K M Manohar Insights

  Battery Technology · Green Manufacturing The binder is a tiny fraction of a lithium-ion battery's weight, and it quietly decides how toxic the battery is to make and how hard it is to recycle. A San Diego team swapped it for a water-based, fluorine-free glue, and recycling became a matter of soaking electrodes in water.

  Green Chemistry · Biocatalysis An enzyme is a protein, and a protein that gets too hot unravels like a ball of yarn. That has kept enzymes out of hot chemistry for decades. A German team just put one inside a porous cage and ran it at 100 degrees, twice as fast, twelve times over.

  Chemistry · Carbon Materials Carbon has been giving us diamond and graphite for as long as anyone has looked. Theorists said there should be more, and one has just been made. It is called diamondiyne; it was proposed 35 years ago, and for now it exists in patches ten nanometers wide.

  Water Treatment · Critical Minerals Old phones and cameras carry rare earths. When their metals leach into wastewater, they become both a pollutant and a lost resource. An India-UK team now has a protocol for catching both at once, with a sponge of molecular hooks.

  Cancer Research · Biofabrication Cancer cells in a lab dish sit still in a uniformly warm bath. Real tumors are stretched, squeezed, and warmed all day long. A new 3D-printed tumor model puts those forces back, and the cancer gets meaner.

  Neuroscience · Language & AI When you hear the word "bank," something in your brain decides which kind you mean. For years, nobody could say which cells were doing the deciding. Researchers listened in on single neurons while people heard stories, and used AI language models as a ruler for the answer.