An ultraporous compound can extract water molecules from dry desert air, store them as tiny "icicles" and then release them as clean drinking water. A new study has shown this novel humidity sponge's developers how it works in detail, taking it a step closer to practical applications. Along with government, industry and university partners, the researchers are working to turn their project into portable hydration systems capable of conjuring fresh water almost anywhere in an increasingly thirsty world. The specific mechanism underlying these superior water-extraction abilities has now been explained by an international team led by University of California, Berkeley, chemist Omar Yaghi . "We figured out which water comes first and the way it fills up, step by step," he says. Yaghi's team had previously developed MOF-303 specifically for water extraction and successfully demonstrated it in dry laboratory conditions.

From computers to credit cards to cloud servers, today's technology relies on magnets to hold encoded data in place on a storage device. But a magnet's size limits storage capacity; even a paper-thin magnet takes up space that could be better used for encoding information. Now, for a study published in Nature Communications, researchers have engineered a magnet among the world's thinnest—a flexible sheet of zinc oxide and cobalt just one atom thick. "That means we can store larger amounts of data using the same amount of materials," says University of California, Berkeley, engineer Jie Yao , the study's senior author.

If the conditions are just right, some of the electrons inside a material will arrange themselves into a tidy honeycomb pattern — like a solid within a solid. Physicists have now directly imaged these 'Wigner crystals', named after the Hungarian-born theorist Eugene Wigner, who first imagined them almost 90 years ago. Researchers had convincingly created Wigner crystals and measured their properties before, but this is the first time that anyone has actually taken a snapshot of the patterns, says study co-author Feng Wang, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. "If you say you have an electron crystal, show me the crystal," he says. For more on this story, please see our press release at Berkeley News

Nuclear engineering students at Berkeley have built a tabletop neutron source that's relatively cheap, portable, and able to produce a narrow but useful range of neutron energies without undesirable radioactive byproducts. "Any hospital in the country could have this thing, they could build it for a few hundred thousand dollars to make local, very short-lived medical isotopes -- you could just run them up the elevator to the patient," says nuclear engineering professor Karl van Bibber, the faculty member overseeing the project. "It has application in geochronology, neutron activation analysis for law enforcement agencies -- when the FBI wants to determine the provenance of a sample as evidence, for example -- neutron radiography, to look for cracks in aircraft parts. This is very compact, the size of a little convection oven; I think it's great, we are excited about this." This story originated at Berkeley News.

Scientists have invented a way to make compostable plastics break down within a few weeks with just heat and water. The new process, developed by researchers at University of California, Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, involves embedding polyester-eating enzymes in the plastic as it's made. "If you have the enzyme only on the surface of the plastic, it would just etch down very slowly," said Ting Xu, UC Berkeley professor of materials science and engineering and of chemistry. "You want it distributed nanoscopically everywhere so that, essentially, each of them just needs to eat away their polymer neighbors, and then the whole material disintegrates." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic also appeared in Spektrum.de, and IFLScience.

Most plastics advertised as "biodegradable" aren't all that degradable. In fact, researchers estimate that most of these supposedly eco-friendly plastics end up in landfills and last just as long as forever plastics. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new method for composting biodegradable plastics -- one that actually works. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Guide dogs offer social, physical and mental benefits for some people who are blind, but training them is a costly and lengthy process, so researchers have created a robotic alternative. Zhongyu Li at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues programmed a four-legged, dog-like robot to safely guide people with a lead, even when faced with obstacles and narrow passages.

The recent proliferation of believable deepfake videos - including ones featuring actor Tom Cruise - have raised new fears about phony events that can be used to sway public opinion. Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says that the Cruise videos demonstrate a step up in the technology's evolving sophistication. "This is clearly a new category of deepfake that we have not seen before," said Farid, who researches digital forensics and misinformation. Deepfakes have been around for years, but, Farid says, the technology has been steadily advancing. "Every three to four months a video hits Tik Tok, YouTube, whatever, and it's just — wow, this is much, much better than before," he said. Another story on this topic appeared on ABC News.

New research throws wide open the amount of information that can be simultaneously transmitted by a single light source. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a new way to harness properties of light waves that can radically increase the amount of data they carry. "It's the first time that lasers producing twisted light have been directly multiplexed," said Boubacar Kanté, Berkeley's Chenming Hu associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences. "We've been experiencing an explosion of data in our world, and the communication channels we have now will soon be insufficient for what we need." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

The polymeric flame retardant PolyFR was developed as an "eco-friendly" substitute for more problematic flame retardants, but new research suggests the compound, commonly used in foam plastic building insulation, could be more harmful than anticipated. In a new paper, scientists argue the widespread adoption of PolyFR is premature, and that more research is needed to understand the polymer's exposure risk. "Our paper points out a lack of knowledge along the lifecycle of PolyFR and states that more information is needed before such chemicals are widely used," said study co-author Arlene Blum, research associate in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley.

Scientists have, for the first time, measured the bond distance of einsteinium, one of the most radioactive and difficult to make elements on the periodic table. Researchers detailed rare experiments on the element, which carries the atomic number 99, in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. "[The finding] is significant because the more we understand about its chemical behavior, the more we can apply this understanding for the development of new materials or new technologies," said UC Berkeley assistant professor of nuclear engineering and study author Rebecca Abergel.