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The government has announced a record £2.5 billion investment in fusion energy, which includes support for a prototype fusion energy plant in Nottinghamshire.

The new prototype plant, known as STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) will be built at the site of the former West Burton A coal power station near Retford and Gainsborough. The site was chosen by the government in 2022 as the location for the project, with the project’s delivery expected to create over 10,000 jobs ranging from construction to operations. The announcement shows the government’s firm commitment to becoming a “clean energy superpower” by turbocharging innovation in an area that’s produced conventional power for generations.

The record funding for fusion research announced this week shows the UK government’s firm commitment to clean, sustainable energy.

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Two key protein structures in the body are being visualized for the first time, thanks in part to the latest technology in the University of Cincinnati’s Center for Advanced Structural Biology—potentially opening the door for better designed therapeutics.

The research of a trio of UC structural biologists was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

It’s the first publication to come out of the Seegar Lab at UC. Tom Seegar, Ph.D., Ohio Eminent Scholar and assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences in the College of Medicine, serves as corresponding author of the study.

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A rare and bewildering intermediate between crystal and glass can be the most stable arrangement for some combinations of atoms, according to a study from the University of Michigan.

The findings come from the first quantum-mechanical simulations of quasicrystals—a type of solid that scientists once thought couldn’t exist. While the atoms in quasicrystals are arranged in a lattice, as in a crystal, the pattern of atoms doesn’t repeat like it does in conventional crystals. The new simulation method suggests quasicrystals—like crystals—are fundamentally , despite their similarity to disordered solids like glass that form as a consequence of rapid heating and cooling.

“We need to know how to arrange atoms into specific structures if we want to design materials with desired properties,” said Wenhao Sun, the Dow Early Career Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and the corresponding author of the paper published today in Nature Physics. “Quasicrystals have forced us to rethink how and why certain materials can form. Until our study, it was unclear to scientists why they existed.”

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In a study published in Science Advances, researchers from Technical University of Denmark and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid demonstrate a new device called an acoustic rainbow emitter (ARE) that takes in broadband white-noise signals from a point source that radiates sound equally in all directions and scatters it up so that different sound frequencies or pitches are emitted.

Similar to how a prism splits into a , the ARE device steers each in different directions, creating an acoustic rainbow.

In nature, some animals—like humans, bats, and dolphins—have evolved intricate ears (pinnae) that can catch, shape and direct sound in amazing ways, helping them sense and navigate their surroundings.

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Single-atom catalysts (SACs) are materials consisting of individual metal atoms dispersed on a substrate (i.e., supporting surface). Recent studies have highlighted the promise of these catalysts for the efficient conversion and storage of energy, particularly when deployed in fuel cells and water electrolyzers.

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