Science

Scientists are investigating more eco-friendly chemistries for batteries, and a team at Texas A&M University has just put forward an interesting candidate, demonstrating a metal-free battery that can be placed in acidic solutions to degrade on demand.

The NSW Government has funded Australia's first dual-fuel-capable power plant to the tune of US$64 million. The Tallawarra B project will initially run on natural gas, but will be gradually upgraded to burn green hydrogen over coming decades.

A new design out of Washington University in St Louis demonstrates a promising path forward for sodium batteries, with the team producing a device that is smaller and less expensive than lithium batteries, without compromising on performance.

Researchers in the UK have developed a new type of glowing probe that increases its fluorescence in the presence of an enzyme linked to plaque buildup in the arteries, possibly acting as an early warning sign for cardiovascular disease.

An imaging technique has been developed offering detailed 3D videos of a human brain. The technique offers novel perspectives on the motions of a brain, delivering clinicians a new diagnostic tool and researchers insights into neurological disorders.

By turning modern scientific tools on an antibiotic discovered 70 years ago, researchers have unearthed a previously unknown mechanism it uses to pierce and pop superbugs like balloons, raising new hopes in the fight against drug-resistant bacteria.

Mars orbiters have spotted a large volcanic deposit that appears to be relatively fresh, only about 53,000 years old. The find may lend weight to the idea that the Red Planet was recently, or still is, habitable for subsurface microbes.

Following a series of impressive yet explosive attempts to bring down its giant spaceship built for interplanetary travel, SpaceX has today successfully landed its Starship prototype without exploding for the first time.

Blue Origin has opened the first round of bidding for the first passenger seat on its suborbital New Shepard reusable space vehicle, which is scheduled to fly on July 20, 2021.

It can be frustrating, when the jacket that you initially put on to keep you warm starts making you too hot. Jackets made from an experimental new reversible fabric, however, could both heat and cool their wearer.

As useful a material as leather is, it isn’t too environmentally friendly. Now, engineers at Tufts University have created a new leather-like material out of silk, which can be 3D printed into shape and easily recycled into new products as needed.

Scientists at Sweden's KTH Royal Institute of Technology have produced a completely renewable version of see-through wood thanks to the addition of a fruit peel extract, which also happens to make it more translucent than previous versions.

Scientists at Harvard have demonstrated an alternative to CRISPR – a genetic engineering system called Retron Library Recombineering (RLR) that works without cutting DNA and can be quickly applied to huge populations of cells.

Ordinarily, if biologists wish to confirm that an animal specimen represents a new species, they have to perform a dissection – essentially destroying it. Now, though, the task has been accomplished non-invasively, using MRI and CT scan technologies.

All walking animals have something in common – their preferred walking speed is largely determined by what's known as "resonance." Bearing this in mind, scientists have calculated what may have been the default walking speed of Tyrannosaurus rex.

Scientists have mapped ‘atmospheric rivers’ in Earth’s atmosphere that are responsible for transporting huge quantities of potentially dangerous aerosols around the planet, which eventually descend and impact air quality.

Modern scientific techniques are rapidly improving our understanding of how plastic pollution can impact marine organisms, and a new study has demonstrated how they can also be used to understand the plight of creatures past.

A new study has revealed that Earth’s glaciers have lost a staggering amount of ice over the last two decades, and the rate of loss is accelerating. The global effort used satellite data to track the deteriorating condition of some 220,000 glaciers.

Quantum technology is bursting with potential, but controlling atoms and molecules keeps proving tricky. In a breakthrough new study, physicists have successfully wrangled thousands of molecules into a single unified quantum state for the first time.

There’s invisible, undetectable stuff all around us, and we call it dark matter. There’s plenty of evidence that this stuff is very real, but what exactly is dark matter? How do we know it’s there? And how are scientists looking for it?

With elusive dark matter continuing to evade detection, scientists are having to search in stranger and stranger places. In a new study, physicists at MIT have studied the spins of black holes for signs of drag from dark matter slowing them down.

Graphene just keeps getting weirder. Engineers at ETH Zurich have now managed to tweak the overachieving material so that some parts of a flake can be an electrical insulator while other areas act as a superconductor, just nanometers apart.

Eyeing solutions to our e-waste problem, engineers have developed the world's first fully recyclable printed electronics, demonstrated in a transistor that can be reduced to its original building blocks with the help of baths and sound waves.

Engineers at Stanford have created a new optical device that can easily manipulate light into basically any color desired. The system uses a series of modulators to fine-tune the frequencies of individual photons to change their color.

Progress on quantum computers may soon stall. Cosmic rays streaming to Earth can interfere with the integrity of information in quantum computers, and now an MIT team has shown just how vulnerable they are and what it might take to protect them.

Current-gen quantum computing "qubits" need to be kept incredibly cold – below 0.1 Kelvin (-273.05 °C/-459.5 °F). But new "hot qubits" developed at UNSW can work 15 times hotter, opening the door to radically smaller, cheaper quantum computers.

Scientists have achieved quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time, sending information between them without being physically or electronically connected. The feat opens the door for quantum computers and quantum internet.