UEC Tokyo and Nichia report a solid electrolyte with a theoretical density of 2.74 g/cm3, against 5.12 g/cm3 for some lanthanum-zirconium oxides. A defect bottleneck in its pure form makes it a material for battery teams to track. No cell has been built around it yet.
Reality
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Science Tokyo researchers found a junction-free photocurrent in CuCrP2S6 that ran about 1.5 times stronger once the crystal turned symmetric on average. That widens the search for materials not bound by the roughly 33% single-junction limit, though so far the evidence is laser-lit photocurrent in one crystal.
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Florida State chemists used UV light to crosslink metal halide hybrid films that stay intact in water, where uncrosslinked films quickly dissolved. That removes one processing barrier for X-ray scintillators, though no detector performance figures were reported.
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MIT engineers built a half-millimetre gel robot that swims up to four body lengths a minute on one layer of light-triggered muscle. The team expects the design to need less living tissue than bulkier robots, but it has not published a cell count, and a person still steers it with a hand-moved light.
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HZB chemists got their best CO yield from CO2 using silver particles about 10 nm wide, spread thinly on carbon. Replacing the anode reaction with aldehyde oxidation also cut energy use by more than 30% and added hydrogen and formic acid to the output.
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A DGIST group passed current through a platinum, IrMn3 and CoGd stack and moved the temperature where the two magnetizations cancel, by 70 K in one film and 110 K in another, with the alloy composition left alone.
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A Seoul National University team varied the ozone dose during deposition, then watched 10-nanometre films crystallize under synchrotron X-rays, and the vacancy-rich ones crystallized later while holding on to the nonferroelectric phase.
Reality
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- Confidence55