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The refinery filter that works because it clogs
A cheap polymer membrane usually used only as a backing layer can sort crude oil molecules once heavy hydrocarbons partly…
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Recyclers have spent centuries diluting dirty scrap. An algorithm says use the dirt
A Chinese and German team used machine learning to design ductile irons made entirely from contaminated scrap. In laboratory tests…
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A slug’s trick could let doctors seal a leaking gut without stitches
Beijing researchers have made an injectable gel that flows through an endoscope, sets in about 30 seconds at body temperature and sticks only on the side facing tissue. It closed stomach fistulas in rats and pigs, but has not been tested in people.
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Rust as a battery: the case for burning iron in old coal plants
A new EWI Cologne study for TU Darmstadt and the DESERTEC Foundation models iron powder as a seasonal energy store…
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An MRI start-up bets that chemists can build a better qubit
Ulm-based NVision and Ulm University have shown a single designed molecule working as a light-connected spin qubit. The physics is…
More stories
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Kyoto beams 14.6 gigabits a second out of a moving car
Kyoto University has sent data at 14.6 Gbit/s from a car on a real road to a receiver 140 metres away using…
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Korean lab cuts the rarest ingredient in EV magnets by four-fifths
A DGIST team, part-funded by a Korean magnet maker, says a new diffusion recipe delivers comparable magnet performance with 80 per cent…
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A white coat that lets old power lines carry more current
KAUST researchers have made a retrofit coating that reflects desert sun and draws heat out of a live cable. Modelling suggests up…
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A staircase of crystals keeps spin alive long enough to use
An HKUST team has stretched room-temperature spin coherence in a perovskite to about five nanoseconds, roughly 300 times longer than a conventional…
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Making enzymes outside the cell, to feed the machine that designs them
A Fraunhofer team in Potsdam is building a robot platform that produces enzyme variants without living cells, then trains AI on the…
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A white LED without the yellow powder
Seoul Viosys says it is mass producing white light from gallium nitride alone, with no rare earth phosphor and no package, in…
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Cancer cells misread their own code, so researchers built a trap out of the mistake
A Chinese team has turned a translation error that happens mostly in tumour cells into an on switch for a self-destruct gene.…
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A gene therapy with a dimmer switch, and what happened when it was switched off
Three people with drug-resistant epilepsy had seizures fall by an average of 92.6% after a virus made their neurons sensitive to a…
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Waste heat does the work an electrolyser usually pays for
An Australian spin-out has won A$15m of public money to scale a ceramic tube electrolyser that runs on industrial steam. The efficiency…
Energy and climate
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A small sodium pouch cell exposes a big manufacturing test
Chinese researchers kept anode-free sodium cells cycling for 1,400 cycles with a new electrolyte. Larger prototypes faltered, making coating and assembly quality…
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China pairs two old electrolysers to chase the wind
A 5MW system mixing alkaline and PEM electrolysers has won Chinese state recognition after field trials in Ningxia. The engineering targets fluctuating…
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An iron catalyst turns plastic bags into oil, at kitchen-table scale
Chinese and German chemists converted polyethylene into liquid hydrocarbons with a cheap iron catalyst and scaled the batch to a kilogram. The…