The research conducted by South Korea's Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB), Heinz Maier Leibnitz Zentrum (MLZ), and Soongsil University has been published in Nature Communications on February 27, 2025. This advancement can be applied to develop sustainable isotope separation technologies using existing LNG cryogenic infrastructure.

A collaboration involving Osaka University found that the degradation of solid platinum electrodes in electrochemical devices is influenced by the cations present in the liquid electrolyte. Higher cation acidity increased the concentration of hydroxide ions near the electrode surface, facilitating electrode degradation compared with that in systems with lower cation acidity. These findings are important for designing durable electrochemical devices like batteries and fuel cells.

Florida State University chemists have created a machine learning tool that can identify the chemical composition of dried salt solutions from an image with 99% accuracy.

By using robotics to prepare thousands of samples and artificial intelligence to analyze their data, they created a simple, inexpensive tool that could expand possibilities for performing chemical analysis.

A rapid prototyping platform called VIK (Voxel Invention Kit) enables makers without engineering expertise to create large-scale interactive devices using a series of reconfigurable electromechanical building blocks. These user-friendly components can be assembled using only a soldering iron and a pair of pliers.

In Physics of Fluids, researchers from the University of Göttingen in Germany decided to use a high-speed camera to capture what occurs while opening a swing-top bottle of beer. They found that the sound emitted by opening a pressurized bottle with a swing-top lid isn’t a single shockwave, but rather a very quick “ah” sound. Their high-speed video recordings captured condensation within the bottleneck that vibrated up and down in a standing wave. After opening the bottle, the dissolved carbon dioxide starts to form inside the beer and triggers the liquid level to rise, causing the sloshing.

Biomass can be converted into valuable gases. But in order to control this process, the amount of water vapor has to be measured. This is notoriously hard, because other components of the gas can affect the measurement. Using quantum cascade lasers, this problem has now been solved.

The Physics of Plasmas Early Career Collection will feature journal articles from Frances Kraus, Jason Parisi and Willca Villafana.