Zn-I₂ batteries have emerged as promising next-generation energy storage systems owing to their inherent safety, environmental compatibility, rapid reaction kinetics, and small voltage hysteresis. Nevertheless, two critical challenges, i.e., zinc dendrite growth and polyiodide shuttle effect, severely impede their commercial viability. To conquer these limitations, this study develops a multifunctional separator fabricated from straw-derived carboxylated nanocellulose, with its negative charge density further reinforced by anionic polyacrylamide incorporation. This modification simultaneously improves the separator’s mechanical properties, ionic conductivity, and Zn²⁺ ion transfer number. Remarkably, despite its ultrathin 20 μm profile, the engineered separator demonstrates exceptional dendrite suppression and parasitic reaction inhibition, enabling Zn//Zn symmetric cells to achieve impressive cycle life (> 1800 h at 2 mA cm⁻²/2 mAh cm⁻²) while maintaining robust performance even at ultrahigh areal capacities (25 mAh cm⁻²). Additionally, the separator’s anionic characteristic effectively blocks polyiodide migration through electrostatic repulsion, yielding Zn-I₂ batteries with outstanding rate capability (120.7 mAh g⁻¹ at 5 A g⁻¹) and excellent cyclability (94.2% capacity retention after 10,000 cycles). And superior cycling stability can still be achieved under zinc-deficient condition and pouch cell configuration. This work establishes a new paradigm for designing high-performance zinc-based energy storage systems through rational separator engineering.

Researchers at Tohoku University used the Digital Hydrogen Platform - which combines data from over five thousand meticulously curated experimental records - as a tool to guide materials design for hydrogen storage.

Researchers have successfully simulated the 100 billions stars of the Milky Way. This feat was accomplished by combining artificial intelligence (AI) with numerical simulations. This is 100 times better than previous attempts and took 100 times less time to produce. The same process can be used to model other phenomenon such as climate change and weather patterns. the study was led by Keiya Hirashima at the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) in Japan.

A new open-access tool created by University of Toronto Engineering researchers provides a systematic way to organize and synthesize knowledge about metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) — a class of materials with applications in drug delivery, catalysis, carbon capture and more. The new tool is named Unifying Chemical Data for MOFs, abbreviated to MOF-ChemUnity.

A team of researchers from University of Toronto Engineering have designed a new material that is both very light and extremely strong — even at temperatures up to 500 Celsius. These properties could make it extremely useful in aerospace and other high-performance industries. The new composite material is made of various metallic alloys and nanoscale precipitates, and has a structure that mimics that of reinforced concrete, but on a microscopic scale.  

With the advancement of Internet applications, the global demand for broadband satellite communication services is incessantly escalating. Furthermore, there exists an exponential surge in the requisition for the capacity of satellite communication systems. In response to this evolving demand, the domain of satellite communication technology is progressively evolving toward the realm of high-throughput satellite (HTS) communication systems. The typical technical characteristics of HTS are: (a) the satellite adopts multibeam technology for beam overlapping coverage of the service area, which improves the quality of the wireless link while realizing the spatial dimension segmentation; (b) based on this, the system adopts multiple frequency multiplexing to improve the communication capacity of a single satellite; (c) gateway stations are tightly coupled with user beam clusters to complete two-hop communication, which makes multiple gateway stations share the communication resources of the same satellite, forming a spatial isolation of the gateway stations, and once again realizing the frequency multiplexing of the gateway station links. A key requirement for future multibeam broadband satellite communication systems is the ability to flexibly adjust beam capacity according to changes in business distribution, in order to meet time-varying business requirements. Beam hopping technology provides an efficient solution to achieve the efficient use of frequency resources and power resources. At the same time, the use of beam hopping makes the beam hopping of satellite payload need to match the business signals of ground signal stations, bringing about the need for synchronization of beam hopping between satellite and ground.