It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Layered hydrogen silicane (L-HSi) represents a promising solid-state hydrogen carrier that can address the drawbacks of conventional hydrogen storage systems, while being cost-effective and sustainable.
Hydrogen, a clean energy source, requires a highly reliable and safe storage system, which is currently lacking. Layered hydrogen silicane (L-HSi) is a promising, safe, lightweight, and energy-efficient solid-state hydrogen carrier with potential for practical utility. This material releases hydrogen when irradiated with low-intensity visible-light sources like sunlight or LEDs. L-HSi represents a new direction for hydrogen carrier system research.
Hydrogen is a promising fuel that can replace conventional fossil fuels as it emits no carbon dioxide during combustion or oxidation and can be produced from a wide range of sources. However, a hydrogen-based economy requires not only clean production but also safe and efficient hydrogen storage and transportation. Current systems pose several drawbacks: compressed hydrogen tanks have low hydrogen densities and pose explosion risks, while liquid hydrogen tanks require extremely low temperatures and considerable energy.
Ammonia is a well-known liquid hydrogen carrier with a high hydrogen density, but its dehydrogenation requires extensive energy and comes with issues such as corrosiveness and toxicity. To solve these issues, researchers have turned towards solid-state hydrogen carrier materials. Unfortunately, most solid-state alloys consist of heavy metals and have limited gravimetric hydrogen capacities.
In a breakthrough, a research team consisting of Mr. Hirona Ito and Professor Masahiro Miyauchi from Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo), Ms. Mio Nakai and Professor Hideyuki Nakano from Kindai University, and Professor Takahiro Kondo from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, discovered a new solid-state hydrogen carrier called layered hydrogen silicane (L-HSi). Hydrogen can be released from L-HSi by visible light irradiation under ambient temperature and pressure. Their findings were published online in the journal Advanced Optical Materials on December 29, 2025.
L-HSi consists of silicon and hydrogen in a 1:1 ratio and exhibits a high gravimetric hydrogen capacity of 3.44 wt.%. Unlike conventional hydrogen storage systems, it is a stable, solid-state hydrogen carrier that can release hydrogen simply by exposure to low-intensity light sources like sunlight or LEDs.
The researchers synthesized L-HSi via decalcification of CaSi2 in a reaction with HCl and tested its hydrogen release properties. They placed L-HSi powder under an argon atmosphere in a gas-flow-type reactor and irradiated it with a xenon lamp at ambient temperature and pressure. The optical bandgap of L-HSi is 2.13 eV, corresponding to a wavelength of 600 nm, which absorbs visible light. The light was turned on 10 minutes after the experiment began and turned off at the 60-minute mark. During irradiation, the researchers clearly observed gaseous hydrogen formation.
Further heating tests under a dark environment and detailed spectroscopic analysis confirmed that hydrogen release was not due to a photothermal process, but instead, driven by bandgap excitation of L-HSi. Specifically, hydrogen was released when irradiated with wavelengths below 600 nm. The material showed a maximum quantum efficiency of 7.3% at 550 nm.
The researchers also conducted long-term irradiation tests, where L-HSi was dispersed in an organic medium inside the dispersed reactor. Under extended visible-light exposure, about 46.7% of the bonded hydrogen atoms were released. The team also confirmed that hydrogen could be effectively produced using low-intensity, economical light sources, including sunlight and LEDs.
L-HSi is a promising solid-state hydrogen carrier that can open new possibilities for safe, lightweight, and energy-efficient hydrogen storage. Looking forward, their research will focus on improving its reversibility and scalability for practical applications.
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About Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo) Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo) was established on October 1, 2024, following the merger between Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) and Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), with the mission of “Advancing science and human wellbeing to create value for and with society.”
Bird’s-eye view of Cobre Panama mine. (Image: Google Earth.)
First Quantum Minerals (TSX: FM) welcomed Panama President Jose Raul Mulino’s plan to allow the removal and processing of stockpiled ore at its shuttered Cobre Panama copper mine, calling it a step toward stabilizing the site while discussions continue on its long-term future.
The Canadian miner said the government began executing a care and maintenance plan last year in preparation for processing about 38 million tonnes of ore mined before operations were suspended in 2023.
The stockpile is expected to yield about 70,000 tonnes of copper, with proceeds from concentrate sales helping offset preservation and maintenance costs in 2026, depending on regulatory timing.
Chief executive Tristan Pascall said the forthcoming permit is a positive development but does not amount to a reopening of the mine, adding that First Quantum remains committed to dialogue to resolve the dispute.
The company said it had revised its copper production guidance for the next two years. It nows expects to generate 375,000 to 435,000 tonnes of copper this year; 410,000 to 470,000 tonnes in 2027 and 430,000 to 490,000 tonnes in 2028.
BMO Metals analyst Matt Murphy said the bank sees the guidance adjustments as “a modest negative”, as First Quantum’s 2026 copper production guidance was reduced by about 15,000 tonnes. He noted the market may take some comfort in the likelihood that the miner could begin processing stockpiled ore at Cobre Panama in the coming months.
Murphy added that while 2027 guidance was also lowered by 20,000 tonnes, the 2028 production range represents a 20,000-tonne year-over-year increase.
Initial actions
The Mulino administration last year began taking steps to extract value from the idled mine, delivering key measures by the fourth quarter that included royalty payments, the launch of an independent audit and a partial restart of on-site power generation.
Authorities also sold more than 122,000 tonnes of copper concentrate stored at the site, generating nearly $30 million in royalties that were directed to public works such as health centre upgrades, school expansions, road repairs and improvements to water and electrical systems.
The plan allowed for the restart of the mine’s power plant, with the first 150-megawatt unit commissioned in the fourth quarter and reaching design capacity. The plant is now operating at an average of about 120 MW to support preservation activities and supply Panama’s national grid, while a second 150 MW unit is scheduled to be commissioned this month.
First Quantum and government officials said removing, processing and exporting the stockpiled ore would reduce environmental and operational risks linked to long-term storage, including the potential for acid rock drainage, while providing feed for the tailings management facility.
Timeline
On a preliminary timeline, processing could begin about three months after formal regulatory approval and take roughly one year to complete.
The work is expected to provide an economic boost, adding about 700 direct jobs to the current workforce of roughly 1,600, alongside indirect employment in transportation, logistics, equipment supply and food services.
Pascall said the company supports the President’s call for transparency and engagement and remains committed to dialogue to achieve an amicable and durable resolution at Cobre Panama for Panama and its people.
First Quantum said all activities will be carried out in coordination with the government and in strict compliance with the approved plan.
The mine once supplied about 1% of global copper production, and its closure has weighed on both Panama’s economy and First Quantum’s financial performance. Before the shutdown, Cobre Panama produced 350,000 tonnes of copper in 2022, accounting for about 5% of Panama’s GDP. According to the company, would have delivered $1 billion to the treasury and $2 billion to local suppliers if operations had continued.
Mulino said earlier this week the government aims to decide on the mine’s future by June.
First Quantum is scheduled to release its fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 financial and operating results on Feb. 10, after the close of trading in Toronto.
First Quantum backs Panama’s plan to allow stockpile processing at shuttered copper mine
Cobre Panama mine was First Quantum Minerals’ largest copper operation. (Image courtesy of Cobre Panama.)
Canadian miner First Quantum Minerals (TSX: FM) on Thursday welcomed Panama President Jose Raul Mulino’s plan, announced early this month, to allow the removal and processing of stockpiled ore at its shuttered Cobre Panama copper mine.
The company said processing of the ore stockpiles will allow it to mitigate the environmental and operational risks associated with acid rock drainage and ensure a supply of feed material to the leftover, or tailings, management facility.
First Quantum is awaiting formal approvals to carry out these activities in coordination with the Panama government.
The Cobre Panama mine, one of the world’s largest open-pit copper deposits, was closed in 2023 following protests from local residents over tax contributions and environmental impacts.
The processing of stockpiles does not constitute reopening the mine, and will not require any new extraction, drilling or blasting, the company said in a statement.
The mine formerly provided 1% of the global copper supply, and its closure has had an impact on both Panama’s and First Quantum’s financial prospects.
Earlier on Thursday, Mulino said the government aims to make a decision on the future of the copper mine by June.
(Reporting by Pooja Menon in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)
Ivanhoe meets 2025 output targets as Kamoa-Kakula smelter ramps up
A smelter operator takes a sample while 99.7%-pure copper anodes are poured and cast at the Kamoa-Kakula copper smelter. Credit: Ivanhoe Mines
Ivanhoe Mines said on Thursday it met its 2025 output targets at the Kamoa-Kakula copper complex and Kipushi zinc mine in Congo and issued guidance pointing to a steady recovery after a year of disruptions and a pivotal smelter ramp‑up.
Kamoa‑Kakula is widely viewed as one of the world’s most significant new copper sources, making details of Canadian miner Ivanhoe’s 2025 output and steady 2026 targets critical in a market facing tight supply and slow project growth.
The mine’s ability to hold production within guidance, alongside the ramp‑up of its new smelter, reinforces Ivanhoe’s rising influence in the copper sector, while record output at Kipushi underscores its growing weight in zinc.
Kamoa-Kakula spent 2025 tackling water inflows that restricted access to higher‑grade ore and weighed on recoveries, forcing a staged de-watering push.
Ivanhoe said Kamoa-Kakula delivered 388,838 metric tons of copper in concentrate in 2025, landing within its 380,000–420,000 ton guidance range.
The result reflected record throughput from the Phase 3 concentrator and the early benefits of destocking as the mine transitions to on‑site smelting.
Ivanhoe reaffirmed 2026 copper output guidance at 380,000–420,000 tons, saying production should strengthen as underground dewatering progresses and higher‑grade areas become accessible.
A key milestone for the complex was the late‑2025 start‑up of Africa’s largest copper smelter, which the company said is now averaging 500 tons per day of 99.7%‑pure copper anodes.
First exports are expected imminently, it said.
Ivanhoe said the ramp‑up would cut logistics costs by more than halving the tons of material transported per unit of copper, while generating new revenue streams through sulphuric acid production.
Kamoa-Kakula’s 2026 copper sales are expected to be 20,000 tons higher than production as the inventory of unsold copper concentrate is destocked, mainly during the first half of the year, the results showed.
At Kipushi, Ivanhoe reported a record 203,168 tons of zinc in concentrate in 2025, achieving guidance after a strong second‑half recovery supported by improved power stability and a de-bottlenecking program completed ahead of schedule.
Ivanhoe set 2026 zinc guidance at 240,000–290,000 tons, adding that December production alone implied an annualized run rate exceeding 270,000 tons.
(By Maxwell Akalaare Adombila; Editing by Alexander Smith)
Codelco submits $1.3B plan to prolong Radomiro Tomic mine life to 2058
Chile’s state-run miner Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, on Tuesday submitted a $1.3 billion continuity project to Chile’s environmental authority to request an extension of its leaching operations at its Radomiro Tomic mine until 2058.
The proposal aims to boost the mine’s capacity to an average of 725,000 tonnes per day, up from its current level of 675,000 daily tonnes, requiring pit expansion and new waste dumps and ore stockpile areas.
The plan seeks to extend the operation of the mine’s chlorinated leaching process at an average annual rate of 154,000 tons per day.
Leaching is a method of extracting metals and minerals from rock using liquid chemicals instead of melting or crushing.
The project also seeks to provide operational continuity to its waste treatment and dumping line, which uses chemical solutions to extract copper from ore rather than smelting.
Plans include expanding support facilities and installing a hydraulic barrier system with four wells to control water infiltration in the industrial area.
The project includes truck transport of 20,000 daily tons of ore or waste per year to Codelco’s Chuquicamata facility over the next 10 years.
Codelco’s Radomiro Tomic mine is one of the company’s three most prominent mines in Chile.
(By Fabian Cambero; Editing by Natalia Siniawski)
Codelco gets environmental permit for $2.8B Ministro Hales mine extension
Chilean state-run miner Codelco said on Wednesday it had received environmental approval to extend the life of its Ministro Hales copper mine until 2054, a project that will require an investment of $2.8 billion.
The world’s largest copper producer said the initiative will allow the mine to increase production to 200,000 tons per year, up from the current 170,000 tons.
(By Fabian Cambero; Editing by Sarah Morland)
Sandvik partners with Vale Base Metals for autonomous surface drill fleet expansions
Sandvik will supply 16 surface drills with AutoMine readiness for Vale Base Metals’ copper operations in Brazil.
The orders include nine Sandvik DR416i rotary blasthole drill rigs and seven Leopard DI650i down-the-hole (DTH) drill rigs, as well as multi-year service and rock tools supply. The rigs will be equipped for fully autonomous drilling with Sandvik’s industry-leading AutoMine system.
Sandvik DR416i is a powerful and technologically advanced drill rig, designed for drilling rotary from 269.9 to 406.4 millimeters (10.625 to 16 inches). The Leopard DI650i is a self-contained, crawler-mounted, intelligent DTH drill rig for demanding high-capacity production drilling and pre-split, covering hole diameters from 115 to 203 millimeters (4.5 to 9 inches).
AutoMine is the most advanced level of automation and includes the AutoCycle capabilities. The AutoCycle enables fully autonomous operation of the surface drilling fleet, allowing multiple drill rigs to be operated from a remote-control room. This enhances operational safety, increases productivity and improves fleet utilization.
The equipment will be used at the Salobo and Sossego operations. Located in Canaã dos Carajás, southeastern Pará, the Sossego mine complex was inaugurated in 2004 as Vale’s first copper operation. The Salobo mining complex is located in Marabá, also in southeastern Pará. It holds the largest copper mineral reserve in Brazil.
“We’re excited to grow our surface partnership with Vale Base Metals, where we will provide our latest technologies and collaborate to optimize productivity and cost efficiencies,” said Mats Eriksson, president of mining at Sandvik.
“This achievement also marks a significant milestone for Sandvik … demonstrating our ability to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of surface solutions across all divisions. Our journey with Vale Base Metals began in 2021 with the initial DR416i trial at the Sossego mine.”
The orders were mostly booked in the second and third quarters of 2025, with the remainder in 2026.
Deliveries of the Sandvik DR416i rotary rigs began in the fourth quarter and will continue into Q2 2027. Four DI650i rigs will be delivered this year, and the final three in 2029.
Thursday, January 15, 2026
Building the world’s first graviton detector
With support from the W. M. Keck Foundation, a Stevens–Yale collaboration is now transforming graviton detection from a long-standing impossibility into a first-of-its-kind experimental program
Hoboken, NJ., January 15, 2026 - Modern physics has a problem. Its two main pillars are quantum theory and Einstein’s theory of general relativity, yet these two frameworks are seemingly incompatible. Quantum theory describes nature in terms of discrete quantum particles and interactions, while general relativity treats gravity as a smooth curvature of space and time. A true unification requires gravity itself to be quantum, mediated by particles known as “gravitons.” However, detecting even a single graviton was long thought fundamentally impossible. As a result, the problem of quantum gravity remained largely theoretical, with no experimentally grounded “theory of everything” in sight.
This situation changed very recently. In 2024, Igor Pikovski, assistant professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, and his team published a discovery in Nature Communications showing that graviton detection is, in fact, possible. “For a long time, graviton detection was considered so hopeless that it was not treated as an experimental problem at all,” says Pikovski. “What we found is that this conclusion no longer holds in the era of modern quantum technology.”
The key is a new perspective that synthesizes two major experimental advances. The first is the detection of gravitational waves: ripples in space-time produced by collisions of black holes or neutron stars. Predicted by Einstein over a century ago, gravitational waves were first observed in 2015 and are now detected routinely, opening an entirely new window onto the universe. If gravity ultimately obeys quantum physics, gravitational waves would be described as vast collections of gravitons acting in concert, appearing indistinguishable from a classical wave in current observations.
The second advance comes from quantum engineering. Over the past decade, physicists have learned how to cool, control, and measure increasingly massive systems in genuine quantum states, bringing quantum phenomena far beyond the atomic scale. In a landmark experiment in 2022, the laboratory of Jack Harris, professor at Yale University, demonstrated control and measurement of individual vibrational quanta of superfluid helium weighing over a nanogram.
Pikovski realized that if these two capabilities are combined, it becomes possible to absorb and detect a single graviton; a passing gravitational wave can, in principle, transfer exactly one quantum of energy (i.e. a single graviton) into a sufficiently massive quantum system. The resulting energy shift is small but can be resolved. The true difficulty is that gravitons almost never interact with matter. But for quantum systems at the kilogram scale - rather than the microscopic scale - exposed to intense gravitational waves from merging black holes or neutron stars, absorbing a single graviton becomes possible.
Building on this recent discovery, Pikovski and Harris have now teamed up to construct the world’s first experiment explicitly designed to detect individual gravitons. With support from the W. M. Keck Foundation, the team is developing a superfluid-helium resonator on the centimeter scale, approaching the regime required to absorb single gravitons from astrophysical gravitational waves.
“We already have the essential tools,” says Harris. “We can detect single quanta in macroscopic quantum systems. Now it’s a matter of scaling.”
The experiment aims to immerse a gram-scale cylindrical resonator in a superfluid-helium container, cool the system to its quantum ground state, and use laser-based measurements to detect individual phonons - the vibrational quanta into which gravitons are converted. The detector builds on systems already operating in the Harris laboratory, but pushes them into a new regime, scaling the mass to the gram level while preserving exquisite quantum sensitivity. Demonstrating the successful operation of this platform will establish a blueprint for a next iteration that can be scaled to the sensitivity required for direct graviton detection, opening a new experimental frontier in quantum gravity.
“Quantum physics began with experiments on light and matter,” says Pikovski. “Our goal now is to bring gravity into this experimental domain, and to study gravitons the way physicists first studied photons over a century ago.”
About Stevens Institute of Technology Stevens is a premier, private research university situated in Hoboken, New Jersey. Since our founding in 1870, technological innovation has been the hallmark of Stevens’ education and research. Within the university’s three schools and one college, more than 8,000 undergraduate and graduate students collaborate closely with faculty in an interdisciplinary, student-centric, entrepreneurial environment. Academic and research programs spanning business, computing, engineering, the arts and other disciplines actively advance the frontiers of science and leverage technology to confront our most pressing global challenges. The university continues to be consistently ranked among the nation’s leaders in career services, post-graduation salaries of alumni and return on tuition investment.
About the W. M. Keck Foundation The W. M. Keck Foundation was established in 1954 in Los Angeles by William Myron Keck, founder of The Superior Oil Company. One of the nation’s largest philanthropic organizations, the W. M. Keck Foundation supports outstanding science, engineering and medical research. The Foundation also supports undergraduate education and maintains a program within Southern California to support arts and culture, education, health and community service projects.
