Energy

Boston.com reporter Matt Rocheleau reports on how Professor Jeffrey Grossman and postdoctoral associate Timothy Kucharski have developed a new material that can produce solar power for times when the sun is not shining.

Umair Irfan and ClimateWire report on new research that helps explain how lithium batteries operate. The findings could lead to new methods for optimizing battery performance.

Writing for Scientific American, Geoffrey Giller explores a new device developed by MIT researchers that combines elements of both photovoltaic cells and solar-thermal thermal systems to generate power from the sun.

“With the push of a button Monday, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology resumed efforts to try to harness the process that powers the sun — nuclear fusion — in the hope of developing a stable, nonpolluting source of energy,” reports The Boston Globe’s Erin Ailworth on the restarting of MIT’s Alcator C-mod fusion reactor.

WBUR reports that, “now that federal funding has been restored for a fusion energy research project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is proposing long-term funding for the project.”