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At the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the spotlight was on groundbreaking developments in AI and healthcare. However, battery technology is the game-changer at the heart of these innovations, enabling greater power efficiency. Importantly, electric vehicles are where this technology is being applied most intensely.

Today’s EVs can travel around 700 km on a single charge, while researchers are aiming for a 1,000 km battery range. Researchers are fervently exploring the use of silicon, known for its high storage capacity, as the anode material in lithium-ion batteries for EVs. However, despite its potential, bringing silicon into practical use remains a puzzle that researchers are still working hard to piece together.

It’s “Little Shop of Horrors” meets “Terminator.”

A team of scientists successfully took control over a Venus Flytrap, a type of cultivated carnivorous plant, by implanting a tiny microchip in it.

This “artificial neutron” was able to force the plants to open and close — conventionally a way for them to devour its prey — mimicking the brain’s methods of processing and transferring information.

Terahertz radiation has several advantages over other imaging modalities, such as X-rays and ultrasound. It is non-ionizing, meaning it does not damage the cells or tissues of the body. It is also sensitive to water, which makes it ideal for detecting skin cancers, as they tend to have different water content and blood supply than normal skin.

Professor MacPherson and her team at the Department of Physics are developing a screening device that uses terahertz frequencies to scan the skin and produce high-resolution images that can identify suspicious lesions. The device is portable, fast, and easy to use and could be deployed in clinics, hospitals, and pharmacies.

If realized using solar energy or other renewable energy, water splitting could be a promising way of sustainably producing hydrogen (H2) on a large-scale. Most photoelectrochemical water splitting systems proposed so far, however, have been found to be either inefficient, unstable, or difficult to implement on a large-scale.

Researchers at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) recently set out to develop a scalable and efficient photoelectrochemical (PEC) system to produce green hydrogen. Their proposed system, outlined in Nature Energy, is based on an innovative formamidinium lead triiodide (FAPbI3) perovskite-based photoanode, encapsulated by an Ni foil/NiFeOOH electrocatalyst.

“Our group has thoroughly studied the challenges associated with practical solar hydrogen production,” Jae Sung Lee, Professor of Energy & Chemical Engineering at UNIST and co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “As summarized in our most recent review paper, minimum 10% of solar-to-hydrogen (STH) efficiency is required to develop viable practical PEC system, for which selecting an efficient material is the first criteria.”

Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Donnelly Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Research have found nearly one million new exons—stretches of DNA that are expressed in mature RNA—in the human genome.

The findings were published in the journal Genome Research.

There are around 20,000 in humans that contain approximately 180,000 known internal exons. These protein-coding regions account for only one percent of the entire . The vast majority of what remains is a mystery—aptly referred to as the “dark genome.”