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Researchers at Cornell University have made a battery breakthrough they say could assuage these concerns. The researchers created a lithium battery that can charge in under five minutes, while still delivering a stable performance through repeated “charging and discharging” cycles.

Lithium-ion batteries have been popular for electric vehicles because they’re lightweight, energy efficient, and have a long life. How long those batteries take to charge depends on their size and what sort of charger they’re plugged into. Fast chargers can charge an EV in as little as 30 minutes, while “level 1” chargers often found in residential homes could take more than 40 hours. (There have been charger developments too; a company called Gravity says its chargers take just five minutes on vehicles with a 200-mile range, though some EVs aren’t designed to handle these chargers’ power.)

For all of a lithium-ion battery’s benefits, it also comes with downsides, including the time it takes to charge and issues handling a large surge of current. The researchers instead found that a metal called indium, often used for touchscreens and solar panels, helps with fast charging and storage in batteries. Their battery uses indium anodes (lithium-ion battery anodes typically use graphite coated on copper foil).

His father’s voice, the sounds of passing cars and scissors clipping his hair: An 11-year-old boy is hearing for the first time in his life after receiving a breakthrough gene therapy.

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) which carried out the treatment – a first in the United States – said in a statement Tuesday the milestone represents hope for patients around the world with hearing loss caused by genetic mutations.

Aissam Dam was born “profoundly deaf” because of a highly rare abnormality in a single gene.

A University of Alberta research team has uncovered differences in the way male and female mice develop and resolve chronic pain, pointing to potential pathways for future targeted treatments for humans.

In recently published research in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, the team reports on its study of mice with chronic resulting from inflammation rather than direct injury. The researchers found that the were more sensitive to the effects of called macrophages. They also identified an X chromosome-linked receptor that is critical for resolving both acute and in both sexes.

“We’re always interested in understanding the triggers for pain, but in this study, we went up the next step to ask how pain resolves to determine how these immune cells are involved,” explains principal investigator Bradley Kerr, professor of anesthesiology and in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry.

The fountain of youth has eluded explorers for ages.


Summary: Researchers found that T cells can be genetically reprogrammed to target and eliminate senescent cells, which contribute to aging-related diseases. By using CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T cells in mice, they achieved significant health improvements including lower body weight, enhanced metabolism, and increased physical activity.

This groundbreaking approach, offering long-term effects from a single treatment, could revolutionize treatments for age-related conditions like obesity and diabetes, transcending the potential of CAR T cells beyond their current use in cancer therapy.

An experiment carried out in Italy, backed by theoretical support from Newcastle University, has produced the first experimental evidence of vacuum decay.

In quantum field theory, when a not-so-stable state transforms into the true stable state, it’s called “false vacuum decay.” This happens through the creation of small localized bubbles. While existing theoretical work can predict how often this bubble formation occurs, there hasn’t been much experimental evidence. Now, an international research team involving Newcastle University scientists has for the first observed these bubbles forming in carefully controlled atomic systems. Published in the journal Nature Physics, the findings offer experimental evidence of bubble formation through false vacuum decay in a quantum system.

Researchers discovered a method to expedite the study of bacterial gene regulation, which could help fight antibiotic resistance by analyzing DNA replication’s impact on gene expression.

Bacterial infections cause millions of deaths each year, with the global threat made worse by the increasing resistance of the microbes to antibiotic treatments. This is due in part to the ability of bacteria to switch genes on and off as they sense environmental changes, including the presence of drugs. Such switching is accomplished through transcription, which converts the DNA in genes into its chemical cousin in mRNA, which guides the building of proteins that make up the microbe’s structure.

For this reason, understanding how mRNA production is regulated for each bacterial gene is central to efforts to counter resistance, but approaches used to study this regulation to date have been laborious. In a new study, scientists revealed a trick that may speed such efforts.