Microplastics pose a great threat to human health. These tiny plastic debris can enter our bodies through the water we drink and increase the risk of illnesses. They are also an environmental hazard; found even in remote areas like polar ice caps and deep ocean trenches, they endanger aquatic and terrestrial lifeforms.
Green Li-ion has launched a commercial-scale plant to process unsorted battery waste, or “black mass,” from used lithium-ion batteries.
Within an existing recycling facility in Atoka, Oklahoma, the plant will produce sustainable, battery-grade cathode precursor, lithium, and anode materials – closing the EV recycling loop with the production done all in one plant.
The current recycling process for spent lithium-ion batteries in North America includes sorting batteries before shredding, which are then processed into black mass and further into sulfates. The material is then exported overseas, most often to China and South Korea, for further processing.
New options for making finely structured soft, flexible and expandable materials called hydrogels have been developed by researchers at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT).
Notably, while other scientists have observed similar phenomena in their laboratory data, the mechanisms behind these observations remained elusive until now. Allan Johnson and his collaborators have elucidated the underlying processes, highlighting the formation of polarons and their ordering in specific directions as a key factor in reducing the energy penalty to the metallic phase. Driving the phase transition by exciting this disordered state of motion can be achieved with less energy.
Furthermore, the dynamic barrier lowering means that scientists are able to selectively reduce the energy required for the laser driven phase transition without increasing the probability of thermal switching, in contrast to other methods for improving the efficiency.
The results have been published in Nature Physics. The implications of this research extend beyond fundamental science, offering new avenues for precise material control and technological innovation. As the team continues to optimize the method and explore new materials, the potential for transformative advancements in material science and optical control remains high.
University of Florida engineers have developed a method for 3D printing called vapor-induced phase-separation 3D printing, or VIPS-3DP, to create single-material as well as multi-material objects. The discovery has the potential to advance the world of additive manufacturing.
A reservoir computing system for multimode and multiscale signal processing can be created using optoelectronic synapses that are based on α-In2Se3 and exploit the tightly coupled ferroelectric and optoelectronic properties of the material.
Tesla has been building Prefabricated Supercharger Units (PSUs) for at least a year at its Giga New York facility, and now the company released a video claiming it can deploy the pre-built EV fast chargers in just four days after getting them delivered to the installation site.
The company’s PSUs have up to four Supercharger stalls installed on a concrete base, with all the wiring in place and everything ready to be hooked up to the utilities. Up to three units–that’s 12 stalls in total–can be loaded onto the back of a truck with a crane and delivered to a new Supercharger location in the United States.
The house in Japan, designed by Japanese studio Nendo, has block walls made from the world’s first CO2-absorbing concrete.
Researchers at the Quantum Machines Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) are studying levitating materials—substances that can remain suspended in a stable position without any physical contact or mechanical support.
“Our research is inspired by the idea that unconventional superconductivity usually emerges in proximity to magnetism,” Xiang said. “In particular, for copper-based and iron-based high-temperature superconductors, many of the proposed superconducting pairing mechanisms are closely connected to magnetism; moreover, the interplay between magnetism and superconductivity may give birth to more peculiar phases of matter, including the pair-density-wave (PDW) order with a spatially oscillating superconducting order parameter and finite-momentum pairing which has been an intense focus of research recently.”
The EuO/KTO heterostructure examined by Xiang and his colleagues exhibits a strong ferromagnetic proximity effect elicited by the EuO overlayer. This effect makes it an ideal platform to study unconventional superconductivity.
“The first report on the superconductivity at the EuO/KTO interface was published in 2021, focusing on the KTO (111) interface,” Xiang said. “We have since worked on the EuO/KTO (110) interface (considering its improved interface quality), at which we revealed the emergence of two-dimensional superconductivity in a previous paper.”
