In tropical cities, afternoon thunderstorms can plunge entire neighborhoods into brief moments of darkness. 

When civil engineer Markus Schläpfer moved to Singapore a decade ago, he recognized these thunderstorms as an emerging engineering challenge. For cities that hope to run on solar energy, these short periods without strong sunlight could destabilize urban power grids and undermine reliability.

In a new paper, published April 7 in Nature Communications,  Schläpfer and collaborators explain how tropical cities, which will soon contain half of the global population, can address this problem without expensive infrastructure build-outs. For Schläpfer, the solution lies in connecting electric vehicles to the grid. 

"If you have a thunderstorm moving over an area with solar energy, you can have your electric cars that are parked serve as the energy source and balance out this lack of energy generation," said Schläpfer, assistant professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics at Columbia Engineering. “When the thunderstorm moves away, the cars are charged again by the photovoltaics.”

A hydrogen-bond-mediated molecular bridging strategy is proposed to overcome the trade-off in photocathodic protection, enabling round-the-clock corrosion prevention for marine infrastructure through precise interfacial engineering.

Risk Sciences is a general-interest journal that publishes academic research and industry practices on risks and disruptive technologies across all fields including agriculture, economics, engineering, environmental science, finance, health, law, management, natural sciences, and public administration.

Researchers from China developed the FI-R model, a novel flowering spectral index for the fine-scale extraction of angiosperms over large areas in complex multi-regional backgrounds, using rapeseed as an example. FI-R shows low sensitivity to background complexity and rapeseed varieties, and it has good applicability to multiple multi-spectral sensor images.

This study employs advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) and Dynamic Topic Modeling to quantitatively analyze nearly 290,000 hydrology-related publications from 2000 to 2023. By intelligently parsing hundreds of thousands of global hydrology publications, the research overcomes the limitations of traditional bibliometric methods. It maps the field's trajectory, revealing a crucial thematic shift from traditional water resource management to eco-hydrology. The findings highlight the surging focus on climate change, the widespread use of the hydrological models, and the intense scientific attention on the Yangtze and Yellow River basins. This study provides a comprehensive overview of how the discipline has evolved to meet complex environmental challenges.

Selective recovery of lithium from spent cathode is an attractive means to promote the green and efficient recycling of spent lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). However, current technologies face numerous challenges including high reagent consumption, limited method versatility and significant secondary pollution. In this study, we found that intermediate phase formed during the leaching process had high stability, which hindered the further leaching of Li⁺ and led to more reagent and energy consumption. Simple mechanical activation strategy was utilized to change the intermediate phase through activating spent cathode without grinding additives. As a result, the method shows a high utilization efficiency of H⁺ (>97%) for the recycling of Li⁺ from most of spent cathode, and obviates the need for auxiliary reagents, and substantially reduces secondary pollutant generation.