Hydrogen Fuel Cell

Promising new hydrogen fuel cell technology has up to 50% higher performance than current state-of-the-art technology, with improved durability. 

The grooved electrode design advance may help optimize next-generation fuel cell technology to power emission-free medium- and heavy-duty transportation.

"We had a theory that by reimagining the way electrodes are designed we could achieve improved performance," said Jacob Spendelow, materials scientist with the Los Alamos National Laboratory team that described its results in the journal Nature Energy. 

"One of our biggest takeaways is that novel materials are not the only route to improve performance. The way the materials are put together can be equally important.

"All we did was take conventional commercially available materials and change the way we put them together to change the microscale architecture, and that resulted in substantially higher performance."

Hydrogen fuel cells—and specifically a version of the technology called proton exchange membrane fuel cells—represent an emission-free engine design that uses hydrogen as a fuel. Fuel cells could transform the medium- and heavy-duty transportation sector, which has been difficult to decarbonize.  READ MORE...

Most Powerful Magnet in China,

China launched construction of the world’s most powerful pulsed magnet facility in the city of Wuhan on Tuesday.


The upgraded pulsed high magnetic field facility at Huazhong University of Science and Technology will produce a short – but extremely strong – magnetic field at 110 Tesla, more than two million times stronger than that of the Earth.


The current record of 100 Tesla for pulsed magnetic field is held by a facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US state of New Mexico.


The strongest pulsed magnetic field that China can generate at present is 70 Tesla.  READ MORE...

Speed of Sound on Mars

Scientists have confirmed the speed of sound on Mars, using equipment on the Perseverance rover to study the red planet's atmosphere, which is very different to Earth's.

What they discovered could have some strange consequences for communication between future Martians.

The findings suggest that trying to talk in Mars' atmosphere might produce a weird effect, since higher-pitched sound seems to travel faster than bass notes. Not that we'd try, since Mars' atmosphere is unbreathable, but it's certainly fun to think about!

From a science perspective, the findings, announced at the 53rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by planetary scientist Baptiste Chide of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, reveal high temperature fluctuations at the surface of Mars that warrant further investigation.

The speed of sound is not a universal constant. It can change, depending on the density and temperature of the medium through which it travels; the denser the medium, the faster it goes.

That's why sound travels about 343 meters (1,125 feet) per second in our atmosphere at 20 degrees Celsius, but also at 1,480 meters per second in water, and at 5,100 meters per second in steel.

Mars' atmosphere is a lot more tenuous than Earth's, around 0.020 kg/m3, compared to about 1.2 kg/m3 for Earth. That alone means that sound would propagate differently on the red planet.

But the layer of the atmosphere just above the surface, known as the Planetary Boundary Layer, has added complications: During the day, the warming of the surface generates convective updrafts that create strong turbulence.  READ MORE...

Quantum Artificial Intelligence

A novel proof that certain quantum convolutional networks can be guaranteed to be trained clears the way for quantum artificial intelligence to aid in materials discovery and many other applications. Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Convolutional neural networks running on quantum computers have generated significant buzz for their potential to analyze quantum data better than classical computers can. While a fundamental solvability problem known as "barren plateaus" has limited the application of these neural networks for large data sets, new research overcomes that Achilles heel with a rigorous proof that guarantees scalability.


"The way you construct a quantum neural network can lead to a barren plateau—or not," said Marco Cerezo, co-author of the paper titled "Absence of Barren Plateaus in Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks," published today by a Los Alamos National Laboratory team in Physical Review X. Cerezo is a physicist specializing in quantum computing, quantum machine learning, and quantum information at Los Alamos. "We proved the absence of barren plateaus for a special type of quantum neural network. Our work provides trainability guarantees for this architecture, meaning that one can generically train its parameters."

As an artificial intelligence (AI) methodology, quantum convolutional neural networks are inspired by the visual cortex. As such, they involve a series of convolutional layers, or filters, interleaved with pooling layers that reduce the dimension of the data while keeping important features of a data set.

These neural networks can be used to solve a range of problems, from image recognition to materials discovery. Overcoming barren plateaus is key to extracting the full potential of quantum computers in AI applications and demonstrating their superiority over classical computers.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Mapping Interstellar Space

Using data from NASA’s IBEX satellite, scientists created the first-ever 3D map of the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space.

For the first time, the boundary of the heliosphere has been mapped, giving scientists a better understanding of how solar and interstellar winds interact.

“Physics models have theorized this boundary for years,” said Dan Reisenfeld, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author on the paper, which was published in the Astrophysical Journal on June 10, 2021. “But this is the first time we’ve actually been able to measure it and make a three-dimensional map of it.”

The heliosphere is a bubble created by the solar wind, a stream of mostly protons, electrons, and alpha particles that extends from the Sun into interstellar space and protects the Earth from harmful interstellar radiation.

Reisenfeld and a team of other scientists used data from NASA’s Earth-orbiting Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) satellite, which detects particles that come from the heliosheath, the boundary layer between the solar system and interstellar space. 

The team was able to map the edge of this zone — a region called the heliopause. Here, the solar wind, which pushes out toward interstellar space, collides with the interstellar wind, which pushes in towards the Sun.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...