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Nanotubes Transform Lead Acid Batteries Into Super Energy Source

An Israeli startup has developed a way to make lead acid batteries last four times longer, disrupting a multi-billion-dollar industry and potentially making them the rechargeable – and recyclable – energy storage method of choice around the world.

Lead acid is the second most common battery technology worldwide and the power cells are currently used as the starter batteries in cars, trucks and motorcycles.

The batteries have a positive plate made of lead dioxide on one end, and a spongy lead negative plate on the other end, with sulfuric acid flowing between them both to conduct the electricity.

Cyber Espionage Alert: LilacSquid Targets IT, Energy, and Pharma Sectors

A previously undocumented cyber espionage-focused threat actor named LilacSquid has been linked to targeted attacks spanning various sectors in the United States (U.S.), Europe, and Asia as part of a data theft campaign since at least 2021.

“The campaign is geared toward establishing long-term access to compromised victim organizations to enable LilacSquid to siphon data of interest to attacker-controlled servers,” Cisco Talos researcher Asheer Malhotra said in a new technical report published today.

Targets include information technology organizations building software for the research and industrial sectors in the U.S, energy companies in Europe, and the pharmaceutical sector in Asia, indicating a broad victimology footprint.

Building a Dyson Sphere Around the Sun Would Be Easy if We Used Jupiter for Raw Materials

We’d need an astronomical amount of resources to construct a Dyson sphere, a giant theoretical shell that would harvest all of a given star’s energy, around the Sun.

In fact, as science journalist Jaime Green explores in her new book “The Possibility of Life,” we’d have to go as far as to demolish a Jupiter-sized planet to build such a megastructure, a concept first devised by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960.

“If you wanted enough material to build such a thing, you’d essentially have to disassemble a planet, and not just a small one — more like Jupiter,” Green writes in her book.

You can watch astronauts at the International Space Station receive 3 tons of supplies: Here’s how

Space lovers have an opportunity to watch two unique occurrences at the International Space Station this week, but you will have to stay up pretty late — or wake up very early — to see them live.

According to NASA, the cargo spacecraft carrying three tons of food, fuel and supplies to the ISS is for the Expedition 71 crew.

The unpiloted spacecraft – called Progress 88 – is scheduled to launch on a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Thursday at 2:43 p.m. local time.

Speeding up calculations that reveal how electrons interact in materials

Materials scientists and engineers would like to know precisely how electrons interact and move in new materials and how the devices made with them will behave. Will the electrical current flow easily within the material? Is there a temperature at which the material will become superconducting, enabling current to flow without a power source? How long will the quantum state of an electron spin be preserved in new electronic and quantum devices?

Researchers create the world’s strongest ionizing terahertz radiation

Lying between the microwave and infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, the terahertz (1 THz = 10¹² Hz) gap is being rapidly closed by development of new terahertz sources and detectors, with promising applications in spectroscopy, imaging, sensing, and communication.

These applications greatly benefit from terahertz sources delivering high-energy or high-average-power radiation. On the other hand, high-intensity or strong-field terahertz sources are essential to observe or exploit novel nonlinear terahertz-matter interactions, where the electric and/or magnetic field strengths play a key role.

The team of scientists, led by Dr. Chul Kang from Advanced Photonics Research Institute, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Korea, and Professor Ki-Yong Kim from Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, U.S., has created the world’s strongest terahertz fields of 260 megavolts per centimeter (MV/cm) or equivalent peak intensity of 9 × 10¹³ watts per square centimeter (W/cm²).