Light hits a particle of indium oxide, and something unusual happens. The palladium clusters dotting its surface don’t just absorb the photons. They convert them into heat, raising the catalyst’s skin temperature to around 230 degrees Celsius within seconds, even though the source of illumination is nothing more exotic than simulated sunlight. That warmth is … Read more
Think about what happens inside a solar cell the moment light hits it. Photons jostle electrons loose from their atoms, and those electrons have to travel, quickly, through a crystalline lattice before they recombine and the energy is wasted as heat. In a tandem cell built from two stacked layers of perovskite, a man-made mineral … Read more
Every nerve fibre in your brain and spinal cord is wrapped in something a bit like electrical tape. The myelin sheath, as it’s called, is a fatty insulating layer produced by specialist cells called oligodendrocytes, and without it, nerve signals lose their speed and coherence. In multiple sclerosis, the immune system attacks this layer directly. … Read more