Heather Hunsperger is a scientist, writer, and wordplay enthusiast. After earning a PhD at the University of Washington, she traded her lab coat for a keyboard to tell the stories behind the science.
What if all the heat your car engine, a factory, or a power plant throws away could run the grid instead? A new engine turns that waste heat into electricity, even the low-grade stuff today's best systems struggle with. It has no moving parts, and the wild part is who built it. Dr. Lonnie Johnson, t
How a Saltwater Battery Desalinates Seawater and Captures Carbon. Drop your phone in the ocean and you learn fast that seawater destroys batteries. So a seawater battery that actually runs on the stuff sounds backwards. Yet researchers in Korea have spent over a decade building one. This single syst
You know that stretch where you hit every green light perfectly? Well, that might not be luck anymore. There's an AI system that watches every car, bike, and pedestrian approaching an intersection in real time… and lines up the lights so you cruise right through. And the numbers on how much faster p
I was a teenager on a cruise when I first saw ocean pollution up close. Late at night, I heard a noise over the railing. I looked down and saw crew dumping garbage into the ocean. A stream of trash stretching off toward the horizon. That image stuck with me.
Ever since Donut Lab announced their miracle solid-state battery, the internet has been absolutely certain about what it is. A capacitor. Vaporware. A scam. Except when you actually dig into those explanations, a lot of them start falling apart. Here's what Donut Lab is actually claiming: more energy
Your lights just flickered. Not for long. Just a split second. You probably didn't think much about it, but somewhere a battery may have just saved your city from a blackout. I’m not talking about keeping your phone charged or your EV running. These kinds of batteries
Perovskite solar cells are smashing efficiency records and starting to hit the market, but what if the real future of solar is a material you’ve probably never heard of? It’s called kesterite, and new research suggests it could match perovskites’ efficiency without any toxic lead in the stack.
What if you could power cities just by mixing river water with seawater? Around 15,000 TWh of energy pours into the oceans each year as freshwater blends with saltwater at river mouths. That amounts to roughly half the energy the world consumes in electricity every year.12 And we
What if every piece of plastic waste, like bottles, bags, even clothes, could be rebuilt from scratch, no sorting required? Not just melted and reshaped, but broken down to pure chemical building blocks and made new again. That’s what a new wave of recycling tech promises. At Northwestern University,
We've been told for years that fast-charging kills batteries. The typical warning is that if you spring for too much current too quickly, you'll cook the lifespan. But what if that rule is wrong? A team at the Georgia Institute of Technology just flipped the script.
Thanks to reusable rockets that fly, land, and fly again, launch costs are coming back down to Earth. And that’s revived a ‘70s dream to beam clean solar energy from orbit. Space agencies around the world are revamping blueprints for giant solar farms capturing sunlight 24/7 and wirelessly
Caribbean beaches are ankle-deep in slimy, smelly seaweed. Wave after wave of sargassum is blanketing shorelines from Barbados to Cancún. It traps sea turtles. It smothers coral reefs. And it drives tourists away from islands that depend on them. This seaweed isn't just crashing weddings on the beach.