Offering the potential to:

• Drive an electric vehicle from Melbourne to Sydney on a single charge
• Create lightweight batteries for drones and submarines
• Unlock new avenues in aviation and maritime industries
• Produce batteries in Australia with Australian lithium, without using cobalt and rare earth minerals.

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Simply by adding sugar, researchers from the Monash Energy Institute have created a longer-lasting, lighter, more sustainable rival to the lithium-ion batteries that are essential for aviation, electric vehicles and submarines.

The Monash team, assisted by CSIRO, report in today’s edition of Nature Communications that using a glucose-based additive on the positive electrode they have managed to stabilise lithium-sulfur battery technology, long touted as the basis for the next generation of batteries.

“In less than a decade, this technology could lead to vehicles including electric buses and trucks that can travel from Melbourne to Sydney without recharging. It could also enable innovation in delivery and agricultural drones where light weight is paramount,” says lead author Professor Mainak Majumder, from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Associate Director of the Monash Energy Institute.

In theory, lithium-sulfur batteries could store two to five times more energy than lithium-ion batteries of the same weight. The problem has been that, in use the electrodes deteriorated rapidly, and the batteries broke down. There were two reasons for this – the positive sulfur electrode suffered from substantial expansion and contraction weakening it and making it inaccessible to lithium, and the negative lithium electrode became contaminated by sulfur compounds.

Corrected 31 August: ‘500 light years’ updated to ‘500 million light years’

Research reveals how star-making pollutes the cosmos

Animation available, astronomers available in Australia and UK for interview

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Galaxies pollute the environment they exist in, researchers have found.

A team of astronomers led by Alex Cameron and Deanne Fisher from the ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D) used a new imaging system on at the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii to confirm that what flows into a galaxy is a lot cleaner than what flows out.

The research is published today in The Astrophysical Journal.

Seeing sound

The beauty of salt

Explosive patterns from linseed oil and ink

Electricity moving slowly through wood

Extreme cinematography captures everyday phenomena

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Photos and stunning video clips for print and online features for Science Week

Each reveal the fundamentals of science: energy, waves, light, and the beauty in the natural world in Josef Gatti’s photographs and short films.  Please watch these two short clips and consider how you could use them in an online feature: https://bit.ly/2VTGGet; https://bit.ly/37OiiO1

Plankton? Pollen? Sound?	Cells or sound?	Ancient tiles? Bouncing salt?	An alien planet? Or a bubble

The clips and stills are from Phenomena, an ABC series of nine award winning episodes made by Josef Gatti and published through the ABC’s YouTube channel and Facebook and as a half-hour short film on ABC iView. Each film focuses on a force of nature.  

This year’s festival runs 14 to 22 August, with thousands of events around Australia.

National Science Week 2021 runs from 14 to 24 August. Explore the big topics, brilliant minds, and unexpected ideas from the world of science.

The struggle for women physicists takes many forms, but certain elements are universal, as these examples from Pakistan, India and South Africa show.

Dr Anisa Qamar: “I was the only woman in the physics faculty.”

Professor Mmantsae Moche Diale: “In big conferences, there are very few black women.”

Professor Prajval Shastri: “Such bad mentoring has no consequences.”

Astronomical Society of Australia honours stargazers at annual conference

Six Australian astronomers will be recognised by the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA), the country’s professional body for the field.

‘Magneto-rotational hypernova’ soon after the Big Bang fuelled high levels of uranium, zinc in ancient stellar oddity

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A massive explosion from a previously unknown source – 10 times more energetic than a supernova – could be the answer to a 13-billion-year-old Milky Way mystery.

Adelaide invention revolutionises veterinary x-rays

Your best friend can’t tell you where it hurts but now, thanks to an invention by Adelaide company Micro-X, vets have a better tool to diagnose your pet’s health problems.

New technique helps NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope

Astronomers have turned a cluster of galaxies into a gargantuan magnifying lens, using it to study another galaxy, 10.7 billion light years away, in unprecedented detail.