Solid-State Batteries Take To The Sky

June 17, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

There always seem to be a handful of revolutionary technologies perpetually out of reach: fusion energy, quantum computers, and full self-driving cars are always in this list, and it seems like there’s also some battery technology which will finally let us fully decouple from fossil fuels in there as well. Although lithium batteries have allowed some ground-based electric transportation, the energy density is still not enough to enable full electrification, especially for things like aircraft. Solid state batteries may be on the verge of changing some of this, though, and a team has recently put them to work in a test aircraft to help make some headway with this novel battery chemistry.

The main contributing factor of these batteries’ improved energy densities is the ability to use a solid lithium anode, which has much higher energy density than the graphite-based anodes in modern liquid electrolyte batteries. Solid state batteries also have improved safety, since the solid electrolyte is generally not flammable and the battery itself is less prone to thermal runaway. The tests in this aircraft, a modified motorized glider, bear this out as well. With a standard lithium ion pack the team was able to harness 250 Wh/kg and with their new solid state battery they managed 410 Wh/kg, which let them fly the craft up to 24,000 feet (7,315 m) with the help of some wing-mounted solar panels.

Of course, a motorized glider is a long way away from battery-powered commercial flights, but tests like this are an important step on the way to de-carbonizing one of the more impactful industries on the planet, as well as hopefully making it less expensive to operate aircraft in the way EVs are generally much cheaper to operate than their internal combustion equivalents. But the limiting factor to adopting solid state batteries isn’t going to be implementation but rather the discovery of a cost effective way to manufacture them at scale. It’s the same reason we haven’t seen mass adoption of things like algae-based biodiesel or economic carbon capture yet.

Introducing Boron Buckyballs

June 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

A buckminsterfullerene, also known as a buckyball, is typically a fullerene consisting of sixty carbon atoms (C₆₀) arranged in a way that resembles a football-like sphere. Extending this arrangement to other types of atoms has until now however proven as elusive as finding non-carbon-based lifeforms. In a paper by [Hyun Wook Choi] et al. and published in Chemical Science the discovery of boron buckyballs is detailed. There is also a soft-paywalled article in the Chemical & Engineering News magazine for a higher-level perspective.

The discovered boron-based buckyball ups the number of atoms to eighty, forming B₈₀ (boron fullerite) with a slightly larger diameter than C₆₀ at 0.85 nm versus 0.71 nm. Perhaps more interesting are the claims by the authors that boron fullerite may have more practical applications than its carbon-based cousin, mostly due to it being predicted to be a semiconductor with an 0.8 eV energy gap and better electron acceptance that provides interesting doping prospects.

Producing these boron structures used laser vaporization with a helium carrier gas that was seeded with argon to increase cooling efficiency. Inside this boron cluster the reported structures were then discovered and characterized as described in the paper.

Obviously, going from a fascinating laboratory discovery to bulk production won’t be easy, and the predicted properties of boron fullerite may turn out to be incomplete or have a dark side that we aren’t aware of. Regardless, they’re bound to be more useful at least than the carbon version that’s remained mostly a curiosity despite many years of research.

Be Your Own Oil Company With Desktop Fischer-Tropsch Process

May 29, 2026 by Tyler August 26 Comments

Plastics, oil, petrol– the modern world is entirely dependent on hydrocarbons. The good sources are slowly running low and supply is increasingly complicated by geopolitical factors we really don’t want to get into, but hey! It’s just hydrogen and carbon, right like it says in the name. How hard could it be to roll your own at home. Well, if you’ve got a lab like [Marb]’s Lab on YouTube, it might just be doable, as he demonstrates in his latest video.

The Fischer-Tropsch reaction was discovered back in 1925 in Germany by a couple of gents named Fischer and Tropsch. In the unpleasantness that followed later, Germany made good use of their process on an industrial scale, since they had ample coal and no oil on hand. Coal-rich South Africa has also made us of it, particularly during the Apartheid-era trade restrictions. Every so often the idea of industrializing the process comes up in the USA, but there’s still enough oil there it doesn’t make sense economically.

Those nations all have something in common: they’re all coal-rich countries, and that makes sense because coal is easily converted to carbon monoxide and hydrogen– a combo known as syngas– and it just so happens that those are the feedstock for this reaction. The actual chemistry going on inside is quite complex, but conceptually it is pretty simple: hydrogen and carbon monoxide mix over a hot metal catalyst, and combine to form various hydrocarbons.

In [Marb]’s glassware-based demonstration, the catalyst is Cobalt (III) Oxide on silica gel– a lovely, cancer-causing substance that must be prepared for each use, as it lasts but 24 hours before further oxidization ruins it. That’s in spite of purging the system with argon– a necessary step if one does not wish to explode. The yield isn’t amazing, and [Marb] isn’t sure exactly what mix of hydrocarbons he has created– although they smell like gasoline and burn like the dickens, so mission accomplished.

This might seem like the furthest thing from green, but if you use solar power to run the process and something like woodgas– which is syngas by any other name– as a feed-stock, then you’ve got a carbon neutral energy storage medium.

Thanks to [Markus Bindhammer] for the tip!

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Battery Tester Outperforms Cheaper Options

April 1, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 4 Comments

Batteries are notoriously difficult pieces of technology to deal with reliably. They often need specific temperatures, charge rates, can’t tolerate physical shocks or damage, and can fail catastrophically if all of their finicky needs aren’t met. And, adding insult to injury, for many chemistries, the voltage does not correlate to state of charge in meaningful ways. Battery testers take many efforts to mitigate these challenges, but often miss the mark for those who need high fidelity in their measurements. For that reason, [LiamTronix] built their own.

The main problem with the cheaper battery testers, at least for [LiamTronix]’s use cases, is that he has plenty of batteries that are too large to practically test on the low-current devices, or which have internal battery management systems (BMS) which can’t connect to these testers. The first circuit he built to help solve these issues is based on a shunt resistor, which lets a smaller IC chip monitor a much larger current by looking at voltage drop across a resistor with a small resistance value. The Pi uses a Python script which monitors the current draw over the course of the test and outputs the result on a handy graph.

This circuit worked well enough for smaller batteries, but for his larger batteries like the 72V one he built for his electric tractor, these methods could draw far too much power to be safe. So from there he built a much more robust circuit which uses four MOSFETs as part of four constant current sources to sink and measure the current from the battery. A Pi Zero monitors the voltage and current from the battery, and also turns on some fans pointed at the MOSFETs’ heat sink to keep them from overheating. The system can be configured to work for different batteries and different current draw rates, making it much more capable than anything off the shelf.

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Virus-Based Thermoresponsive Separation Of Rare-Earth Elements

December 31, 2025 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

Although rare-earth elements (REEs) are not very rare, their recovery and purification is very cumbersome, with no significant concentrations that would help with mining. This does contribute to limiting their availability, but there might be more efficient ways to recover these REEs. One such method involves the use of a bacteriophage that has been genetically modified to bind to specific REEs and release them based on thermal conditions.

The primary research article in Nano Letters is sadly paywalled, but the supporting information PDF gives some details. We can also look at the preceding article (full PDF) by [Inseok Chae] et al. in Nano Letters from 2024, in which they cover the binding part using a lanthanide-binding peptide (LBP) that was adapted from Methylobacterium extorquens.

With the new research an elastin-like peptide (ELP) was added that has thermoresponsive responsive properties, allowing the triggering of coacervation after the phages have had some time in the aqueous REE containing solution. The resulting slurry makes it fairly easy to separate the phages from the collected REE ions, with the phages ready for another cycle afterwards. Creating more of these modified phages is also straightforward, with the papers showing the infecting of E. coli to multiply the phages.

Whether the recovery rate and ability to scale makes it an economically feasible method of REE recovery remains to be seen, but it’s definitely another fascinating use of existing biology for new purposes.

A device within a vertical rectangular frame is shown, with a control box on the front and an LCD display. Within the frame, a grid of syringes is seen held upright beneath two parallel plates.

Building A Multi-Channel Pipette For Parallel Experimentation

December 20, 2025 by Aaron Beckendorf 6 Comments

One major reason for the high cost of developing new drugs and other chemicals is the sheer number of experiments involved; designing a single new drug can require synthesizing and testing hundreds or thousands of chemicals, and a promising compound will go through many stages of testing. At this scale, simply performing sequential experiments is wasteful, and it’s better to run tens or hundreds of experiments in parallel. A multi-channel pipette makes this significantly simpler by collecting and dispensing liquid into many vessels at once, but they’re, unfortunately, expensive. [Triggy], however, wanted to run his own experiments, so he built his own 96-channel multi-pipette for a fiftieth of the professional price.

The dispensing mechanism is built around an eight-by-twelve grid of syringes, which are held in place by one plate and have their plungers mounted to another plate, which is actuated by four stepper motors. The whole syringe mechanism needed to move vertically to let a multi-well plate be placed under the tips, so the lower plate is mounted to a set of parallel levers and gears. When [Triggy] manually lifts the lever, it raises the syringes and lets him insert or remove the multi-well. An aluminium extrusion frame encloses the entire mechanism, and some heat-shrink tubing lets pipette tips fit on the syringes.

[Triggy] had no particularly good way to test the multi-pipette’s accuracy, but the tests he could run indicated no problems. As a demonstration, he 3D-printed two plates with parallel channels, then filled the channels with different concentrations of watercolors. When the multi-pipette picked up water from each channel plate and combined them in the multi-well, it produced a smooth color gradient between the different wells. Similarly, the multi-pipette could let someone test 96 small variations on a single experiment at once. [Triggy]’s final cost was about $300, compared to $18,000 for a professional machine, though it’s worth considering the other reason medical development is expensive: precision and certifications. This machine was designed for home experiments and would require extensive testing before relying on it for anything critical.

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Warnings About Retrobright Damaging Plastics After 10 Year Test

December 5, 2025 by Maya Posch 51 Comments

Within the retro computing community there exists a lot of controversy about so-called ‘retrobrighting’, which involves methods that seeks to reverse the yellowing that many plastics suffer over time. While some are all in on this practice that restores yellow plastics to their previous white luster, others actively warn against it after bad experiences, such as [Tech Tangents] in a recent video.

Uneven yellowing on North American SNES console. (Credit: Vintage Computing)

After a decade of trying out various retrobrighting methods, he found for example that a Sega Dreamcast shell which he treated with hydrogen peroxide ten years ago actually yellowed faster than the untreated plastic right beside it. Similarly, the use of ozone as another way to achieve the oxidation of the brominated flame retardants that are said to underlie the yellowing was also attempted, with highly dubious results.

While streaking after retrobrighting with hydrogen peroxide can be attributed to an uneven application of the compound, there are many reports of the treatment damaging the plastics and making it brittle. Considering the uneven yellowing of e.g. Super Nintendo consoles, the cause of the yellowing is also not just photo-oxidation caused by UV exposure, but seems to be related to heat exposure and the exact amount of flame retardants mixed in with the plastic, as well as potentially general degradation of the plastic’s polymers.

Pending more research on the topic, the use of retrobrighting should perhaps not be banished completely. But considering the damage that we may be doing to potentially historical artifacts, it would behoove us to at least take a step or two back and consider the urgency of retrobrighting today instead of in the future with a better understanding of the implications.

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