Engineers calculate the ultimate potential of next-generation solar panels. Most of today’s solar panels capture sunlight and convert it to electricity only from the side facing the sky. If the dark underside of a solar panel could also convert sunlight reflected off the ground, even more electricity might be generated.

Double-sided solar cells are already enabling panels to sit vertically on land or rooftops and even ho...

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a faint but sprawling glow of high-energy light around a nearby pulsar. If visible to the human eye, this gamma-ray “halo” would appear about 40 times bigger in the sky than a full Moon. This structure may provide the solution to a long-standing mystery about the amount of antimatter in our neighborhood.

“Our analysis suggests that this same puls...

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology developed by the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP) in Japan has successfully found features in pathology images from human cancer patients, without annotation, that could be understood by human doctors...

Non-flammable, cost-efficient, and effective battery. As the lithium-ion batteries that power most phones, laptops, and electric vehicles become increasingly fast-charging and high-performing, they also grow increasingly expensive and flammable.

In research published recently in Energy Storage Materials, a team of engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute demonstrated how they could – by using aqueous electrolytes instead of the typical organic electrolytes – assemble a substantially safer, cost-efficient battery that still performs well.

If you were to take a look inside a battery, you’d find two electrodes – an anode and a cathode...