Category Technology/Electronics

This model car’s carbon fibre roof and battery electrodes are made with wood. Credit: Image courtesy of KTH The Royal Institute of Technology

Swedish researchers have produced the world’s first model car with a roof and battery made from wood-based carbon fibre – a lightweight and renewable alternative to metals and other composites. Remember wood paneled station wagons? Well, wood is back, but this time it’s not for aesthetics – it’s for reducing vehicle weight with renewable materials. Swedish researchers have just produced the world’s first model car with a roof and battery made from wood-based carbon fibre.

Although it’s built on the scale of a toy, the prototype vehicle represents a giant step towards realizing a vision of new lightweight materials from the forest, one of the benefits...

This is a graphic that describes how the new interface acts as a quantum switch. Credit: S. Kelley/JQI

Single photons can quickly modify individual electrons embedded in a semiconductor chip and vice versa, an advance that could be a significant step toward establishing quantum networks in the future. Such networks would transmit qubits from place to place and would offer unbreakable security for the transmitted information. But researchers must first develop ways for qubits that are better at storing information to interact with photons that are better at transporting it, a task achieved in conventional networks by electro-optic modulators that use electronic signals to modulate properties of light.

A/Prof Edo Waks et al have struck upon an interface between photons and single electrons t...

This scanning electron microscope image shows bee pollen studied for potential use as electrodes for lithium-ion batteries. Color was added to the original black-and-white image. Credit: Purdue University image/ Jialiang Tang

Pollen could represent a boon for battery makers: Recent research has suggested their potential use as anodes in Li-ion batteries. “Our findings have demonstrated that renewable pollens could produce carbon architectures for anode applications in energy storage devices,” said A/Prof Vilas Pol. The anodes in most of today’s lithium-ion batteries are made of graphite. Lithium ions are contained in electrolyte, and these ions are stored in the anode during recharging.

The researchers tested bee pollen- and cattail pollen-derived carbons as anodes...