Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have designed a novel material to make all-solid-state lithium (Li) batteries less costly but more effective, according to an article published in the journal Nature Communicationson July 20.

Solid electrolytes are important to realizing safe, energy-dense all-solid-state Li batteries. Among different types of solid electrolytes, the chloride solid electrolytes were recently found to exhibit the desirable characteristics of both sulfide and oxide systems, including high ionic conductivity, deformability and oxidative stability. The rare combination of these advantages has rapidly attracted wide interest...

In the late 1970s, M. Stanley Whittingham was the first to describe the concept of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, an achievement for which he would share the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Yet even he couldn’t have anticipated the complex materials science challenges that would arise as these batteries came to power the world’s portable electronics.

One persistent technical problem is that every time a new lithium-ion battery is installed in a device, up to about one-fifth of its energy capacity is lost before the device can...

Remarkable things happen when a “squishy” compound of manganese and sulfide (MnS2) is compressed in a diamond anvil, say researchers from the University of Rochester and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).

“This is a new type of charge transfer mechanism, and so from a science community point of view this is very, very exciting...

Long-term studies of ozone and water vapor in the atmosphere of Mars could lead to better understanding of atmospheric chemistry for the Earth. A new analysis of data from ESA’s Mars Express mission has revealed that our knowledge of the way these atmospheric gases interact with each other is incomplete.

Using four martian years of observations from the SPICAM (Spectroscopy for the Investigation of the Characteristics of the Atmosphere of Mars) instrument, which corresponds to seven and a half Earth years, a team of researchers from Europe and Russia uncovered the gap in our knowledge when trying to reproduce their data with a global climate model of Mars.

Ozone and water vapor do not make good atmospheric companions...