Electric vehicles and grid batteries keep lifting lithium demand higher each year. Meeting that growth cleanly matters more than ever. Spodumene holds much of the lithium locked inside hard rock deposits spread across Australia, the United States, and Europe. Mines already pull the mineral out of the ground, yet turning it into battery-grade material has always demanded extreme heat and left large piles of leftover rock. A team at MIT changed the script. Materials scientist Yet-Ming Chiang and colleagues mix crushed spodumene with a simple solution of water and ammonium fluoride. The first major step happens at ordinary room temperature.

Greenhill Forge runs a rural workshop focused on hands-on projects for smallholding life. Years spent building an axial flux permanent magnet generator gave him the perfect foundation for a new challenge. Cold water needed reliable heating off the grid, and fuel or grid power carried too many hassles. He turned those existing rotors into the heart of a device that creates heat through nothing more than motion and magnetic fields.

Scientists in Switzerland have developed a prototype camera capable of capturing clear three-dimensional images of neutrinos, particles so elusive they often earn the label ghost particles. Neutrinos come in huge numbers from the sun and other sources throughout space, yet they interact so rarely with ordinary matter that trillions pass through a person every second without any effect