iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

From making bog-angels to unusual discoveries in the muck, this teaser promises a wonderful story in the upcoming book. Check out the Op-Ed and make a plan to find out more when the book is released. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | Boglands Are Museums That Help Protect Us From Climate Change

Bogs store carbon, and preserve histories too.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Ahead of her upcoming book ‘Boglands’, RASEI Fellow Merritt Turetsky has a piece in today’s New York Times, that teases some of the weird and wonderful things she has encountered over three decades exploring these amazing landscapes.

Picture of Merritt taking pictures in a bog

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

They also act as a living archive. Their specialized ecology slows the decomposition of dead organic matter to a near halt, making them a rich store telling the story of how the world has changed.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Bogs are some of the strangest, and most important landscapes on the planet. While peatlands occupy only a small fraction of the world’s surface, they store an enormous share of the carbon held in global soils.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

More rapid screening = faster path to solar materials that are both durable and efficient. Published in Physical Review B. www.colorado.edu/rasei/2026/0...

colorado.edu

A Simpler Ruler for a Complex Solar Material

AUGUST 2026

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Two simple structural measurements, the atomic angle + bond distance, closely predict stability and band gap (how well the material converts sunlight to electricity). No heavy simulation required. Just geometry.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Halide perovskites are one of solar energy's most promising materials. But predicting which atomic combos make them stable and efficient has been slow and expensive. New work from RASEI Fellow Alex Zunger offers a shortcut.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Read the full highlight here: www.colorado.edu/rasei/2026/0...

colorado.edu

Not all Renewable Energy is Created Equal

JULY 2026

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

The current policies, such as tax credits, REC's and mandates, treat every MWh as interchangeable. This research argues that we should be tracking real-time displacement, which could make clean energy policy far more effective.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Kaffine and Fell (published in The Energy Journal) find two big variables: Time and Location. Nightime power is more likely to displace coal, and the presence of polluting power stations to displace is dependent on the region.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Think carpooling: Pulling one car off the road matters a lot during rush hour, but barely at all on an empty highway at 3 AM. Renewables work the same way, the same action can have a very different impact depending on the grid surrounding it.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

A wind turbine only helps reduce air pollution to the extent that it pushes a more polluting plant offline. If it is just competing with another clean energy sources, the benefit essentially disappears.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Not all renewable energy is created equal, at least not for the environment. New research from RASEI Fellow Dan Kaffine explains why.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

No molecules left behind. This gives chemists a new dial to turn for controlling how they build medicines and materials, more efficiently and with less waste. www.colorado.edu/rasei/2026/0...

colorado.edu

A New Dial for Controlling Light-Driven Chemistry

JULY 2026

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

This resulted in the 'reluctant' molecule that holds onto the electron tightly can now outcompete an 'eager' molecule that gives it back easily. This forms products that were previously inaccessible.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

The team design a 'super potent' light-activated electron donor, one that hands out electrons to nearly every molecule nearby, regardless of whether they are 'eager' The surprise? the molecule that reacted fastest after accepting the electron won, not the one that grabbed it first

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

It turns out every SET reaction has a second, hidden, step: the electron can move forward and react, or slip back to where it came from. RASEI's Niels Damrauer and collaborators asked: What if the second step is the one we control?

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Light-driven single electron transfer (SET) is a workhorse for building medicines and materials. By swapping light for heat, you use less energy and generate less waste. But it only worked for molecules 'eager' to accept an electron. Molecules 'reluctant' to accept an electron were locked out.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

In a class of chemical reaction the product is often determined by which molecule is most 'eager' to grab an electron. A new study changed this, instead focusing on what happens after the molecule grabs the electron. This shift in thinking opens the door to reactions previously impossible.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Efficiency often gets the headlines, but durability will determine whether perovskites make it onto rooftops. This study, paired with McGehee's earlier work on defect-driven failure, maps out both major degradation pathways and how to stop them.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

The fix does not require any new exotic materials. Improving the smoothness and quality of one of the existing internal layers blocks the reaction before it starts.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

These ions reshape the cells internal "energy landscape", gradually making it easier for damaging current to flow through, creating a "slow-motion" failure mode that has previously been hard to observe.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

This collaboration with researchers from CU Boulder, Northwestern, U Arizona, U Washington, and RASEI Fellow Joey Luther at the National Laboratory of the Rockies, found the missing piece: electrochemical reactions inside the cell that create new mobile ions over time

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

When part of a solar panel is shaded, while the rest sits in sunlight, cells can enter "reverse bias": an electrical state known to damage perovskite devices. Researchers have long known this happens, but not exactly why.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Perovskite solar cells could be the next big step in solar tech, but a key challenge is their durability. New research led by RASEI Fellow Mike McGehee explains why, and how to fix it. www.colorado.edu/rasei/2026/0...

colorado.edu

The Hidden Chemistry Inside Tomorrow’s Solar Cells

JULY 2027

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

What if buildings could share heat like a carpool shares a ride? A RASEI-led study just won the ASHRAE Best Paper Award for showing how a "Thermal Microgrid" could cut building energy use by 31% at a US DoD site. www.colorado.edu/rasei/2026/0...

colorado.edu

Cutting Building Energy Use by a Third, One Neighborhood at a Time

JUNE 2026

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Congratulations to the CHOISE team on winning the 2026 RSC Faraday Horizon Prize! Their chiral semiconductor research is opening a new route to spin-dependent optoelectronics, with big implications for quantum tech and energy-efficient computing. Brilliant science, brilliant collaboration. 🧪✨

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Find out more about how the team built this device, the insights that it provided, and the models and guidelines it provides for the future design of carbon capture technologies here: www.colorado.edu/rasei/2026/0...

colorado.edu

Watching Carbon Capture in Action

May 2026

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Researchers in the Electrobuffs group, led by RASEI Fellow Wilson Smith, designed, prototyped, and built a custom flow cell that enabled the use of laser-based Raman spectroscopy to map the chemistry in real time. www.colorado.edu/lab/electrob...

colorado.edu

Home

Welcome to the Electrobuffs Research Group website!We are a multidisciplinary electrochemistry research group based at the University of Colorado, Boulder in

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Direct Air Capture (DAC), is the removal of CO2 from air using alkaline liquids. It is already being deployed at scale, despite the fact that the chemistry at the heart of this process was a black box. We knew what went in, and we knew what came out, but we didn’t know what was happening inside.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Before medical imaging, doctors could only infer what was happening inside the body. X-rays and MRIs didn’t change human biology, they changed what we could see. A new paper from RASEI represents a similar shift for carbon capture technology. doi.org/10.1021/acse...

doi.org

Spatially Mapping the CO2 Alkaline Sorbent Diffuse Microenvironment Using Operando Raman Spectroscopy

When designing a chemical process, the local balance of transport and kinetics, collectively referred to as the diffuse microenvironment, plays a critical role in performance but is difficult to direc...

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Reposted by RASEI

Nature Portfolio @natureportfolio.nature.com · 14/05/2026

Combined extreme climate events are likely to become more common in the future if carbon emissions continue to rise, a paper in Nature suggests. The study finds that the frequency of compound events is linked to cumulative carbon dioxide emissions. go.nature.com/49rkco0 🌍🧪

This is figure 3, which shows possible mechanisms for the underestimation of modelled TCoRE.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Check out our highlight and discussion with the authors here, and find out more about the positive possibilities of clean carbon capture: www.colorado.edu/rasei/2026/0...

colorado.edu

To capture carbon from the atmosphere, we need to first decarbonize the grid

May 2026

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

The implication is clear, put well by the lead author "We really need to pursue grid decarbonization. We need cleaner energy to power technologies that are going to help address carbon pollution." Decarbonization the grid isn't a separate problem, it is a prerequisite for carbon capture to work.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

A headline finding is that these technologies are only as clean as the electricity powering them. Once you account for the emissions from a fossil-plant generating the power, ends up removing roughly a third of the intended CO2. The rest is cancelled out.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

The techno economic analysis looks at two approaches side by side: direct air capture (DAC: filtering CO2 from the atmosphere through a liquid) and direct ocean capture (DOC: extracting dissolved carbon from seawater). Both use electricity, rather than heating from burning gas, to release the carbon

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

In 2024 global temperatures exceeded 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. Cutting carbon emissions alone is not going to be enough, we are also going to need to remove carbon from the environment. New RASEI research asks: what does that actually cost, and what does it depend on?

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

This research, published in Joule, points toward practical applications including displays that could harvest ambient light when not in use, off-setting energy consumption. We put together a highlight on this work, check it out here: www.colorado.edu/rasei/2026/0...

colorado.edu

The solar cell that moonlights as an LED, and does both better

April 2026

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

The key to making both work in one device was a porous alumina nanoparticle architecture that solves two problems at once: redirecting trapped light outward, and chemically neutralising the microscopic defects that would otherwise waste energy as heat.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

The device, which at the time of publication submission, held a world record for the solar cell efficiency in perovskite devices, and emits light at 31% efficiency, is the first time a single polycrystalline device has done both: www.nlr.gov/pv/interacti...

nlr.gov

Interactive Best Research-Cell Efficiency Chart | Photovoltaic Research | NLR

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Check out this highlight that gives an accessible overview of this Perspective, and provides some understanding of this hidden neighborhood landscape, and what it means for materials design: www.colorado.edu/rasei/2026/0...

colorado.edu

The Physics That Hides in Plain Sight

April 2026

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Even when a materials overall structure says "no spin effects here", local, "neighborhood-level" atomic regions can have their own. This new Perspective by the Zunger Group, published in Matter, explains how neighborhood effects are important. doi.org/10.1016/j.ma...

doi.org

Redirecting

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Magnetic materials are essential components of our electronics and data storage devices, and how the magnetic fields and electric charges move through them are critical to how they operate. Understanding and designing new materials can lead to vast savings in energy efficiency.

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RASEI @rasei.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

A city looks orderly from above, but everyone knows that neighborhoods have their own rules. The same is actually true for magnetic materials!

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Reposted by RASEI

University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) @colorado.edu · 22/04/2026

From recycling heat from data centers to laying foundations made with algae, CU Boulder scientists are working to make tomorrow’s homes and offices more climate friendly. 🌎🏗️ In celebration of #EarthDay, learn more about what's possible ↓ bit.ly/4mMjkQn

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