Chinese Academy of Sciences

The race to achieve the extreme cold that quantum technologies demand may have a frontrunner. Chinese scientists have developed an alloy that almost reaches absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature, without using the scarce isotope, helium-3.

Massively faster, more scalable, and more energy efficient than electronic computation, single-shot tensor computing uses light’s amplitude and phase to store, process, and send data. It could "create a new generation of optical computing systems."

Rare earth elements that are crucial for producing tech products, from EVs to phones, require destructive mining to get them out of the ground. Scientists in China might have just found another source for them that's easier to reach: ferns.

Researchers have demonstrated a programmable nano-scale robot, made from a few strands of DNA, that's capable of grabbing other snippets of DNA, and positioning them together to manufacture new UV-welded nano-machines – including copies of itself.

It’s a basic fact that temperatures drop at night, damaging crops, equipment and infrastructure. Scientists have created a new film that selectively absorbs and reflects different wavelengths of infrared light to efficiently keep objects warm.

Tesla's 4680 cells, for comparison, measure somewhere between 244-296 Wh/kg. So the extreme-density cells recently tested in Beijing represent a huge leap forward from the status quo – even if they're solely focused on maximizing a single metric.

Even though glass is praised for being fully recyclable, the EPA states that only about a third of discarded glass items actually get recycled. With that problem in mind, scientists have developed a new type of glass which is biodegradable.

The Chinese city of Dalian has just switched on a world-leading new energy storage system, expected to supply enough power for up to 200,000 residents each day, with an initial capacity of 400 MWh and output of 100 MW.

Discarded electronics can be a gold mine – literally. Researchers have developed an efficient new way to use graphene to recover gold from electronic waste, without needing any other chemicals or energy.

Good news for fusion energy progress and a new world record for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as its Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), or "artifical sun," maintains 70 million degrees Celsius (126 million °F) for 1,056 seconds.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed a new type of wearable electric generator, which harvests energy from the wind as you walk. The team says it’s low cost and efficient enough to power small sensors and LEDs.

They charge much faster than lithium batteries, they can put out massive power, and they last thousands of cycles with minimal deterioration. This energy density breakthrough could bring supercapacitors into the EV and consumer tech worlds.