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AI generates full battery electrolyte recipes, matching top lithium metal battery performance

Battery electrolytes aren’t just one chemical, but a complex mixture of salts, solvents, and additives interacting and reacting with each other. Artificial intelligence has made great headway in helping select ideal materials to go into that chemical soup. But a team from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) is using AI to generate the entire formulation, balancing the complicated tradeoffs and interactions that go into the electrolytes that make batteries possible.

The research is published in JACS Au. It is the next step in the Amanchukwu Lab’s ongoing development of an AI for battery work, ElectrolyteGPT.

“Next-generation battery electrolytes must meet multiple, often conflicting property requirements,” said first author Jaemin Kim. “With the model’s capability of generating outputs under diverse conditions, ElectrolyteGPT is able to generate novel candidates satisfying the desired properties simultaneously.”

Chris Hables Gray on AI and the Singularity: We Need Strong Citizenship!

In 2013, I interviewed a man who studies cyborgs and war for a living.

Somewhere in that conversation, Prof. Chris Hables Gray predicted a global pandemic. I chimed in that it would most likely stem from a bird flu outbreak.

We were both right. Neither of us wanted to be.

That was six years before COVID. And here we are in 2026, watching H5N1 headlines pile up again.

The point was never the prediction. The point was what he said we should do about it.

Chris did not pitch a gadget. He did not sell a forecast. He argued that surviving the century is not a technology problem; it is a citizenship problem.

Continue reading “Chris Hables Gray on AI and the Singularity: We Need Strong Citizenship!” | >

How swarms of tiny light-controlled robots could revolutionize wound care

Having a swarm of microbots moving across your body may sound like the stuff of a horror movie, but it could actually be the future of targeted drug delivery and advanced wound healing. Scientists have developed a way to use blue and red light as a remote control to assemble and disperse swarms of biohybrid microrobots that could one day transform how we treat injuries.

Details of the research are in a paper published in the journal Science Advances.

The microrobots come in two parts. The first is a living green microalga called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (CR), which uses two tail-like structures (flagella) to swim through aquatic environments and respond to light.

Materials For Space Elevators — From Carbon Nanotubes To Graphene And Beyond…

From carbon nanotubes to multi-layered graphene, we explore the revolutionary materials that could turn space elevators from sci-fi dreams into real-world infrastructure. Discover how these supermaterials might let us weave ribbons to the stars.

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Credits:
Materials For Space Elevators — From Carbon Nanotubes To Graphene And Beyond…
Episode 741; July 24, 2025
Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Edited by:
Adrian Nixon.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Chris Zabriskie, \

Photon-driven synapse advances low-power neuromorphic systems

Modern artificial intelligence systems rely on moving large amounts of data between memory and processors, a design that limits speed and increases energy use. The human brain works differently: it combines memory and computation within synapses, allowing fast, efficient learning and perception. Replicating this approach in hardware is a central goal of neuromorphic computing, especially for tasks like vision, where most real-world information is gathered and processed.

In that context, researchers have developed a new type of artificial synapse that operates entirely with light. Unlike most existing devices, which still depend on electrical signals at some stage, this system uses optical signals both to receive information and to update its internal state. Removing electrical conversion steps could lower energy use, reduce noise, and enable faster processing, particularly in vision systems that already rely on light.

As reported in Advanced Photonics, the device is built from a rare-earth-doped crystal that emits a persistent afterglow after being illuminated. This material can store optical information in the form of trapped charge carriers. When light excites the crystal, some of these carriers emit light immediately, while others remain trapped and are released later. The balance between these pathways depends on the history of illumination, allowing the material to mimic how biological synapses change strength based on past activity.

Toward cheaper, cleaner hydrogen production

Sobek was born and raised in Argentina, but he also grew up at MIT over the course of three degrees and more than a decade. He first studied aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, then jumped to mechanical engineering as a graduate student, then moved to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where he worked under PhD advisors and MIT professors Martha Gray and Stephen Senturia. His thesis focused on a technique for quickly measuring optical properties of large numbers of biological cells.

“A lot of my learnings around microfabrication and materials chemistry ended up being really relevant for 1s1,” Sobek says. “A class that was very important to me was taught by Professor Amar Bose. I was a teaching assistant for him for a couple of semesters, and that had an incredible influence on my thinking.”

Following graduation, Sobek worked in microelectronics and microfluidics before founding his own company, Zymera, in 2004. The company developed deep-tissue imaging technology for detecting cancer and other serious diseases.

JWST finds a stellar bar in the early universe that breaks all rules

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have discovered a stellar bar in GN20, a massive galaxy seen just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. The new paper was submitted to the preprint server arXiv on May 14.

Stellar bars are elongated arrangements of stars that cut across the center of a galaxy, rotating as a single rigid unit. As they spin, they act like a funnel and pull gas inward toward the galaxy’s nucleus, which can trigger intense star formation, feed the central black hole, and build up a dense core. In the nearby universe, bars are common. Even the Milky Way hosts one.

But formation of a stellar bar is thought to be slow, taking place over billions of years. Early galaxies were also significantly gas-rich, and gas was thought to suppress or delay bar formation. Therefore, when JWST discovered stellar bars within the first 2 billion years after the Big Bang, it challenged expectations from the standard model.

Irregular brain maturation in childhood predicts emotional habits in early adolescence

A new study reveals that the pace of a child’s brain maturation can predict whether they will tend to bottle up their emotions during their teenage years, offering new clues about the biological roots of adolescent mental health.

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