Researchers in China have identified various techniques to transform plastic waste into carbon materials capable of improving batteries and supercapacitors. This initiative aims to address the environmental problem of approximately 400 million tons of plastic waste generated annually by leveraging its carbon composition for advanced battery components.

Scientists including Jin Yuan, Gaixiu Yang, Xiaoyue Zhou, Jianlin Huang, and Yan Chen have analyzed methods like instantaneous Joule heating, which uses electrical impulses to reach extremely high temperatures, reorganizing the plastic's chemical components to obtain materials such as graphene, nanotubes, and porous carbon materials.

These materials are particularly useful for lithium batteries and supercapacitors due to their excellent electrical and structural properties, with graphene offering high conductivity and porous carbons facilitating ion movement and storage.

One example cited in the Chinese review describes a porous carbon obtained through pyrolysis of mixed plastics and subsequent chemical activation, which was used as a cathode component in a lithium-selenium battery, achieving a specific capacity of 655.2 mAh/g after 150 cycles.

However, scaling these processes to an industrial level presents significant challenges, including high energy consumption, chemical treatments, purification stages, and issues with additives in mixed plastic waste.

👉 Read the full article on Gizmodo en Español

In 2026, Ukraine has escalated its attacks beyond Russian oil infrastructure, now targeting and significantly damaging Russia's cloud and AI infrastructure.

A primary target has been Yandex, a company described as Russia's equivalent of Google, Amazon, and Uber combined.

A third devastating attack on Yandex resulted in the complete shutdown of its data center in the Vladimir region, with other facilities in Kaluga and Sasovo also being hit.

These attacks reportedly impacted facilities housing two of the three supercomputers used for Yandex's AI model development.

Consequently, critical services like Yandex's Alice voice assistant, Yandex Music, and Telemost (its version of Google Meet) were disabled, leading to widespread outages for other services relying on Yandex Compute Cloud.

Given that Yandex Cloud provides specialized solutions for healthcare and stores Russian citizens' private data for government use, these disruptions are causing extensive chaos for both consumers and government services.

👉 Read the full article on Gizmodo

The content of the provided URL was inaccessible. Therefore, a detailed summary for this article cannot be provided.

👉 Read the full article on WIRED