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Blog – Page 9

A giant object that has been lurking in the relative galactic vicinity of the Solar System this entire time has just been unmasked in all its enormous, invisible glory.

Just 300 light-years away, at the edge of the Local Bubble of space, astronomers have discovered a huge, crescent-shaped cloud of molecular hydrogen, the basic building block of everything in the Universe.

It’s the first time scientists have managed to discover molecular material in interstellar space by looking for the glow of far-ultraviolet light. Its discoverers have named the cloud Eos, after the ancient Greek goddess of the dawn.

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Lithium button cells with electrodes made of nickel-manganese-cobalt oxides (NMC) are very powerful. Unfortunately, their capacity decreases over time. Now, for the first time, a team has used a non-destructive method to observe how the elemental composition of the individual layers in a button cell changes during charging cycles.

The study, published in the journal Small, involved teams from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), the University of Münster, researchers from the SyncLab research group at HZB and the BLiX laboratory at the Technical University of Berlin. Measurements were carried out in the BLiX laboratory and at the BESSY II synchrotron radiation source.

Lithium-ion batteries have become increasingly better. The combination of layered nickel-manganese-cobalt oxides (NMC) with a graphite electrode (anode) has been well established as the in button cells and has been continuously improved. However, even the best batteries do not last forever; they age and lose capacity over time.

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Scientists have demonstrated that a surface reconstruction strategy can enable affordable hydrogen fuel production. The hydrogen fuel is created using The hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). However, scaling this process from a lab experiment to large-scale commercial production has been challenging.

Now, scientists in Japan have showcased that a surface reconstruction pathway can produce durable, non-noble metal-based cathodes that speed up the HER reaction.

Researchers highlighted that they can maintain their performance for more than 300 hours and are calculated to cost very close to the US Department of Energy’s 2026 H2 production target ($2.00 per kgH2-1).

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