News

Researchers have shown that certain superconductors, materials that carry electrical current with zero resistance at very low temperatures, can also carry currents of ‘spin’. The successful combination of superconductivity and spin could lead to a revolution in high-performance computing, by dramatically reducing energy consumption. Spin is a parti…

A simple potassium solution could boost the efficiency of next-generation solar cells, by enabling them to convert more sunlight into electricity.An international team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge found that the addition of potassium iodide ‘healed’ the defects and immobilised ion movement, which to date have limited the effici…

Prof Clare Grey developed a new way of looking inside solids (using nuclear magnetic resonance), her interest in batteries was sparked by a man from Duracell who asked her a question at an academic conference, and charged up by some electrochemists she met playing squash. For the last twenty years she has sought to understand the precise chemistry …

Delegates from the US and the UK came together this week at the Maxwell Centre in Cambridge to debate the future of the UK and US energy systems. The two-day ‘smart grid’ summit was organised by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Energy@Cambridge and Cambridge Cleantech. The summit brought together industry, government and academia with represent…

The University of Cambridge is leading one of four government-funded projects into battery research, in order to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles and a low-carbon economy. The funding for the four projects, totalling up to £42 million, was announced this week by the Faraday Institution, the UK’s independent national battery research i…

Joint research programme will focus on how to convert carbon dioxide to useful chemicalsA three-year programme will bring together researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of California, Berkeley, the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to develop ways of transforming carbon dioxide …

Singapore’s Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) was established in 2007, with funding from Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF), to allow research-intensive institutions from all over the world to set up research centres in Singapore. CREATE supports collaborations between four Singaporean universities and…

Singapore’s Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE)was established in 2007, with funding from Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF), to allow research-intensive institutions from all over the world to set up research centres in Singapore. CREATE supports collaborations between four Singaporean universities and …

A new design of algae-powered fuel cells that is five times more efficient than existing plant and algal models, as well as being potentially more cost-effective to produce and practical to use, has been developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge. In recent years, in addition to synthetic photovoltaic devices, biophotovoltaics (BPVs, a…

The CAM-IES Symposium on Photovoltaics and Thermoelectrics was held on 8 November at the Maxwell Centre with 85 attendees from academia and industry. The Symposium highlighted cutting-edge energy materials research, exploring what happens at the interfaces between the high-tech materials used to fabricate solar cells. It also highlighted new resear…

Researchers distil twenty years of lessons from clean energy funding into six ‘guiding principles’. They argue that governments must eschew constant reinventions and grant scientists greater influence before our “window of opportunity” to avert climate change closes.In a recent Nature article, researchers from the universities of Cambridge, Minneso…

The CAM-IES Symposium on Photovoltaics and Thermoelectrics was held on 9 November at the Maxwell Centre with 85 attendees from academia and industry. The Symposium highlighted cutting-edge energy materials research, exploring what happens at the interfaces between the high-tech materials used to fabricate solar cells, and highlighting thermoelectri…

It is understood that the world will not become carbon-free in the near future, developed and developing countries rely on fossil fuels for transport, industry and power, all of which release CO2 into the atmosphere. As sea levels rise, ‘unprecedented’ weather events become commonplace and the polar ice caps melt, the question raised is that how us…

It is understood that the world will not become carbon-free in the near future, developed and developing countries rely on fossil fuels for transport, industry and power, all of which release CO2 into the atmosphere. As sea levels rise, ‘unprecedented’ weather events become commonplace and the polar ice caps melt, the question raised is that how us…

The Faraday Institution, a new, multi-million pound research institute was announced yesterday (Monday 02 October 2017), by Greg Clark, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. It will drive and accelerate fundamental research in developing battery technologies, and its translation.The Institution will be the UK's independen…