By editing the polymers of discarded plastics, chemists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have found a way to generate new macromolecules with more valuable properties than those of the starting material. Upcycling may help remedy the roughly 450 million tons of plastic discarded worldwide annually, of which only 9% gets recycled; the rest is incinerated or winds up in landfills, oceans or elsewhere.

The German national metrology institute, the Physikalisch-Techniche Bundesanstalt (PTB), has developed a new type of clock, which has the potential to measure time and frequency 1000 times more accurately than the caesium clocks that currently realize the SI second. Their results have been published in the current issue of Physical Review Letters.

As a promising candidate for large-scale energy storage, aqueous zinc batteries (AZBs) have faced a stubborn hurdle in the form of troublesome side reactions at the electrode/electrolyte interface, hindering their widespread application. Now, researchers from Hunan University and Nankai University, reporting in the National Science Review, have overcome this challenge. In their study, they developed self-polymerizable glutamate salts as universal interphase-forming additives to in-situ constructing robust electrode/electrolyte interphase (EEI) layers on both the cathode and anode of AZBs, effectively suppressing interfacial side reactions and Zn dendrite growth. This discovery could revolutionize the approach to construct EEI layers in aqueous electrolytes, opening a novel pathway to boost the stability of aqueous batteries.