Category
A University of Adelaide research team has published a new electrochemical method in Nature Synthesis that converts urea from urine and table salt into hydrazine. Unlike the dangerous oxidant-dependent industrial process that has dominated for 120 years, the new aqueous, room-temperature method achieves more than 10 times the current density and 240 hours of stable operation.
An analysis of one year of real-world driving data from 15 EVs in Guangzhou using physics-aligned causal inference predicted that the most aggressive driving style causes roughly 2.5 times more battery capacity degradation than eco-driving. It is one of the first attempts to statistically isolate the effects of temperature and state of charge, though the figures after 1,000 cycles are model predictions, not measured values.
A hybrid material combining the light-driven proton pump of halophilic bacteria with a semiconductor nanosheet synthesized hydrogen peroxide from sunlight and air at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. Showing more than five times the production efficiency of the semiconductor alone, it opens the possibility of a distributed, decarbonized synthesis route to replace the anthraquinone process.
AI models trained during safety fine-tuning to say they have no consciousness also systematically downgrade their attribution of mind to animals and natural objects, their religious beliefs, and even their subjective well-being. A team from Google and the University of Chicago reveals this unexpected ripple effect of alignment through geometric analysis of internal representations.
In fusion reactor material testing, femtosecond electron camera observations have revealed that copper does not instantly collapse even when it exceeds its predicted limit temperature, but instead melts gradually. This discovery overturns the assumptions behind conventional simulations and could improve the accuracy of heat-resistant material screening.
Moonshot AI's PerceptionBench is a 3,000-question benchmark that strips away reasoning and knowledge to measure visual perception alone. Evaluating 16 state-of-the-art models, the top score was just 59.7%. It quantitatively reveals how similar overall scores mask uneven capabilities, and how what looks like a 'reasoning failure' is often actually a perception failure at its root.
A ton of discarded circuit boards contains roughly 200 times more gold than natural ore. Solvent extraction, the technique used to mine this "urban ore," has always demanded heavy consumption of acids and bases. Now a research team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has demonstrated a design principle for a single molecule with built-in charge that fully electrifies the extraction cycle—cutting chemical reagent use by up to 100-fold while achieving 89% gold recovery.
A University of Minnesota research team has synthesized semiconductor-grade pyrite single crystals from low-grade taconite ore—traditionally used as steelmaking feedstock—without any additional purification. The discovery that pyrite is "immune" to impurities shakes the long-held assumption that semiconductor materials require high-purity starting materials.
Under shock compression at the trillion-pascal scale, microcrystalline diamond melted at roughly 7,300 K without leaving a clear diffraction signature of the BC8 phase. We unpack the detection limits and a conditional prediction of a threefold fusion yield gain.
An Argonne National Laboratory team has shown through experiments and multipole analysis that when the rotation angle of four nanomagnets exceeds 45°, the energy relaxation of the system switches from probabilistic to deterministic. This provides a new principle for designing output certainty through geometric arrangement alone, offering a path toward ultra-low-power computing with artificial spin ice.
