Researchers estimate that waste streams from Alberta’s Athabasca Oil Sands Region contain substantial quantities of titanium, zirconium, rare earth elements, vanadium, and nickel that could represent secondary critical mineral resources. However, complex mineralogy, stable metal-bearing compounds, environmental risks, and regulatory challenges mean economically viable recovery will require substantial technological development.
Researchers developed CoatingDet, a publicly available dataset containing 5,416 high-resolution images of wind turbine tower coatings captured under real manufacturing conditions, with annotations for critical defects and benign surface particles. Validation with YOLOv11n and RT-DETR showed the dataset can support reproducible deep learning-based inspection while highlighting the importance of lighting conditions and class imbalance for reliable deployment.
A prospective life cycle assessment of 37 metals found that net-zero energy technologies will increase mining-related environmental damage, especially from copper, nickel, and aluminum. Even so, the modeled climate benefits of deeper decarbonization outweighed the added metal burden by roughly 400 to 1.
Researchers define Africa’s “Tesla Paradox” as the divide between the clean-energy promise of electric vehicles and the economic, environmental, and political burdens concentrated in mineral-rich African countries. The authors argue that limited local processing and weak governance restrict value capture while shifting ecological and social risks onto mining communities.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory will lead a Genesis Mission project to help secure the nation’s critical mineral supply by developing AI tools to improve recovery of valuable transition metals from spent lithium-ion batteries.
Researchers estimated that dormant smartphones in Norway exceeded 10 million devices by 2024, substantially outnumbering the 6.8 million phones still in use. Across three analyzed components, active and dormant devices held about 80 tonnes of critical raw materials, although current recycling systems struggle to recover their rare-earth elements.
Modeling suggests that overlooking lithium, cobalt, and nickel constraints could overestimate China’s EV ownership by 42% in 2060 while underestimating cumulative CO2 emissions by 57% and transition costs by 6%. Recycling and lower-cobalt batteries could ease supply pressures, but net-zero transport would still require carbon-neutral or negative-emissions electricity or carbon removal.
Researchers developed a thiourea-derived surface treatment that combines a sub-nanometer sulfur-rich coating with a spinel-like layer to protect lithium-rich manganese oxide cathodes and accelerate lithium-ion transport. In laboratory solid-state half-cells, the modified cathode delivered 220.2 mAh g?¹ and retained approximately 97% of its capacity after 600 cycles at 1 C.
Researchers combined density functional theory, machine-learning-enhanced transition-state calculations, and microkinetic modeling to screen 12 Ni-based ternary alloys for nitric oxide reduction under representative aircraft exhaust conditions. The analysis identified four promising candidates, with Ni-Cr-Pt offering the strongest predicted balance of catalytic activity, stability, carbon resistance, and material cost, although experimental validation is still required.
In organic photovoltaics (OPV), low-energy spin-triplet excitons (T1) have long been regarded as “energy traps” that often dissipate energy as heat rather than contributing to light-to-electricity conversion.
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