Materials scientists at Saarland University are therefore working to develop environmentally friendly alternatives. By introducing finely dispersed iron oxide into tiny, highly porous, hollow carbon spheres developed by Professor Michael Elsaesser at the University of Salzburg, the Saarbrücken team has achieved some very promising results: higher storage capacities using materials that are both readily available and environmentally far less problematic. The results have now been published in the journal Chemistry of Materials.

A team of scientists led by Academician Professor Xiang Zhang, President and Vice-Chancellor of The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Chair of Engineering and Physics, has made a major breakthrough by using a natural magnetic material called CrSBr to achieve negative refraction — without the need for complicated artificial structures. This discovery opens the door to ultra-compact lenses, super-high-resolution microscopes, and reconfigurable optical devices that can be controlled with magnets.

A new study co-led by the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) now provided an answer. Published in Nature Communications, the research reveals that Alfvén waves — plasma waves travelling along Earth’s magnetic field lines — act like an invisible power source, fueling the stunning auroral displays we see in the sky.

Insulated joint systems are crucial for safe railway operation, but are susceptible to faults. The newly developed insulated joint is intended to extend service life and reduce maintenance and repair costs.

For planning animal conservation measures, it is vital to know where endangered species live and how they interact. Ecologists are successfully using tracking technology to learn about the movements of individual animals. Yet, leveraging this knowledge to understand how entire populations change in space and time, including long-term persistence and survival chances in a given area, remains a long-standing open question in ecology. A major step toward answering this question was now achieved through a collaboration between researchers from São Paulo State University (UNESP, Brazil) and the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR): The scientists introduced a new theoretical framework that shows how individual animal movements and their home ranges shape population dynamics across space and time (Ecology Letters, DOI: 10.1111/ele.70269).