A square meter of concrete can store the electricity of two AA batteries.
Scientific American looks at a weird new power source, using probably the most common building material in the modern world as a kind of rechargeable […]
chemistry
Today’s batteries are better.
Ars Technica busts a long-running myth about batteries – that they’re always five years away from any real improvement – with a look at how […]
Turning hard-to-recycle plastics into jet fuel, diesel, and gasoline.
Science Advances outlines a way to use a platinum-tungten-zirconium catalyst (“Pt/WO3/ZrO2” for short) along with a zeolite crystal to turn trash into, if not treasure, […]
Red cabbage could soon turn your food blue (and green and purple) – naturally.
Science magazine celebrates a new natural way to replace the artificial dyes that make candy, soda and ice cream blue – by stabilizing the pigments […]
“Just grow a table.”
MIT News looks at the new science of tissue engineering, taking lab-grown cells and training them to grow objects to order: It takes a lot […]
A Finnish company is making food out of air – CO2 & water, to be precise.
Big Think has a piece on a NASA concept to convert atmosphere – and specifically, the gases we animals exhale – into protein powder like […]
Science Art: Escut del Marquès d’Oró (Escutcheon of the Marquis d’Oró)
Click to embiggen The Marquis d’Oró (without that accent mark, he’d be the Marquis of Gold) has a coat of arms with a diagram of […]
Spinning yarn from human skin
PhysOrg reminds me here of a piece of jewelry my mother won at an auction, which she then gave to me to give to the […]
To make hydrogen from water and sunlight, you need an efficient catalyst. Here’s a perfect one.
Nature looks at what it takes to make a 100 percent efficient catalyst for getting clean fuel from water: The largest potential source of renewable […]
Better bottles.
The Guardian looks forward to a time when our plastic bottles will be replaced with plant-based containers that turn into, essentially, mulch in a year: […]
Medieval Blue is Remade
Science News opens a new book on an old pigment, reconstructing a botanical purple-blue hue that had puzzled medievalists for ages: The pigment, called folium, […]
Learning from the ashes of Notre Dame
Nature takes a look at how the tragic fire at Notre Dame last year created a unique opportunity for researchers to study medieval construction: The […]
Squeezing lead makes it stronger than steel.
Science News proves that there’s always something new to figure out – in this case, with one of the most common and worked-with metals we […]
Microscopic nutrient doses to solve malnutrition. (With Bill Gates as a lab rat.)
Inverse covers an invention that should invisibly make a difference in some of the world’s hungriest communities, beating back malnutrition-based diseases with super-tiny capsules of […]
Bourbons have microscopic signatures. (In a way that scotches don’t.)
Science News takes appreciation of American whiskeys to a whole new level – a teeny-tiny one. Researchers publishing in Physical Review Fluids found that bourbons, […]