Thermodynamics News

October 25, 2025

Top Headlines

Japanese Scientists Unveil a Quantum Battery That Defies Energy Loss

Oct. 24, 2025 — A team of researchers has designed a theoretical model for a topological quantum battery capable of long-distance energy transfer and immunity to dissipation. By exploiting topological properties in photonic waveguides, they showed that energy loss ...

Scientists 3D-print Materials That Stop Vibrations Cold

Oct. 18, 2025 — A collaboration between the University of Michigan and AFRL has resulted in 3D-printed metamaterials that can block vibrations using complex geometries. Inspired by nature and theoretical physics, these “kagome tubes” demonstrate how geometry ...

New Crystal Camera Lets Doctors See Inside the Body Like Never Before

Sep. 21, 2025 — Scientists have created a perovskite-based gamma-ray detector that surpasses traditional nuclear medicine imaging technology. The device delivers sharper, faster, and safer scans at a fraction of the cost. By combining crystal engineering with ...

Harvard’s Salt Trick Could Turn Billions of Tons of Hair Into Eco-friendly Materials

Sep. 17, 2025 — Scientists at Harvard have discovered how salts like lithium bromide break down tough proteins such as keratin—not by attacking the proteins directly, but by altering the surrounding water ...

Tiny Magnetic Spirals Unlock the Future of Spintronics

Sep. 14, 2025 — Scientists in Korea have engineered magnetic nanohelices that can control electron spin with extraordinary precision at room temperature. By combining structural chirality and magnetism, these nanoscale helices can filter spins without complex ...

Graphene Just Broke a Fundamental Law of Physics

Sep. 12, 2025 — For the first time, scientists have observed electrons in graphene behaving like a nearly perfect quantum fluid, challenging a long-standing puzzle in physics. By creating ultra-clean samples, the team at IISc uncovered a surprising decoupling of ...

A Tiny Chip May Have Solved One of Clean Energy’s Biggest Problems

Aug. 28, 2025 — In just one afternoon, scientists used a nanoparticle “megalibrary” to find a catalyst that matches or exceeds iridium’s performance in hydrogen fuel production, at a fraction of the ...

Caltech Breakthrough Makes Quantum Memory Last 30 Times Longer

Aug. 27, 2025 — While superconducting qubits are great at fast calculations, they struggle to store information for long periods. A team at Caltech has now developed a clever solution: converting quantum information into sound waves. By using a tiny device that ...

Scientists Supercharge Solar Power 15x with Black Metal Tech

Aug. 24, 2025 — A Rochester team engineered a new type of solar thermoelectric generator that produces 15 times more power than earlier versions. By enhancing heat absorption and dissipation rather than tweaking semiconductor materials, they dramatically improved ...

AI Just Found 5 Powerful Materials That Could Replace Lithium Batteries

Aug. 2, 2025 — AI is helping scientists crack the code on next-gen batteries that could replace lithium-ion tech. By discovering novel porous materials, researchers may have paved the way for more powerful and sustainable energy storage using abundant elements ...

Building Electronics That Don’t Die: Columbia's Breakthrough at CERN

July 29, 2025 — Deep beneath the Swiss-French border, the Large Hadron Collider unleashes staggering amounts of energy and radiation—enough to fry most electronics. Enter a team of Columbia engineers, who built ultra-rugged, radiation-resistant chips that now ...

Digital Twins Are Reinventing Clean Energy — But There’s a Catch

July 29, 2025 — Researchers are exploring AI-powered digital twins as a game-changing tool to accelerate the clean energy transition. These digital models simulate and optimize real-world energy systems like wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and biomass. But while ...

Latest Headlines

updated 12:42pm EDT

Decades-Old Photosynthesis Mystery Finally Solved

Oct. 13, 2025 — Scientists from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Caltech have finally solved a decades-old mystery about how photosynthesis really begins. They discovered why energy inside plants flows ...

New Simulation Reveals How Earth’s Magnetic Field First Sparked to Life

Oct. 12, 2025 — Geophysicists have modeled how Earth’s magnetic field could form even when its core was fully liquid. By removing the effects of viscosity in their simulation, they revealed a self-sustaining ...

USC Engineers Just Made Light Smarter With “optical Thermodynamics”

Oct. 10, 2025 — USC engineers have developed an optical system that routes light autonomously using thermodynamic principles. Rather than relying on switches, light organizes itself much like particles in a gas ...

Black Holes Might Hold the Key to a 60-Year Cosmic Mystery

Oct. 6, 2025 — Scientists may have finally uncovered the mystery behind ultra-high-energy cosmic rays — the most powerful particles known in the universe. A team from NTNU suggests that colossal winds from ...

Black Hole Discovery Confirms Einstein and Hawking Were Right

Sep. 29, 2025 — A fresh black hole merger detection has offered the clearest evidence yet for Einstein’s relativity and Hawking’s predictions. Scientists tracked the complete cosmic collision, confirming that ...

Black Holes Just Proved Stephen Hawking Right With the Clearest Signal Yet

Sep. 12, 2025 — Gravitational-wave astronomy has exploded since 2015, capturing hundreds of black hole and neutron star collisions. With ever-clearer signals, researchers are testing Einstein’s relativity and ...

Enceladus’s Plumes May Be Fooling Us About Life

Sep. 9, 2025 — Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus has long fascinated scientists with its spectacular water plumes, which NASA’s Cassini spacecraft once revealed to contain organic molecules. Many hoped these ...

Gold Refuses to Melt at Temperatures Hotter Than the Sun’s Surface

Aug. 18, 2025 — For the first time, researchers have measured atomic temperatures in extreme matter and found gold surviving at 19,000 kelvins, more than 14 times its melting point. The result dismantles a ...

Accidental Lab Discovery Reveals Gold’s Secret Chemistry

Aug. 11, 2025 — Scientists at SLAC unexpectedly created gold hydride, a compound of gold and hydrogen, while studying diamond formation under extreme pressure and heat. This discovery challenges gold’s reputation ...

Gold Survives Impossible Heat, Defying Physics Limits

Aug. 11, 2025 — Physicists have heated gold to over 19,000 Kelvin, more than 14 times its melting point, without melting it, smashing the long-standing “entropy catastrophe” limit. Using an ultra-fast laser ...

Earlier Headlines

AI Cracks a Meteorite’s Secret: A Material That Defies Heat

Aug. 3, 2025 — A rare mineral from a 1724 meteorite defies the rules of heat flow, acting like both a crystal and a glass. Thanks to AI and quantum physics, researchers uncovered its bizarre ability to maintain ...

Scientists Twist DNA Into Self-Building Nanostructures That Could Transform Technology

July 20, 2025 — Scientists have used DNA's self-assembling properties to engineer intricate moiré superlattices at the nanometer scale—structures that twist and layer like never before. With clever molecular ...

One Tiny Trick Just Broke Light’s Oldest Rule — and Changed Optics Forever

July 14, 2025 — Researchers have cracked a fundamental optical challenge: how to control both angle and wavelength of light independently—a problem that’s limited imaging and display technologies for years. By ...

Breakthrough Battery Lets Physicists Reverse Entanglement—and Rewrite Quantum Law

July 7, 2025 — Scientists have finally uncovered a quantum counterpart to Carnot’s famed second law, showing that entanglement—once thought stubbornly irreversible—can be shuffled back and forth without loss ...

Defying Physics: This Rare Crystal Cools Itself Using Pure Magnetism

July 6, 2025 — Deep in Chile’s Atacama Desert, scientists studied a green crystal called atacamite—and discovered it can cool itself dramatically when placed in a magnetic field. Unlike a regular fridge, this ...

Invisible Quantum Waves Forge Shape-Shifting Super-Materials in Real Time

June 19, 2025 — Scientists have, for the first time, directly observed phonon wave dynamics within self-assembling nanomaterials unlocking the potential for customizable, reconfigurable metamaterials with ...

Scientists Just Solved a 40-Year-Old Mystery About Quasicrystals

June 14, 2025 — Scientists at the University of Michigan have unlocked a long-standing mystery about quasicrystals exotic materials that straddle the line between the orderly structure of crystals and the chaos of ...

This Quantum Sensor Tracks 3D Movement Without GPS

June 14, 2025 — Physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have created a groundbreaking quantum device that can measure 3D acceleration using ultracold atoms, something once thought nearly impossible. By ...

Atmospheric Chemistry Keeps Pollutants in the Air

June 3, 2025 — A new study details processes that keep pollutants aloft despite a drop in ...

An Iron Oxide 'Oxygen Sponge' for Efficient Thermochemical Hydrogen Production

May 29, 2025 — As the world shifts toward sustainable energy sources, 'green hydrogen' - hydrogen produced without emitting carbon - has emerged as a leading candidate for clean power. Scientists have now ...

Does Outdoor Air Pollution Affect Indoor Air Quality? It Could Depend on Buildings' HVAC

May 29, 2025 — Researchers determined how much outdoor particulate pollution affects indoor air quality. Their study concluded pollution from inversion and dust events is kept out of buildings, but wildfire smoke ...

Solitonic Superfluorescence Paves Way for High-Temperature Quantum Materials

May 28, 2025 — A new study in Nature describes both the mechanism and the material conditions necessary for superfluorescence at high ...

Cryogenic Hydrogen Storage and Delivery System for Next-Generation Aircraft

May 27, 2025 — Researchers have designed a liquid hydrogen storage and delivery system that could help make zero-emission aviation a reality. Their work outlines a scalable, integrated system that addresses several ...

Machine Learning Simplifies Industrial Laser Processes

May 27, 2025 — Laser-based metal processing enables the automated and precise production of complex components, whether for the automotive industry or for medicine. However, conventional methods require time- and ...

New Fuel Cell Could Enable Electric Aviation

May 27, 2025 — Engineers developed a fuel cell that offers more than three times as much energy per pound compared to lithium-ion batteries. Powered by a reaction between sodium metal and air, the device could be ...

Efficiency Upgrade for OLED Screens: A Route to Blue PHOLED Longevity

May 23, 2025 — Blue phosphorescent OLEDs can now last as long as the green phosphorescent OLEDs already in devices, researchers have demonstrated, paving the way for further improving the energy efficiency of OLED ...

Engineers Discover a New Class of Materials That Passively Harvest Water from Air

May 21, 2025 — A serendipitous observation has led to a surprising discovery: a new class of nanostructured materials that can pull water from the air, collect it in pores and release it onto surfaces without the ...

Personal Space Chemistry Suppressed by Perfume and Body Lotion Indoors

May 21, 2025 — In 2022 a team discovered that high levels of OH radicals can be generated indoors, simply due to the presence of people and ozone. This means: People generate their own oxidation field and change ...

Extreme Weather Cycles Change Underwater Light at Lake Tahoe

May 21, 2025 — Large shifts in UV radiation at Lake Tahoe are associated with wet and dry climate extremes, finds a new ...

Chemists Develop Compact Catenane With Tuneable Mechanical Chirality

May 19, 2025 — A team of chemists has made significant strides in the field of mechanically interlocked molecules (MIMs). Their work showcases the development of a compact catenane with tuneable mechanical ...