Preventing dangerous short circuits in lithium batteries
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 24-Dec-2025 06:11 ET (24-Dec-2025 11:11 GMT/UTC)
• Danger not limited to electrodes
• Protective layer itself affected by dendrite growth
• New findings aid in search for alternative materials
Dendrites are considered the most dangerous destroyers of lithium batteries — tiny metal structures that can cause short circuits. In the worst case, they can cause batteries to burn or explode. A research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now discovered that such structures can form not only at the electrodes but also in polymer-based electrolytes. This new finding is crucial for the stability of future solid-state batteries.
The Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Institute of Science Tokyo is proud to announce that it will host the PCST Japan Symposium 2025, to be held from 11–13 November 2025. This joint international symposium marks the first time the Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) Network brings a symposium to Japan, and the seventh conference of the Japan SciCom Forum (JSF).
♦Successful development of a stealth cloak (invisibility cloak) to protect nanomachines introduced into living organisms from foreign body reactions over extended periods: Constructed a stable ion pair network composed of polyanions and polycations on the nanomachine surface, devising a structure that prevents protein adsorption and attacks from macrophages.
♦Achieved ultra-long circulation in vivo with a half-life exceeding 100 hours after intravenous administration (10 times longer than previous stealth DDS systems).
♦Nanomachines equipped with asparaginase, an enzyme that breaks down L-asparagine, circulate long-term within the body, depleting L-asparagine—essential for cancer cell survival—from tumor tissues.
♦Confirmed the efficacy of starvation therapy for refractory breast cancer using a mouse model.
♦Furthermore, it breaks down the thick stroma (fibrous tissue) that blocks drug penetration into pancreatic cancer (such as immune checkpoint inhibitors), achieving extremely high efficacy (long-term survival) through synergistic effects with cancer immunotherapy.
♦A paper detailing the presentation content:
Junjie Li*, Kazuko Toh, Panyue Wen, Xueying Liu, Anjaneyulu Dirisala, Haochen Guo, Joachim F. R. Van Guyse, Saed Abbasi, Yasutaka Anraku, Yuki Mochida, Hiroaki Kinoh, Horacio Cabral, Masaru Tanaka, and Kazunori Kataoka*
Nature Biomedical Engineering (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-025-01534-1
- Wafer-Scale Integration of Next-Generation Memristor Semiconductors: Establishing a World-Class Platform for High-Density, Low-Power Computing
- Research Findings Published in Nature CommunicationsScientists from Harbin Institute of Technology, together with collaborators from The University of Hong Kong and Southern University of Science and Technology, has developed a decoupled titanium dioxide–viologen hybrid material that integrates energy storage and color-changing display functions within a single system. This breakthrough enables high-capacity, high-efficiency electrochromic energy storage and marks an important step toward the next generation of smart, interactive energy devices.
2024 was an exciting year that all the single-junction
silicon, perovskite solar cells, and the perovskite/silicon
tandem solar cells have broken their world record power
conversion efficiencies. This paper continues our
highlights on the yearly highest independently confirmed
mainstream (silicon, perovskite and organic) solar cell
efficiencies and analyzes the progress of each cell
technology. We are also happy to see that the passivating
contact solar cells have been dominated the photovoltaic
(PV) market and the production capacity of the
perovskite solar cells has been reached to several
hundred-megawatt scale in 2024.