the University of Houston have broken the temperature record for superconductivity at ambient pressure—a breakthrough that could eventually lead to more efficient ways to generate, transmit, and store energy.

The UH team achieved a transition temperature (Tc) of 151 Kelvin (about minus 122 degrees Celsius) under ambient pressure—the highest ever recorded for all the reported superconductors at ambient pressure since the discovery of superconductivity in 1911. The transition temperature is the point below which a material becomes superconducting, meaning electricity can flow through it without resistance.

Raising this temperature has been a major goal in superconductivity research for decades. The closer scientists can push the Tc toward room temperature, the more practical and affordable superconducting technologies could become.

GlassWorm Attack Uses Stolen GitHub Tokens to Force-Push Malware Into Python Repos

The GlassWorm malware campaign is being used to fuel an ongoing attack that leverages the stolen GitHub tokens to inject malware into hundreds of Python repositories.

“The attack targets Python projects — including Django apps, ML research code, Streamlit dashboards, and PyPI packages — by appending obfuscated code to files like setup.py, main.py, and app.py,” StepSecurity said. “Anyone who runs pip install from a compromised repo or clones and executes the code will trigger the malware.”

According to the software supply chain security company, the earliest injections date back to March 8, 2026. The attackers, upon gaining access to the developer accounts, rebasing the latest legitimate commits on the default branch of the targeted repositories with malicious code, and then force-pushing the changes, while keeping the original commit’s message, author, and author date intact.

Scientists create slippery nanopores that supercharge blue energy

Scientists have found a way to significantly boost “blue energy,” which generates electricity from the mixing of saltwater and freshwater. By coating nanopores with lipid molecules that create a friction-reducing water layer, they enabled ions to pass through much more efficiently while keeping the process highly selective. Their prototype membrane produced about two to three times more power than current technologies. The discovery could help bring osmotic energy closer to becoming a practical renewable power source.

Scalable quantum batteries can charge faster than their classical counterparts

Over the past decades, energy engineers have developed increasingly advanced battery technologies that can store more energy, charge faster and maintain their performance for longer. In recent years, some researchers have also started exploring the potential of quantum batteries, devices that can store energy leveraging quantum mechanical effects.

To store energy, quantum batteries rely on qubits, quantum systems that can exist in two energy states simultaneously, leveraging a property known as superposition. While in principle these batteries could perform better than classical batteries, the realization of battery prototypes that exhibit this predicted quantum advantage has proved challenging.

Researchers at the Southern University and Technology in China (Sustech) and the Superior Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) in Spain recently realized a quantum energy storage device that was found to outperform a classical equivalent when operating under realistic conditions.

Quantum materials could enable the solar-powered production of hydrogen from water

Hydrogen fuel is a promising alternative to fossil fuels that only emits water vapor when used and could thus help to lower greenhouse gas emissions on Earth. In the future, it could potentially be used to fuel heavy-duty transport vehicles, such as trucks, trains, and ships, as well as industrial heating and decentralized power generation systems.

Unfortunately, most current methods to produce hydrogen rely on the burning of fossil fuels, which limits its environmental advantages. Given its potential, many energy engineers worldwide have been trying to devise more sustainable strategies to produce hydrogen on a large scale.

One proposed method for the clean production of hydrogen is known as photocatalytic water splitting. This approach entails splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, using photocatalysts (i.e., materials that respond to sunlight and prompt desired chemical reactions).

NASA finds extreme star collision in unlikely spot

A fleet of NASA missions has likely uncovered a collision between two ultradense stars in a tiny galaxy buried in a huge stream of gas. Astronomers have never seen this type of explosive event in an environment like this before—and it may help solve two outstanding cosmic mysteries. A paper describing these results is forthcoming in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and currently available on the arXiv preprint server.

Neutron stars are the cores left behind after a star much heavier than the sun runs out of fuel, collapses on itself, and then explodes. They are small (only a dozen or so miles across) but slightly more massive than the sun, making them amazingly dense. Astronomers consider them to be some of the most extreme objects in the universe.

In recent years, astronomers have collected data on collisions, or mergers, of two neutron stars inside of moderately sized or large galaxies. This latest discovery, however, shows that a neutron star collision may take place inside a tiny galaxy.

Resolving Barrier Crossing in Protein Folding

High-temporal-resolution fluorescence measurements reveal how quickly proteins cross energy barriers separating unfolded and folded states.

Proteins are the active molecules of life. To carry out their functions, they adopt specific structures, or “folds.” Biophysicists have long been fascinated by the “protein-folding problem”: How does the sequence of amino-acid building blocks encode the protein’s ultimate fold, and how can folding occur so quickly and reliably? The folding process can be understood as a diffusive random walk through the large space of possible configurations, culminating in the crossing of an energy barrier to reach the folded state. The time spent exploring unfolded configurations can span many orders of magnitude and has been measured with various experimental techniques. By contrast, the comparatively short time to ultimately cross the energy barrier—known as the transition-path time—had never been measured in a naturally occurring protein under biologically relevant conditions.

/* */