Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers say they’ve built and tested a ‘structural battery’ that packs a device or EV’s chassis with energy, saving a ton of weight. It could unlock smartphones as thin as credit cards, laptops at half the weight and a 70% boost to EV range.

EVs rely heavily – pun intended – on large lithium-ion batteries to cover long distances. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology wondered if they could build a battery that doubles as the load-bearing material holding the car together, and shed some weight.

As part of their work on what they call ‘massless energy storage,’ the research team in Sweden has developed a battery made of a carbon fiber composite. It promises similar stiffness to aluminum, while also being capable of storing a fair bit of energy – enough to be used commercially.

Deep inside what we perceive as solid matter, the landscape is anything but stationary. The interior of the building blocks of the atom’s nucleus—particles called hadrons that a high school student would recognize as protons and neutrons—are made up of a seething mixture of interacting quarks and gluons, known collectively as partons.

The accumulation of mutations in DNA is often mentioned as an explanation for the aging process, but it remains just one hypothesis among many. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), in collaboration with the Inselspital, University Hospital of Bern and the University of Bern (UNIBE), has identified a mechanism that explains why certain organs, such as the liver, age more rapidly than others.

The mechanism reveals that damages to non-coding DNA, which are often hidden, accumulate more in slowly proliferating tissues, such as those of the liver or kidneys. Unlike in organs that regenerate frequently, these damages remain undetected for a long time and prevent cell division. These results, published in the journal Cell, open new avenues for understanding cellular aging and potentially slowing it down.

Our organs and tissues do not all age at the same rate. Aging, marked by an increase in senescent cells —cells that are unable to divide and have lost their functions—affects the liver or kidneys more rapidly than the skin or intestine.

Materials are crucial to modern technology, especially those used in extreme environments like nuclear energy systems and military applications. These materials need to withstand intense pressure, temperature and corrosion. Understanding their lattice-level behavior under such conditions is essential for developing next-generation materials that are more resilient, cheaper, lighter and sustainable.

A new type of OLED (organic light emitting diode) could replace bulky night vision goggles with lightweight glasses, making them cheaper and more practical for prolonged use, according to University of Michigan researchers.

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters this week, physicists from Amsterdam and Copenhagen argue that close observations of merging black hole pairs may unveil information about potential new particles. The research combines several new discoveries made by UvA scientists over the past six years.

Understanding how light travels through various materials is essential for many fields, from medical imaging to manufacturing. However, due to their structure, materials often show directional differences in how they scatter light, known as anisotropy. This complexity has traditionally made it difficult to accurately measure and model their optical properties. Recently, researchers have developed a new technique that could transform how we study these materials.

A breakthrough in quantum technology research could help realize a new generation of precise quantum sensors that can operate at room temperature.

TU Wien (Vienna) has succeeded in generating laser-synchronized ion pulses with a duration of well under 500 picoseconds, which can be used to observe chemical processes on material surfaces. The work has been published in Physical Review Research.