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Researchers have developed a groundbreaking nuclear battery that’s 8,000 times more efficient than previous models. A team at Soochow University in China designed this battery to harness energy from radioactive decay—a process commonly associated with nuclear waste.

“Micronuclear batteries harness energy from the radioactive decay of radioisotopes to generate electricity on a small scale, typically in the nanowatt or microwatt range,” the researchers explained.

What makes this technology especially promising is that radioactive decay remains unaffected by environmental conditions like temperature, pressure, or magnetic fields. This makes the micronuclear battery a long-lasting and dependable power source in situations where traditional batteries are impractical or difficult to replace such as space or deep sea environments. This brings us closer to a future where miniature batteries can run for decades without needing a recharge.

Breakthrough in Design
While the concept of using radioactive decay for long-lasting batteries has intrigued scientists for over a century, low efficiency has always been a roadblock. This new design overcomes that issue by strategically combining materials.

The researchers used americium, a radioactive element typically regarded as nuclear waste, which emits energy in the form of alpha particles. These particles carry a lot of energy but tend to lose it quickly to their surroundings, making them hard to harness efficiently.

To solve this, the team embedded the americium in a specially designed polymer crystal that acts like a transformer. It converts the fleeting energy of alpha particles into a stable green luminescence. This glowing crystal is then paired with a photovoltaic cell—similar to a tiny solar panel, that is powered by the green glow instead of sunlight. The entire system is encased in a quartz cell, resulting in a micro-nuclear battery that, despite its small size, can provide a stable power supply for decades.

Tests showed that the battery could deliver a steady power supply for more than 200 hours, proving its remarkable longevity. It achieves this with only a small amount of radioactive material, making it a safer and more sustainable option.

While americium has a half-life of 7,380 years, the battery’s lifespan will be limited to a few decades due to the gradual degradation of the materials surrounding the radioactive core. Nonetheless, this marks a significant leap forward in the development of long-lasting, miniature power sources.

Organic and regenerative farming is gaining momentum in Ventura County, California, where industrial agriculture has left a heavy toll on the environment. Pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides have contaminated the soil and groundwater, harming local wildlife. The Rodale Institute and its California Organic Center have been working to change this. With $1 million from Patagonia and $1.5 million from the state of California, they are now able to assist farmers in transitioning to sustainable farming practices that restore soil health and biodiversity, with most startup costs covered.

It’s been just over two years since Patagonia’s founder, Yves Chouinard, declared that 98% company profits would go toward environmental causes, making Earth the company’s bigest shareholder. Since then, the Holdfast Collective, Patagonia’s non-profit arm, has quietly distributed $70 million to major conservation groups like the Nature Conservancy, the Conservation Fund, and Re:Wild. Holdfast Collective’s executive director Greg Curtis praised the Rodale Institute, calling them “peerless” in their success over the past five years in helping farmers adopt regenerative practices. This made them an obvious choice for Patagonia’s first investment in the agricultural sector since Chouinard’s announcement.

Fast Company reports that the funding from Holdfast and the state will provide farmers with business planning support, long-term produce contracts, and grants for equipment and pest management.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink achieved a significant milestone last week in its pursuit to restore vision to those who have lost it. The neurotechnology company, founded by Musk, announced on X (formerly Twitter) that it had been granted “Breakthrough Device Designation from the FDA” for its innovative Blindsight device.

Musk described the Blindsight device as capable of allowing even individuals who have lost both their eyes and optic nerves to regain sight. “As long as the visual cortex is intact, the device will even enable those who have been blind since birth to see for the first time,” Musk wrote on X. Initially, the vision provided by Blindsight will be low-resolution, Musk noted, comparing it to “Atari graphics.” However, he highlighted its potential to improve dramatically over time. While this isn’t the first time Musk has suggested that Blindsight might exceed normal vision, some experts remain skeptical. Research from the University of Washington cautioned that without significant technological breakthroughs, the vision provided by Blindsight and similar devices is likely to remain limited and imperfect.

Earlier this year, Neuralink made headlines after successfully implanting a brain chip into Noland Arbaugh, a paralyzed man. Following the procedure, Arbaugh was able to control computers and play online games using only his mind.

The FDA’s Breakthrough Devices Program aims to expedite the development and approval process for devices that offer more effective treatment or diagnosis of life-threatening or irreversibly debilitating conditions.

People with hearing loss often face the “cocktail party problem,” where it’s hard to focus on one voice in a noisy environment. OrCam Technologies’ OrCam Hear aims to solve this with a system of earbuds and an AI-powered app.
The app samples voices, creates speaker profiles, and allows users to isolate a specific voice, muting others. “Deep networks and advanced language models are used to significantly improve hearing aids and hearables,” said Amnon Shashua, OrCam’s co-founder, in a press release.

The company plans to begin production of the device later this year.

“Starry Night” is widely regarded as one of the most famous paintings in the world, second only to the Mona Lisa. But what many admirers might not realize is that van Gogh’s swirling sky is not just visually striking—it’s also “alive with real-world physics.”

The brushstrokes in Starry Night create such a convincing illusion of atmospheric motion that scientists specializing in fluid dynamics in China and France became curious about how closely it mirrors the actual physics of the sky. Because you can’t measure actual motion in the painting itself, the scientists used van Gogh’s brushstrokes as a proxy for real atmospheric movement. By analyzing the scale and spacing of these swirling strokes, they found that van Gogh’s portrayal of the sky “accurately captures” energy cascading in turbulent flows—a phenomenon they call “hidden turbulence.”

According to Dr. Huang Yongxiang, one of the study’s authors, the size of the brush strokes was key. “By using high-resolution digital images, we were able to precisely measure the size of the strokes and compare them to turbulence theories.” The researchers likened the swirling brushstrokes to leaves caught in a whirlwind, which allowed them to analyze the shape, energy, and scaling of atmospheric characteristics in the painting. They also used the varying brightness of the paint as a stand-in for the kinetic energy of movement in the sky.

“It reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena,” Dr. Huang explained. “Van Gogh’s precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky.” The study, published in Physics of Fluids, examined the 14 main swirling shapes in Starry Night and found they aligned with Kolmogorov’s law, a theory that describes how kinetic energy is transferred in turbulent flows from large to small scales.

On a finer level, the team found the brightness diffused in the brushstrokes also followed Batchelor’s scaling, which explains energy transfer in smaller, passive atmospheric turbulence. Finding both types of energy scaling in one system is rare, and it was a major motivation for their research.