The largely untapped potential of thermal energy sources could transform the future of global energy if fully harnessed. Drawing on a detailed examination of the operating principles behind existing geothermal energy systems, a new book positions geothermal energy as a cornerstone in the global energy supply. Despite the high expectations that geothermal energy will play a vital role in reshaping the global power landscape, the authors caution that significant gaps in innovation and scientific knowledge should first be addressed. Nevertheless, they anticipate that sustained technological advances and declining construction costs for thermal energy facilities could increase thermal energy’s share of global electricity consumption to as much as 15% – roughly equivalent to the combined electricity consumption of India and the United States.

Identifying structural damage with limited sensors based on modal parameters is a significant research topic aimed at evaluating the impact of damage on structural health. The latest work has extracted the index using limited sensors based on principal component analysis and discrete wavelet transform to detect the damage location. It is well-equipped for conducting detection analysis of structural health monitoring.

Critical lifeline systems such as transportation networks, water supply, and energy infrastructure are increasingly exposed to extreme natural hazards. A newly published review highlights how smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), a powerful mesh-free numerical method, is transforming the simulation and visualization of complex lifeline disasters such as dam-break floods and debris flows, offering new opportunities for emergency safety assessment and disaster mitigation.

The Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) has received a donation of 5 million euros from Canadian philanthropist and entrepreneur Garrett Camp to help advance AI as a trustworthy, human-centered technology that benefits society. ISTA’s commitment to responsible AI, coupled with its focus on frontier research and interdisciplinary culture, make it perfectly placed to pursue this goal.

Researchers in James Tour’s lab at Rice University showed that Thomas Edison’s original carbon-filament light bulbs could have inadvertently produced graphene more than a century ago. By recreating Edison’s 1879 design and applying modern analysis, the team demonstrated that briefly heating carbon filaments can form turbostratic graphene, linking historic experiments to cutting-edge materials science.