How electric cars could help tropical cities run on solar

A Columbia Engineering study shows how neighborhood-level electric vehicle charging could let tropical cities expand solar energy without costly grid upgrades.

Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science

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These illustrations show how electric vehicles can help balance a city’s power grid as solar generation fluctuates during passing thunderstorms.

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Credit: Urban Systems Engineering Lab

In tropical cities, afternoon thunderstorms can plunge entire neighborhoods into brief moments of darkness. 

When civil engineer Markus Schläpfer moved to Singapore a decade ago, he recognized these thunderstorms as an emerging engineering challenge. For cities that hope to run on solar energy, these short periods without strong sunlight could destabilize urban power grids and undermine reliability.

In a new paper, published April 7 in Nature Communications,  Schläpfer and collaborators explain how tropical cities, which will soon contain half of the global population, can address this problem without expensive infrastructure build-outs. For Schläpfer, the solution lies in connecting electric vehicles to the grid. 

"If you have a thunderstorm moving over an area with solar energy, you can have your electric cars that are parked serve as the energy source and balance out this lack of energy generation," said Schläpfer, assistant professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics at Columbia Engineering. “When the thunderstorm moves away, the cars are charged again by the photovoltaics.”

The hidden cost of going solar

Solar photovoltaics (PV) have become one of the cheapest sources of energy on the planet. PV energy is inexpensive, carbon-free, and reliable — when the sun is shining. When thunderstorms cut off power generation in one neighborhood, electricity has to travel from neighboring regions that are generating power. While that trip may only be a mile or two, the amount of electricity flowing through powerlines can easily overwhelm the grid’s capacity. 

Traditionally, fixing a problem like this would require new infrastructure, but that comes with significant drawbacks. In dense cities, such projects can be staggeringly expensive. Underground transmission lines in Singapore, for example, cost around 60 million Singapore dollars per kilometer. 

“Building new infrastructure is extremely challenging and expensive in dense cities,” Schläpfer said. “This is a way to use the existing network in a more efficient way and integrate more solar photovoltaics, which would otherwise need more transmission line capacity.”

Batteries already on the road

Researchers across the world are exploring the possibility of using electric vehicles — namely their batteries — as a substitute for new grid capacity. The idea is simple: since electric vehicles have high-capacity batteries that connect to the grid through charging cables, the grid should be able to use the energy stored in these batteries as a backup during short-lived lulls in PV generation. 

"Car batteries can feed in the electricity stored in their batteries to the grid," Schläpfer explained. "We do not need to import the electricity from nearby neighborhoods. Therefore, we do not need to install a new cable.”

When a thunderstorm cuts off solar generation in a neighborhood, nearby parked cars discharge stored energy into the local grid, absorbing the shortfall without requiring power to travel from elsewhere. When the storm passes, the panels recharge the cars.

The right scale for the problem

Schläpfer’s paper demonstrates the importance of scale in developing a strategy for charging and discharging EV batteries for this purpose. A conventional city-wide optimization strategy can make things worse: by smoothing aggregate demand, it allows local imbalances to accumulate, forcing the system to push large amounts of electricity across longer distances. According to the team’s research, loads traveling through some transmission lines more than doubled during thunderstorms.

A better approach is managing charging neighborhood by neighborhood — in this case, across Singapore's 55 urban planning areas — to reduce maximum line loads by roughly 18 percent on storm days while also smoothing the broader daily demand curve. 

"It's one of those things that only seems intuitive once you see it," Schläpfer said. "This potential hasn’t really been explored before."

Where cars park matters

The method's effectiveness depends on where cars are parked. Residential neighborhoods empty out during the day, leaving fewer batteries available when solar generation peaks. Commercial districts show the reverse. The researchers mapped these patterns using anonymized, aggregated mobile phone data, which provided a level of detail that allowed for more accurate models.

Crucially, the approach works even where car ownership is low. Singapore has roughly one vehicle per eight residents. 

"This solution is really working in very car-light environments," Schläpfer said. "We need only a small number of cars, and it works."

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Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-026-71123-6 

Method of Research

News article

Article Title

How Electric Cars Could Help Tropical Cities Run on Solar

Article Publication Date

7-Apr-2026

Water on the moon? New study narrows down the mostly likely locations

University of Colorado at Boulder

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Water likely accumulated on the moon slowly over billions of years, rather than during one big event, according to a new study by an international team of scientists

The researchers, including Paul Hayne, a planetary scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder, published their findings April 7 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The study gets at a lunar mystery that has puzzled scientists for decades. Observations from NASA missions and other sources have provided tantalizing hints that water might be plentiful on the moon. It gathers as ice in the deep, dark craters around the moon’s South Pole.

But how that ice got there, or why it seems to exist in some craters but not others, hasn’t been clear.

The team’s findings can’t pin down the exact source, but they rule out a few possibilities—including water arriving on the moon at once on a humongous comet crashing into the lunar surface.

“It looks like the moon’s oldest craters also have the most ice,” said Hayne, an associate professor in the Department of Astrophysics and Planetary Sciences. “That implies the moon has been accumulating water more or less continuously for as much as 3 or 3.5 billion years.”

Water on the moon would be a goldmine for astronauts, Hayne said. Future lunar explorers could mine ice for drinking water, or even to produce rocket fuel by splitting apart the hydrogen and oxygen atoms. 

“Finding water beyond Earth in liquid and usable form is one of the most important challenges in astronomy,” said Oded Aharonson, lead author of the study and a planetary scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, in a press release [link to WIS release].

Permanent lunar shadows

Hayne cited several possible sources for the moon’s water: Volcanoes in the distant past may have transported water from deep inside the moon to its surface. Water may have also traveled to the moon on comets or asteroids, and it may have arrived via solar wind—a steady stream of charged particles that flows away from the sun and into the solar system.

“Through the solar wind, a constant stream of hydrogen bombards the moon, and some of that hydrogen can be converted to water on the lunar surface,” Hayne said.

Regardless of where the water came from, scientists like Hayne are fairly certain that ice has built up in what are known as “cold traps”—craters on the lunar surface that exist in permanent shadow and haven’t seen the sun for, in some cases, billions of years.

Observations from the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) instrument on the NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter(LRO), which launched in 2009, found evidence of what might be ice in some of those craters.  

“What’s clear is that the ice has a patchy distribution,” Hayne said. “It’s not concentrated in the same quantities in every crater. And there was no great explanation for that.”

Ice boxes

Hayne, Aharonson and co-author Norbert Schörghofer wanted to come up with an explanation—and to do that, they hit rewind on the moon’s history. Aharaonson led the work as a visiting scholar at CU Boulder in 2025. The team used lunar surface temperature data from LRO’s Diviner instrument and a series of computer simulations to estimate the evolution of craters on the lunar surface.

Hayne noted that the moon didn’t always sit in the orientation we know today. Instead, its tilt relative to Earth has shifted over time. As a result, craters that are in shadow today may not always have been in shadow.

Drawing on their simulations, the researchers came up with a list of the moon’s cold traps that have been darkest the longest.

The team also discovered something intriguing: The moon’s oldest and darkest craters are also where LAMP had seen the greatest signs of ice.

The team’s results may give astronauts hints about where to go looking for water. The moon’s Haworth Crater, which sits near the South Pole, for example, has likely been in shadow for more than 3 billion years. It’s a top candidate for storing a lot of ice, Hayne said.

The planetary scientist said that researchers need to collect more detailed observations of craters on the moon that may harbor ice. He’s developing a new instrument to do just that called the Lunar Compact Infrared Imaging System (L-CIRiS), which NASA plans to deploy near the moon’s South Pole in late 2027

“Ultimately, the question of the source of the moon’s water will only be solved by sample analysis,” he said. “We will need to go to the moon to analyze those samples there or find ways to bring them from the moon back to Earth.”

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Journal

Nature Astronomy

DOI

10.1038/s41550-026-02822-9 

 

‘Reinforced concrete’ architecture enables strong composites with superior electromagnetic wave absorption

HEP Data Cooperation Journals

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Credit: HIGHER EDUCATION PRESS

With the rapid development of wireless communication technologies, electromagnetic radiation pollution has become a growing concern. This highlights an urgent need for high-performance electromagnetic wave absorbing (EWA) materials that are lightweight, broadband, well impedance-matched, and mechanically robust. However, achieving both superior absorption and high mechanical strength in a single material remains challenging. Although Ti3C2Tx MXene shows promise due to its layered structure and electrical properties, its high reflectivity, low absorption, and brittleness limit its application.
Inspired by the “reinforced concrete” concept, this study proposes a novel composite design. Core-shell structured CF@PANI acts as the “reinforcement”, while a micro-layered Fe3O4/PDA/Ti3C2Tx serves as the “concrete” matrix. These components are integrated through a combined method of in-situ polymerization, mineralization, and electrostatic self-assembly, driven by charge attraction and hydrogen bonding.
Structural characterization confirmed the successful formation of the core-shell CF@PANI and its uniform composite with Fe3O4/PDA/Ti3C2Tx at an optimal ratio, creating a hierarchical porous structure with multiple heterogeneous interfaces. The composite with a CF@PANI to Fe3O4/PDA/Ti3C2Tx mass ratio of 0.75 (CPFT-0.75) demonstrated exceptional EMW absorption: a minimum reflection loss of −37.34 dB at 13.76 GHz with a thickness of only 1.5 mm, an effective absorption bandwidth of 3.28 GHz, and near-perfect impedance matching. This performance stems from synergistic interfacial polarization, conductive loss, magnetic loss, and multiple scattering. Furthermore, the “reinforced concrete” structure effectively toughened the material. The CPFT-1.0 sample exhibited a balanced rigidity and toughness, with a Young’s modulus of 20.8 MPa, tensile strength of 3.63 MPa, and fracture elongation of 10.98 %. This work provides a viable strategy for designing lightweight, high-performance, and mechanically robust EWA materials by biomimetic structural design.
The work titled “Strengthening of Fe3O4/Ti3C2Tx MXene/CF@PANI composites with ‘reinforced concrete’ structure and high electromagnetic wave absorption performance”, was published on Acta Physico-Chimica Sinica (published on January 24, 2026).
 

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Journal

Acta Physico-Chimica Sinica

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Strengthening of Fe3O4/Ti3C2Tx MXene/CF@PANI composites with ‘reinforced concrete’ structure and high electromagnetic wave absorption performance

 

Engineered bacteria unlock seaweed potential: dual enzyme system enables complete alginate depolymerization

HEP Data Cooperation Journals

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Growth and production of riboflavin in E. coli using alginate depolymerized by heterologously expressed alyB and alyD as sole carbon source.

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Credit: HIGHER EDUCATION PRESS

Alginate constitutes 30%–60% of the polysaccharide content in brown seaweed and represents a promising renewable resource. However, its high molecular weight and complex block structure have limited industrial applications. The research team heterologously expressed alyB and alyD genes from the marine bacterium Vibrio algivorus in C. glutamicum, an industrial workhorse traditionally used for amino acid production.
Findings revealed that AlyB and AlyD possess distinct but complementary modes of action. AlyB exhibits endo-activity, cleaving alginate internally to produce oligomers, while AlyD acts exo-lytically on these products to release monosaccharides. Together, they achieve complete depolymerization. Notably, the researchers discovered that AlyB displays C-5 epimerization activity, which is the first report of such activity in the PL7 family of polysaccharide lyases.
To demonstrate practical application, the team used the enzyme-treated alginate to support growth of engineered E. coli producing riboflavin (vitamin B2), achieving concentrations of 2.1 μg/mL. The research provides a foundation for developing integrated bioprocesses that couple alginate degradation with biosynthesis, potentially enabling sustainable production of food additives, biochemicals, and biofuels from seaweed resources.
The work entitled “Heterologous expression and functional characterization of two alginate lyases in Corynebacterium glutamicum” was published on Systems Microbiology and Biomanufacturing (published on January 07, 2026).
 

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Journal

Systems Microbiology and Biomanufacturing

DOI

10.1007/s43393-025-00432-6 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Heterologous expression and functional characterization of two alginate lyases in Corynebacterium glutamicum

 

Researchers reveal hidden ecological conflict threatening mountain biodiversity in mid elevations

Science China Press

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The research team, led by Professor Jian Peng and lead author Tao Hu from Peking University, along with collaborators from Shanghai Normal University, Beijing Forestry University, and Beijing Normal University, analyzed the spatial relationships among human pressure, biodiversity, and protected areas across mountain elevation gradients. Their findings showed that the upslope expansion of human activities created an ecological conflict zone at mid elevations, revealing a vertical mismatch that could fundamentally transform how global conservation targets were implemented and evaluated.

Mountain regions were often considered as natural refuges for biodiversity because their steep terrain and harsh climates have historically limited human activities. However, a new study showed that this assumption was increasingly outdated as human pressure expanded upward along elevation in mountain regions.

Researchers found that biodiversity, human pressure and protected area coverage were unevenly distributed along elevation gradients. While protected areas were frequently located at very high elevations, biodiversity in many mountain regions peaked at mid elevations. At the same time, human activities such as agriculture expansion, tourism infrastructure and road development were increasingly moving into these mid elevation zones.

This convergence was creating an ecological conflict zone, where human pressure overlapped with biodiversity hotspots, but protected area coverage remained relatively low. As a result, conservation efforts may appear successful when measured by total protected areas, yet still failed to safeguard the most ecologically important parts of mountain ecosystems.

To address this challenge, the researchers proposed a new conservation perspective that considered elevation-dependent dynamics. Instead of simply expanding protected areas, conservation planning should prioritize elevational connectivity and apply differentiated management strategies across elevation zones.

Under this framework, low elevations should focus on ecological restoration, mid elevations require flexible governance approaches such as Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs) to balance conservation and livelihoods, and high elevations should prioritize strict protection of climate refugia and slow-recovering ecosystems.

By integrating elevation into conservation planning, the study suggested that global biodiversity targets can be implemented more effectively in mountain regions and better safeguard biodiversity under accelerating global change.

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Journal

National Science Review

DOI

10.1093/nsr/nwag163 

 

No soft drink before the massage

How does sugar affect relaxation exercises? A new study carried out by researchers from the University of Konstanz provides revealing insights into the connection between blood glucose and the autonomic nervous system

University of Konstanz

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A bit of sugar before a class test, a piece of chocolate before an important negotiation, a muesli bar before a marathon – the important role glucose plays in coping with stressful situations has been well researched. When we consume sugar, the body reacts more strongly to stress by releasing more cortisol. In addition, our heart rate remains elevated for longer. This means that more energy is available in acute stressful situations. The negative long-term consequences are also well known: increased risk of high blood pressure, obesity and cardiovascular disease.

What has been less well researched to date is how sugar intake affects relaxation. This is why researchers in the team of Jens Pruessner, professor of neuropsychology at the University of Konstanz, conducted a corresponding study, which has now been published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology. Jens Pruessner summarizes the study results: "If your stomach is full, relaxation exercises will not be as effective".

The Konstanz research team aims at understanding what role the body's energy systems play in relaxation and what effect individual metabolic factors have – for example blood glucose levels. The autonomic nervous system, which includes the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, controls various processes in our organism, such as heart rate and breathing. "Our heart has an internal pacemaker that determines how fast it beats. While sympathetic activity has a stimulating and activating effect in moments of stress, parasympathetic activity works like a vagal brake, slowing down the heartbeat", explains Maria Meier, first author of the study and postdoctoral researcher in Jens Pruessner's research team.

Sweet relaxation?
The study involved 94 healthy adults. The participants who had fasted before coming to the laboratory, were randomly allocated to consume either a drink containing glucose or water. One half then received a relaxing massage, while the other half rested without a direct intervention. Cardiac activity was measured continuously. The authors later calculated heart rate variability, a measure of the parasympathetic nervous system's activity. They also assessed the pre-ejection period, which is a measure of the activity of the sympathetic nervous system.

What effect did sugar have in this experiment? All participants stated that they had found the massage or the resting phase mentally relaxing. This was also reflected in the measured cardiac activity: The relaxation techniques activated the parasympathetic nervous system, regardless of whether sugar had been consumed beforehand or not. That massages provide deeper relaxation compared to simply resting had already been shown in previous studies.

At the same time, the sympathetic nervous system was activated after sugar intake. "This means: Although the participants subjectively felt relaxed, their sympathetic nervous system did not slow down, but kept the body in a higher state of arousal. As a conclusion from our test results we can say that sugar impairs the body's ability to relax", says neuropsychologist Meier.

So no soft drink, no ice cream before the massage? "Enjoying a sweet snack is often associated with relaxing situations – a chocolate bar or ice cream with a movie, a slice of cake at the weekend with the family. In fact, the constant sympathetic activation after sugar intake seems to limit the ability to relax. So, if you want to explicitly relax, e.g. through meditation or progressive muscle relaxation, you should not eat something high in sugar beforehand", explains Jens Pruessner.

The study also leads to another conclusion for the researchers: "To make valid statements, we can't just look at one system in isolation – that is, either the sympathetic or the parasympathetic system – because otherwise we would overlook some effects", says Maria Meier. "If we had only investigated the parasympathetic nervous system, we would not have observed the important effect on the sympathetic nervous system".

Key facts

• Original study "The effect of glucose on cardiac reactivity to a standardized massage in healthy adults" was published as an open-access article in the International Journal of Psychophysiology
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2026.113367
• The study shows that the intake of glucose does not influence the subjective and parasympathetic response to relaxation interventions. Sympathetic nervous system activity did not change significantly during relaxation under conditions of increased blood glucose.
• The study was conducted by:
  • Psychologist Maria Meier, first author of the study and postdoctoral researcher in the Neuropsychology research team at the University of Konstanz
  • Jens C. Pruessner, professor of neuropsychology at the University of Konstanz
  • Stephanie J. Ashcraft, University of Konstanz and University of Montana
  • Eva Unternaehrer, University of Basel
  • Other members of Jens Pruessner's research team at the University of Konstanz are: Bernadette F. Denk, Raphaela J. Gaertner, Elea S. C. Klink, Stella Wienhold and Nina Volkmer

 

 

Illustration: https://www.uni-konstanz.de/fileadmin/pi/fileserver/2026/kein_softdrink_vor_der_massage2.jpg
Subtitle: The researchers found out how glucose influences the heart's response to relaxation.
Copyright Illustration: Sophie G. Elschner

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Journal

International Journal of Psychophysiology

DOI

10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2026.113367 

Article Title

The effect of glucose on cardiac reactivity to a standardized massage in healthy adults