ScienceDaily: Matter & Energy News

Their conclusion: in extremely cold regions, it can be considerably more efficient to attach the PV modules directly to the electrolyser, i.e. to thermally couple them. This is because the waste heat from the PV modules increases the efficiency of electrolysis in this environment. The results of this study are also relevant for other cold regions on Earth, such as Alaska, Canada, and high mountain regions, for example. In these places, solar hydrogen could replace fossil fuels such as oil and petrol.

A new study disputes the prevailing hypothesis on why Mercury has a big core relative to its mantle. For decades, scientists argued that hit-and-run collisions blew away much of Mercury's rocky mantle and left the big, dense, metal core inside. But new research reveals that collisions are not to blame -- instead, the density, mass and iron content of a rocky planet's core is influenced by its distance from the sun's magnetic field.

Engineers have created an insect-scale robot that can swerve and pivot with the agility of a cheetah, giving it the ability to traverse complex terrain and quickly avoid unexpected obstacles. Small, robust robots like these could be ideal for conducting search and rescue operations or investigating other hazardous situations, such as scoping out potential gas leaks.

Increasing our understanding of cellular processes requires information about the types of biomolecules involved, their locations, and their interactions. This requires the molecules to be labeled without affecting physiological processes (bioorthogonality). This works when the markers are very quickly and selectively coupled using small molecules and 'click chemistry.' A team of researchers has now introduced a novel type of click reaction that is also suitable for living cells and organisms.

In 1934, physicist Eugene Wigner theorized that when electrons in metals are brought to ultracold temperatures, these electrons would be frozen in their tracks and form a rigid, non-electricity conducting structure -- a crystal -- instead of zipping around at thousands of kilometers per second and creating an electric current. The structure was coined a Wigner Crystal and was observed for the first time in 1979. What's remained stubbornly elusive to physicists, however, has been the melting of the crystal state into a liquid in response to quantum fluctuations. Now, almost 90 years later, physicists have finally experimentally documented this transition.

Researchers demonstrate successive proton transport mechanism in a material that may be a future source of reliable primary and backup power.