NEWS RELEASES

Supported by a $1 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy, Worcester PoIytechnic Institute (WPI) researchers are developing a new lithium-ion battery upcycling process designed to convert battery waste into higher-performance materials for next-generation electric vehicles. The project aims to simplify the recycling of mixed battery waste streams while lowering costs, reducing energy use, and helping recover critical materials needed for U.S. battery manufacturing.

Megalibrary platform rapidly discovers promising new materials. Platform marks a shift from trial-and-error materials discovery toward intentional design. Team used the system to identify a new piezoelectric material and then deliberately engineered it to operate at a target temperature. Megalibraries outperform emerging ‘self-driving labs’ in terms of speed and throughput to create and screen vast numbers of materials samples simultaneously.

New research led by the University of Utah documents how carbon markets, a pillar of climate policy, fail to accurately account for the risks U.S. forests face from climate change. The team produced maps that show where the risk of loss from fire, insects and drought are most elevated, and therefore best avoided for forest preservation projects.

MIT researchers developed a way to precisely move columns of individual atoms within a material, to produce exotic quantum properties. The approach works in minutes at room temperature, and could aid the development of stable quantum devices.