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...

Astronomers have developed the most realistic model to date of planet formation in binary star systems.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for Extra-terrestrial Physics, have shown how exoplanets in binary star systems—such as the ‘Tatooine’ planets spotted by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope—came into being without being destroyed in their chaotic birth environment.

They studied a type of binary system where the smaller companion star orbits the larger parent star approximately once every 100 years—our nearest neighbour, Alpha Centauri, is an example of such a system.

“A system like this would be the equivalent of a second Sun where Uranus is, which would have made our own solar system look very different,” said co-author Dr...

New research has identified potential treatment that could improve the human immune system’s ability to search out and destroy cancer cells within the body. Scientists have identified a way to restrict the activity of a group of cells which regulate the immune system, which in turn can unleash other immune cells to attack tumours in cancer patients.

“A patient’s immune system is more than able to detect and remove cancer cells and immunotherapy has recently emerged as a novel therapy for many different types of cancers.” Explained Nullin Divecha, Professor of Cell Signalling at the University of Southampton who led the study...

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...