Addressing the urgent demand for clean energy, Japanese researchers utilized a single-step solution plasma process to synthesize high-performing, cost-effective, bifunctional catalysts for metal–air batteries. Their cobalt-tin hydroxide/carbon composites rival traditional platinum- and ruthenium-based materials in both performance and long-term stability. This breakthrough significantly lowers manufacturing costs and enhances the scalability of next-generation batteries, poised to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.

The oceans have to play a role in helping humanity remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to curb dangerous climate warming. But are we ready to scale up the technologies that will do the job?

Researchers have successfully simulated the 100 billions stars of the Milky Way. This feat was accomplished by combining artificial intelligence (AI) with numerical simulations. This is 100 times better than previous attempts and took 100 times less time to produce. The same process can be used to model other phenomenon such as climate change and weather patterns. the study was led by Keiya Hirashima at the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) in Japan.

With the advancement of Internet applications, the global demand for broadband satellite communication services is incessantly escalating. Furthermore, there exists an exponential surge in the requisition for the capacity of satellite communication systems. In response to this evolving demand, the domain of satellite communication technology is progressively evolving toward the realm of high-throughput satellite (HTS) communication systems. The typical technical characteristics of HTS are: (a) the satellite adopts multibeam technology for beam overlapping coverage of the service area, which improves the quality of the wireless link while realizing the spatial dimension segmentation; (b) based on this, the system adopts multiple frequency multiplexing to improve the communication capacity of a single satellite; (c) gateway stations are tightly coupled with user beam clusters to complete two-hop communication, which makes multiple gateway stations share the communication resources of the same satellite, forming a spatial isolation of the gateway stations, and once again realizing the frequency multiplexing of the gateway station links. A key requirement for future multibeam broadband satellite communication systems is the ability to flexibly adjust beam capacity according to changes in business distribution, in order to meet time-varying business requirements. Beam hopping technology provides an efficient solution to achieve the efficient use of frequency resources and power resources. At the same time, the use of beam hopping makes the beam hopping of satellite payload need to match the business signals of ground signal stations, bringing about the need for synchronization of beam hopping between satellite and ground.

Tokyo, Japan – Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have applied ideas from polymer physics to illuminate the mechanism behind a key pathology in Alzheimer's disease, the formation of fibrils of tau proteins. They showed that fibril formation is preceded by the birth of large protein clusters, mirroring the crystallization of polymers. Crucially, dissolving these clusters helped to prevent fibrils forming in solution. Their work signals a paradigm shift for the development of treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.