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Category: nanotechnology

Sunlight-driven nanoparticles enable cleaner ammonia synthesis at room temperature

Ammonia (NH3) is a colorless chemical compound comprised of nitrogen and hydrogen that is widely used in agriculture and in industrial settings. Among other things, it is used to produce fertilizers, as well as cleaning products and explosives.

Currently, ammonia is primarily produced via the so-called Haber-Bosch process, an industrial technique that entails prompting a reaction between nitrogen and hydrogen at very high temperatures and pressure. Despite its widespread use, this process is known to be highly energy-intensive and is estimated to be responsible for approximately 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Researchers at Stanford University School of Engineering, Boston College and other institutes have identified new promising catalysts (i.e., materials that speed up chemical reactions) that could enable the sunlight-driven synthesis of ammonia at room temperature and under normal atmospheric pressure.

Acid-treated carbon nanotubes boost efficiency and stability of flexible perovskite solar modules

Flexible perovskite solar modules (f-PSMs) are a key innovation in current renewable energy technology, offering a pathway toward sustainable and efficient energy solutions. However, ensuring long-term operational stability without compromising efficiency or increasing material costs remains a critical challenge.

In a study published in Joule, a joint research team from the Institute of Metal Research (IMR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Zhengzhou University has achieved power conversion efficiency (PCE) surpassing 20% in flexible modules capable of withstanding a range of external stresses. The study highlights the use of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) as window electrodes for scalable f-PSMs.

SWCNT films exhibit excellent hydrophobicity, resisting moisture-induced degradation while enhancing device stability. Their flexibility and affordability further position SWCNT-based electrodes as a practical option for sustainable energy systems, providing an ideal opportunity for buildings and infrastructure to incorporate their own power sources in support of a net-zero carbon emissions future.

Iron-based magnetic material achieves major reduction in core loss

A research team from NIMS, Tohoku University and AIST has developed a new technique for controlling the nanostructures and magnetic domain structures of iron-based soft amorphous ribbons, achieving more than a 50% reduction in core loss compared with the initial amorphous material.

The developed material exhibits particularly high performance in the high-frequency range of several tens of kilohertz—required for next-generation, high-frequency transformers and EV drive power supply circuits. This breakthrough is expected to contribute to the advancement of these technologies, development of more energy-efficient electric machines and progress toward carbon neutrality.

The research is published in Nature Communications.

Ultra-strong, lightweight metal composite can withstand extreme heat

University of Toronto researchers have designed a new composite material that is both very light and extremely strong—even at temperatures up to 500 Celsius.

The material, which is described in a paper published in Nature Communications, is made of various metallic alloys and nanoscale precipitates, and has a structure that mimics that of reinforced concrete—but on a microscopic scale.

These properties could make it extremely useful in aerospace and other high-performance industries.

The 2026 Timeline: AGI Arrival, Safety Concerns, Robotaxi Fleets & Hyperscaler Timelines | 221

The 2026 Timeline: AGI Arrival, Safety Concerns, Robotaxi Fleets & Hyperscaler Timelines ## The rapid advancement of AI and related technologies is expected to bring about a transformative turning point in human history by 2026, making traditional measures of economic growth, such as GDP, obsolete and requiring new metrics to track progress ## ## Questions to inspire discussion.

Measuring and Defining AGI

🤖 Q: How should we rigorously define and measure AGI capabilities? A: Use benchmarks to quantify specific capabilities rather than debating terminology, enabling clear communication about what AGI can actually do across multiple domains like marine biology, accounting, and art simultaneously.

🧠 Q: What makes AGI fundamentally different from human intelligence? A: AGI represents a complementary, orthogonal form of intelligence to human intelligence, not replicative, with potential to find cross-domain insights by combining expertise across fields humans typically can’t master simultaneously.

📊 Q: How can we measure AI self-awareness and moral status? A: Apply personhood benchmarks that quantify AI models’ self-awareness and requirements for moral treatment, with Opus 4.5 currently being state-of-the-art on these metrics for rigorous comparison across models.

AI Capabilities and Risks.

Continue reading “The 2026 Timeline: AGI Arrival, Safety Concerns, Robotaxi Fleets & Hyperscaler Timelines | 221” | >

How major nuclear protein complexes control specialized gene regulation in cancer and beyond

Precision and timing of gene expression is essential for normal biological functions and, when disrupted, can lead to many human diseases, including cancers. However, how molecular machines—protein complexes—that control gene expression locate to specific genes at specific times within the nuclei of our cells has remained a mystery.

Now, scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have discovered a new protein domain, SWIFT, found on a major chromatin remodeling complex family called mammalian SWI/SNF (mSWI/SNF or BAF) complexes, which helps these regulatory machines target particular genes to activate their expression.

The findings, published in Science, reveal how the SWIFT platform on mSWI/SNF complexes engage transcription factors (TF) to enable specialized cellular functions during both normal development and cancer. Particularly in human cancers, SWIFT-TF engagement sustains cancer-promoting gene expression and cell growth. Notably, breaking interactions with mutations halts cancer cell growth, flagging this new SWIFT-TF platform as a promising target for small molecule development.

Replication efforts suggest ‘smoking gun’ evidence isn’t enough to prove quantum computing claims

A group of scientists, including Sergey Frolov, professor of physics at the University of Pittsburgh, and co-authors from Minnesota and Grenoble have undertaken several replication studies centered around topological effects in nanoscale superconducting or semiconducting devices. This field is important because it can bring about topological quantum computing, a hypothetical way of storing and manipulating quantum information while protecting it against errors.

In all cases, they found alternative explanations of similar data. While the original papers claimed advances for quantum computing and made their way into top scientific journals, the individual follow-ups could not make it past the editors at those same journals.

Reasons given for its rejection included that, being a replication, it was not novel; that, after a couple of years, the field had moved on. But replications take time and effort and the experiments are resource-intensive and cannot happen overnight. And important science does not become irrelevant on the scale of years.

Quantum phenomenon enables a nanoscale mirror that can be switched on and off

Controlling light is an important technological challenge—not just at the large scale of optics in microscopes and telescopes, but also at the nanometer scale. Recently, physicists at the University of Amsterdam published a clever quantum trick that allows them to make a nanoscale mirror that can be turned on and off at will.

The work is published in the journal Light: Science & Applications.

Behind nature’s blueprints: Physicists create ‘theoretical rulebook’ of self-assembly

Inspired by biological systems, materials scientists have long sought to harness self-assembly to build nanomaterials. The challenge: the process seemed random and notoriously difficult to predict.

Now, researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and Brandeis University have uncovered geometric rules that act as a master control panel for self-assembling particles.

The results, which could find applications ranging from protein design to synthetic nanomachines, were published in Nature Physics.

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