Blue energy has the potential to provide a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. In simple terms, it involves harnessing the energy produced when the ions in a salt solution move from high to low concentrations.

A team including researchers from Osaka University has probed the effect of voltage on the passage of ions through a nanopore membrane to demonstrate greater control of the process.

In a study recently published in ACS Nano the researchers looked at tailoring the flow of ions through the array of nanopores that make up their membrane, and how this control could make applying the technology on a large scale a reality.

If the membranes are made from a charged...

Stars near the center of our galaxy are acting kind of weird. Dark matter may be the explanation. A team of scientific detectives (so to speak) have discovered a potential new class of stars that could exist within a light-year of the Milky Way’s center that could be operating according to an unusual mechanism: dark matter annihilation. This process would produce an outward pressure on the stars other than hydrogen fusion, keeping them from gravitationally collapsing—and making them essentially immortal, their youth being refreshed constantly...

Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science have figured out how to take a miracle material, one capable of extracting value from captured carbon dioxide, and do what no one else has: make it practical to fabricate for large-scale application.

The breakthrough from chemical engineering assistant professor Gaurav “Gino” Giri’s lab group has implications for the cleanup of the greenhouse gas, a major contributor to the climate change dilemma...

After its “birth” in the Big Bang, the universe consisted mainly of hydrogen and a few helium atoms. These are the lightest elements in the periodic table. More-or-less all elements heavier than helium were produced in the 13.8 billion years between the Big Bang and the present day.

Stars have produced many of these heavier elements through the process of nuclear fusion. However, this only makes elements as heavy as iron. The creation of any heavier elements would consume energy instead of releasing it.

In order to explain the presence of these heavier elements today, it’s necessary to find phenomena that can produce them. One type of event that fits the bill is a gamma-ray burst (GRB)—the most powerful class of explosion in the universe...