Global Energy News (news-and-events/news)

Long before stars lit up the sky, the universe was a hot, dense place where simple chemistry quietly set the stage for everything to come. Scientists have now recreated the first molecule ever to form, helium hydride, and discovered it played a much bigger role in the birth of stars than we thought. Using a special ultra-cold lab setup, they mimicked conditions from over 13 billion years ago and found that this ancient molecule helped cool the universe just enough for stars to ignite. Their findings could rewrite part of the story about how the cosmos evolved from darkness to light.

A team of engineers at RMIT University has developed a groundbreaking 3D-printed titanium alloy that s stronger, more ductile, and nearly 30% cheaper to produce than the traditional standard. By replacing expensive vanadium with more accessible elements and rethinking how titanium alloys are designed, the team created a material with improved performance and more uniform microstructure key factors for aerospace and medical applications.

Plastic pollution is a mounting global issue, but scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have taken a bold step forward by creating a new bioplastic inspired by the structure of leaves. Their innovation, LEAFF, enhances strength, functionality, and biodegradability by utilizing cellulose nanofibers, outperforming even traditional plastics. It degrades at room temperature, can be printed on, and resists air and water, offering a game-changing solution for sustainable packaging.

AI is helping scientists crack the code on next-gen batteries that could replace lithium-ion tech. By discovering novel porous materials, researchers may have paved the way for more powerful and sustainable energy storage using abundant elements like magnesium.

Physicists at MIT recreated the double-slit experiment using individual photons and atoms held in laser light, uncovering the true limits of light’s wave–particle duality. Their results proved Einstein’s proposal wrong and confirmed a core prediction of quantum mechanics.

Physicists have discovered that when beams of light interact at the quantum level, they can generate ghost-like particles that briefly emerge from nothing and affect real matter. This rare phenomenon, known as light-on-light scattering, challenges the classical idea that light waves pass through each other untouched.

A Penn State-led research team has unraveled the long-standing mystery of how lightning begins inside thunderclouds. Their findings offer the first quantitative, physics-based explanation for lightning initiation—and a glimpse into the stormy heart of Earth’s atmosphere.

At the edge of two exotic materials, scientists have discovered a new state of matter called a "quantum liquid crystal" that behaves unlike anything we've seen before. When a conductive Weyl semimetal and a magnetic spin ice meet under a powerful magnetic field, strange and exciting quantum behavior emerges—electrons flow in odd directions and break traditional symmetry. These findings could open doors to creating ultra-sensitive quantum sensors and exploring exotic states of matter in extreme environments.

A tiny 3 kg detector has made a huge leap in neutrino science by detecting rare CEvNS interactions at a Swiss reactor. This elusive effect, long predicted and hard to measure, was captured with unprecedented clarity. The achievement could kick off a new era of compact, mobile neutrino detectors with powerful applications.

Deep beneath the Swiss-French border, the Large Hadron Collider unleashes staggering amounts of energy and radiation—enough to fry most electronics. Enter a team of Columbia engineers, who built ultra-rugged, radiation-resistant chips that now play a pivotal role in capturing data from subatomic particle collisions. These custom-designed ADCs not only survive the hostile environment inside CERN but also help filter and digitize the most critical collision events, enabling physicists to study elusive phenomena like the Higgs boson.

Researchers are exploring AI-powered digital twins as a game-changing tool to accelerate the clean energy transition. These digital models simulate and optimize real-world energy systems like wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and biomass. But while they hold immense promise for improving efficiency and sustainability, the technology is still riddled with challenges—from environmental variability and degraded equipment modeling to data scarcity and complex biological processes.

Scientists have cracked open a mysterious layer inside batteries, using cutting-edge 3D atomic force microscopy to capture the dynamic molecular structures at their solid-liquid interfaces. These once-invisible electrical double layers (EDLs) twist, break, and reform in response to surface irregularities phenomena never seen before in real-world battery systems. The findings don t just refine our understanding of how batteries work at the microscopic level they could fundamentally change how we build and design next-generation energy storage.

For the first time ever, scientists have watched electrons perform a bizarre quantum feat: tunneling through atomic barriers by not just slipping through, but doubling back and slamming into the nucleus mid-tunnel. This surprising finding, led by POSTECH and Max Planck physicists, redefines our understanding of quantum tunneling—a process that powers everything from the sun to your smartphone.

Neutrinos, ghostly particles barely interacting with matter, may secretly be reshaping the fates of massive stars. New research suggests that as stars collapse, they form natural "neutrino colliders," allowing scientists to probe these elusive particles in ways never possible on Earth. If neutrinos do interact through yet-undiscovered forces, they could cause stars to collapse into black holes instead of neutron stars, reshaping how we understand cosmic evolution.

Penn State researchers have uncovered a surprising twist in a foundational chemical reaction known as oxidative addition. Typically believed to involve transition metals donating electrons to organic compounds, the team discovered an alternate path—one in which electrons instead move from the organic molecule to the metal. This reversal, demonstrated using platinum and palladium exposed to hydrogen gas, could mean chemists have misunderstood a fundamental step for decades. The discovery opens the door to fresh opportunities in industrial chemistry and pollution control, especially through new reaction designs using electron-deficient metals.

Scientists at OIST have defied a foundational rule in chemistry by creating a stable 20-electron version of ferrocene—an organometallic molecule once thought to be limited to 18 valence electrons. This discovery not only challenges conventional wisdom but unlocks new chemical behaviors and redox states, potentially transforming how catalysts and materials are designed.

Deep in Serbia's Jadar Valley, scientists discovered a mineral with an uncanny resemblance to Superman's Kryptonite both in composition and name. Dubbed jadarite, this dull white crystal lacks the glowing green menace of its comic book counterpart but packs a punch in the real world. Rich in lithium and boron, jadarite could help supercharge the global transition to green energy.

A team at KAUST has revealed that the short lifespan of aqueous batteries is primarily due to "free water" molecules triggering harmful chemical reactions at the anode. By adding affordable sulfate salts like zinc sulfate, they significantly reduced this issue—boosting battery life over tenfold. The sulfate acts as a “water glue,” stabilizing the water structure and halting the energy-wasting reactions. Not only is this solution simple and cost-effective, but early results suggest it may be a universal fix for various types of metal-anode aqueous batteries.

A pioneering team at the University of Maryland has captured the first-ever images of atomic thermal vibrations, unlocking an unseen world of motion within two-dimensional materials. Their innovative electron ptychography technique revealed elusive “moiré phasons,” a long-theorized phenomenon that governs heat, electronic behavior, and structural order at the atomic level. This discovery not only confirms decades-old theories but also provides a new lens for building the future of quantum computing, ultra-efficient electronics, and advanced nanosensors.

Aalto University physicists in Finland have set a new benchmark in quantum computing by achieving a record-breaking millisecond coherence in a transmon qubit — nearly doubling prior limits. This development not only opens the door to far more powerful and stable quantum computations but also reduces the burden of error correction.