Researchers reporting in ACS Energy Letters have devised a battery powered by vitamin B2 (riboflavin) and glucose. Inspired by how human bodies break down glucose for energy using enzymes, the team incorporated riboflavin into a prototype flow cell battery. The riboflavin mediator helped shuttle electrons between the battery’s electrodes and the glucose electrolyte, generating an electrochemical flow from the energy stored in the sugar.

Language models are now also being used in the natural sciences. In chemistry, they are employed, for instance, to predict new biologically active compounds. Chemical language models (CLMs) must be extensively trained. However, they do not necessarily acquire knowledge of biochemical relationships during training. Instead, they draw conclusions based on similarities and statistical correlations, as a recent study by the University of Bonn demonstrates. The results have now been published in the journal Patterns. 

This paper proposes GAN-Solar, a novel quality optimization model for short-term solar radiation forecasting. Based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), the model addresses spatial texture degradation and intensity distortion in predictions, significantly improving forecast quality and reliability for high-precision applications.

Researchers conducted a detailed mobile observation survey of methane emissions in the Osaka metropolitan area. Researchers found overlooked sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

George Gamow® award, established by the Russian-American Association of Scientists (RASA-America, Russian-American Science Association) in memory of the outstanding Russian-American physicist, Professor Georgy Antonovich Gamow (1904-1968) and to encourage members of the Russian-speaking scientific diaspora for outstanding achievements recognized by the wider scientific community, for 2024 is awarded to:

Anna Krylov professor of the University of Southern California “For her pioneering contributions to theoretical and computational chemistry, particularly the development of novel electronic structure methods for open-shell and electronically excited species; for her leadership within the theoretical chemistry community; and for her advocacy of scientific integrity and academic freedom”.

Mikhail Yampolsky, professor of the New York University “For his uniquely original contributions as a cultural theorist and commentator, whose work bridges literature, film, philosophy, and social theory; for the breadth and depth of his scholarship, which have reshaped the study of Russian culture and intellectual history; and for his influential critical voice in Russian and international intellectual life” .

Pulsars suggest that ultra–low-frequency gravitational waves are rippling through the cosmos. The signal seen by international pulsar timing array collaborations in 2023 could come from a stochastic gravitational-wave background—the sum of many distant sources—or from a single nearby binary of supermassive black holes. To tell these apart, Hideki Asada, theoretical physicist and Professor at Hirosaki University, and Shun Yamamoto, researcher at the Graduate School of Science and Technology, Hirosaki University, propose a method that exploits beat phenomena between gravitational waves at nearly the same frequency, searching for their imprint in the tiny shifts of pulsars’ radio-pulse arrival times. 

Their work has just been published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics JCAP.