Boston-based aerospace manufacturer Spike Aerospace says it has reached a new stage in developing its flagship supersonic business jet, the Spike S-512 Diplomat, which the company claims will offer fast, quiet, and fuel-efficient travel over land and water.
The Massachusetts-based aerospace firm announced Wednesday that it is completing an advanced design study to refine the S-512’s aerodynamics, cabin configuration, and low-boom capabilities.
A research team from the Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has shed new light on the magnetic reconnection process driven by rapidly expanding plasma, using magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) numerical simulations. Their findings, published recently in Science China Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy, reveal previously unobserved fine structures and physical mechanisms underlying this fundamental phenomenon.
Magnetic reconnection—a process where magnetic field lines break and rejoin, releasing massive energy—is critical to understanding explosive events in plasmas, from laboratory experiments to solar flares and space weather.
The team focused on how this process unfolds under rapid driving conditions, examining three distinct reconnection modes: flux pile-up, Sonnerup, and hybrid. These modes, they found, arise from variations in gas pressure and magnetic field strength within the inflow region, where plasma is drawn into the reconnection site.
Fuel cells are energy solutions that can convert the chemical energy in fuels into electricity via specific chemical reactions, instead of relying on combustion. Promising types of fuel cells are direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs), devices specifically designed to convert the energy in methyl alcohol (i.e., methanol) into electrical energy.
Despite their potential for powering large electronics, vehicles and other systems requiring portable power, these methanol-based fuel cells still have significant limitations. Most notably, studies found that their performance tends to significantly degrade over time, because the materials used to catalyze reactions in the cells (i.e., electrocatalytic surfaces) gradually become less effective.
One approach to cleaning these surfaces and preventing the accumulation of poisoning products produced during chemical reactions entails the modulation of the voltage applied to the fuel cells. However, manually adjusting the voltage applied to the surfaces in effective ways, while also accounting for physical and chemical processes in the fuel cells, is impractical for real-world applications.
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and their collaborators have created a new class of programmable soft materials that can absorb impacts like never before, while also changing shape when heated.
The research—which includes collaborators from Harvard University, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Sandia National Laboratories and Oregon State University—opens the door to smarter, lighter and more resilient materials that respond to the world around them. The research is published in the journal Advanced Materials.
Built from liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs)—rubbery polymers that shift in response to heat, light or stress—the team 3D-printed the materials into carefully engineered lattice structures. These lattices can be designed to absorb energy, stiffen, soften or even change shape, depending on their architecture and environmental conditions.
The development of wearable electronics and the current era of big data requires the sustainable power supply of numerous distributed sensors. In this paper, we designed and experimentally studied an energy harvester based on ferrofluid sloshing. The harvester contains a horizontally positioned cylindrical vial, half-filled with a ferrofluid exposed to a magnetic field. The vial is excited by a laboratory shaker and the induced voltage in a nearby coil is measured under increasing and decreasing shaking rates. Five ferrofluid samples are involved in the study, yielding the dependence of the electromotive force on the ferrofluid magnetization of saturation. The energy harvesting by ferrofluid sloshing is investigated in various magnetic field configurations. It is found that the most effective magnetic field configuration for the energy harvesting is characterized by the field intensity perpendicular to the axis of the vial motion and gravity. The harvested electric power linearly increases with the ferrofluid magnetization of saturation. The electromotive force generated by each ferrofluid is found identical for measurements in acceleration and deceleration mode. A significant reduction in the induced voltage is observed in a stronger magnetic field. The magneto-viscous effect and partial immobilization of the ferrofluid in the stronger magnetic field is considered. The magneto-viscous effect is documented by a supplementing experiment. The results extend knowledge on energy harvesting by ferrofluid sloshing and may pave the way to applications of ferrofluid energy harvesters for mechanical excitations with changing directions in regard to the magnetic field induction.
Rajnak, M., Kurimsky, J., Paulovicova, K. et al. Vibration energy harvesting by ferrofluids in external magnetic fields. Sci Rep 15, 26,701 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-12490-w.
In a major step toward next-generation electronics, researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have discovered a way to manipulate the direction of charge flow in ultrathin metallic films at room temperature using light. This discovery opens the door to more energy-efficient optical sensors, detectors, and quantum information devices.
The research is published in Science Advances.
The team showed that ultra-thin layers of ruthenium dioxide (RuO2), grown on titanium dioxide (TiO2), can be made to behave differently depending on direction—both in how they respond to light and how electricity moves through them.
Lithium batteries get extended efficiency, life using electrolytes with boron additives.
Scientists from China have confirmed that electrolytes with boron additives can tackle the major challenges of lithium metal batteries.
Energy storage devices that use lithium metal as an anode have exhibited an energy density of over 500 Wh/kg. However, a research team from China’s Nankai University claimed that the practical application of lithium metal batteries (LMBs) is still severely limited by issues such as lithium dendrite formation, short cycle life, and low Coulombic efficiency of Li plating/stripping.