For decades, aerospace engineers have confronted the life-threatening challenge of reigniting aircraft engines in high-altitude, low-pressure environments. Traditional spark ignition systems, limited by short discharge time and low energy efficiency, consistently fail to ignite lean kerosene-air mixtures in some difficult conditions. Although, gliding arc plasma ignitor offers improvements, its dependence on external gas sources prevents compatibility with combustor wide flight envelopes. This critical bottleneck has impeded next-generation aerospace propulsion systems.

Performance of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) in providing positioning, velocity estimation, and timing services in urban environments often suffers significant degradation due to multipath effects and Non-Line-of-Sight signal reception. Traditional Fault Detection and Exclusion methods face technical bottlenecks, including high computational complexity and insufficient exclusion accuracy caused by the complex and diverse nature of fault modes. This study proposed a novel fault detection and correction method for Doppler-observable-based velocity estimation: GS-LASSO (Grouping-Sparsity Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator). Experiment results demonstrated that the GS-LASSO method could provide high-precision velocity estimates at the decimeter-per-second (dm/s) level in complex urban environments with limited computational resources.

Researchers in China have developed a magnesia supported rhodium catalyst that enables the selective growth of ultrathin carbon nanotubes only 0.61 nanometer wide—the smallest stable nanotubes known.

An international research team has advanced an imaging method to capture nanoscale “spin maps” of chiral perovskites for the first time, revealing how these materials control electron spin at room temperature. The study also identifies a new type of spin-sensitive junction at the interface with metals. The findings, recently published in National Science Review, could guide the design of next-generation spintronic devices.

Crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cells, though dominating the photovoltaic market, are nearing their theoretical power conversion efficiencies (PCE) limit of 29.4%, necessitating the adoption of multi-junction technology to achieve higher performance. Among these, perovskite-on-silicon-based multi-junction solar cells have emerged as a promising alternative, where the perovskite offering tunable bandgaps, superior optoelectronic properties, and cost-effective manufacturing. Recent announced double-junction solar cells (PSDJSCs) have achieved the PCE of 34.85%, surpassing all other double-junction technologies. Encouragingly, the rapid advancements in PSDJSCs have spurred increased research interest in perovskite/perovskite/silicon triple-junction solar cells (PSTJSCs) in 2024. This triple-junction solar cell configuration demonstrates immense potential due to their optimum balance between achieving a high PCE limit and managing device complexity. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of PSTJSCs, covering fundamental principles, and technological milestones. Current challenges, including current mismatch, open-circuit voltage deficits, phase segregation, and stability issues, and their corresponding strategies are also discussed, alongside future directions to achieve long-term stability and high PCE. This work aims to advance the understanding of the development in PSTJSCs, paving the way for their practical implementation.

Aqueous Zn-iodine batteries (ZIBs) face the formidable challenges towards practical implementation, including metal corrosion and rampant dendrite growth on the Zn anode side, and shuttle effect of polyiodide species from the cathode side. These challenges lead to poor cycle stability and severe self-discharge. From the fabrication and cost point of view, it is technologically more viable to deploy electrolyte engineering than electrode protection strategies. More importantly, a synchronous method for modulation of both cathode and anode is pivotal, which has been often neglected in prior studies. In this work, cationic poly(allylamine hydrochloride) (Pah⁺) is adopted as a low-cost dual-function electrolyte additive for ZIBs. We elaborate the synchronous effect by Pah⁺ in stabilizing Zn anode and immobilizing polyiodide anions. The fabricated Zn-iodine coin cell with Pah⁺ (ZnI₂ loading: 25 mg cm⁻²) stably cycles 1000 times at 1 C, and a single-layered 3 × 4 cm² pouch cell (N/P ratio ~ 1.5) with the same mass loading cycles over 300 times with insignificant capacity decay.