New material can harvest sunlight by day and release heat at night

As solar power becomes a bigger part of our overall energy mix, scientists are working on more efficient ways of storing the power of the Sun for use during the night-time, or on particularly cloudy days. And now a new type of material has been developed that can do just that - store solar energy when it's in abundance, and release it as heat later on as required.

New material converts CO2 into clean fuel with unprecedented efficiency

A new material made from microscopic layers of cobalt can convert carbon dioxide gas into formate - a fuel that can be burned with no toxic byproducts and used as a clean energy source.

Developed by a team of researchers in China, the material could be one way to deal with the 36 gigatonnes of CO2 we release into the atmosphere each year due to fossil fuel use. Scientists have been struggling for decades to come up with an energy-efficient way to transform CO2 into something useful, and early testing points to this new material as being one of the most promising options we’ve seen so far.

Physicists achieve early stages of a new, solid state of hydrogen

By subjecting hydrogen molecules to record pressures more than 3 million times that of Earth's atmosphere, physicists in the UK have achieved the early stages of a never-before-seen hydrogen phase, known as Phase V.

Observations of the chemical bonds that make up the resulting material suggest the possible appearance of a metallic form of hydrogen - something that was predicted back in 1935, but had failed to be convincingly recreated in the lab. It’s thought that this elusive hydrogen metal can conduct electricity with no resistance, and exists in large amounts inside Jupiter and Saturn.

World's most expensive material

Scientists create world's most expensive material, valued at $145 million per gram

They just sold the equivalent of one-third the weight of a human hair for $32,000.

If your life’s ambition is to become very, very rich, consider getting into the business of producing endohedral fullerenes - the world’s most expensive material.

Scientists at Oxford University in the UK announced that a spin-off lab called Designer Carbon Materials is now producing endohedral fullerenes, and they recently sold off their first sample of the material to the tune of