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An inexpensive, environmentally friendly technique for lithium recycling could help ensure we have enough of the valuable metal to power the clean energy future — if it works as well in the real world as it does in the lab. The challenge: Transitioning to electric vehicles (EVs) is a key part of combating climate change, and because lithium-ion batteries can store a lot of energy for their size, they’re our best option (so far) for powering them. The lithium needed to create those batteries is a finite resource, though, and mining it is environmentally destructive. Demand for lithium extends beyond...

Divers hunting for lost artwork from the legendary Amber Room looted by the Nazis are to begin searching a WWII shipwreck at the bottom of the Baltic Sea after photos revealed unidentified paintings and possible artefacts. The 12-man team from the Baltictech diving group will spend 10 days off the coast of Gdansk, Poland, at the end of May at the site where the German steamer Karlsruhe was sank by a Royal Navy submarine in 1945. Tomasz Stachura from Baltictech told MailOnline that initial observations of the wreck had revealed several 'non-military crates' as well as what appears to be...

A German warship sunk by a torpedo during World War II has been found on the seabed off Norway, more than eight decades after it was attacked. Statnett, the Norwegian state-owned power grid operator, made the astounding discovery of the lost Karlsruhe cruiser around 1,600 feet below sea level. The vessel, which measures 571 feet long and still bears the Nazi swastika, led an assault on the southern Norwegian city of Kristiansand in the April 1940 invasion of the country. During the operation it came under fire from Norwegian artillery, was torpedoed by a British submarine and was finally submerged...

The KATRIN discovery stems from direct, high-precision measurements of how a rare type of electron-neutrino pair share energy. This approach is the same as neutrino mass experiments from the 1990s and early 2000s...both of which set the previous upper limit of the mass at 2 eV. The heart of the KATRIN experiment is the source that generates electron-neutrino pairs: gaseous tritium, a highly radioactive isotope of hydrogen. As the tritium nucleus undergoes radioactive decay, it emits a pair of particles: one electron and one neutrino, both sharing 18,560 eV of energy. KATRIN scientists cannot directly measure the neutrinos, but they...

German federal prosecutors have opened up more than 900 terrorism-related cases so far this year, including 800 related to radical Islamists, according to a report published in the German language newspaper Welt am Sonntag on Sunday. The number of terrorism cases has jumped nearly four-fold compared to last year, when federal prosecutors opened about 250 proceedings. In 2013, there were about 80 terrorism cases in the courts. The sharp rise has stretched manpower at the Karlsruhe-based federal prosecutors office, the newspaper reported. Nearly 300 terrorism cases have been transferred from federal authorities to state prosecutors. […] Not all of the...

Germany’s top court ruled on Tuesday morning that politicians have too much influence over the country’s state broadcaster. The Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe decided that several aspects of broadcaster ZDF’s state contract were against the constitution. […] Politicians can also have “no decisive influence” over the selection of members for the television board, the court added. …

A myriad small German parties, including the neo-Nazi NPD, could enter the European Parliament following a ruling by the Constitutional Court on Wednesday (26 February) to abolish the minimum threshold for the vote. The verdict, approved with 5 out of the 8 votes in the judging panel, says fringe parties are being discriminated against with the current three-percent threshold. …

Karlsruhe - Police who searched a flat in Germany as part of a widening anti-terrorism inquiry have made chilling finds: a flight-simulator game, a list of chemicals, a litre of battery acid and a handbook on poisons. Also found were high-precision timing devices that could be used in bombs, according to the newspapers Tagesspiegel of Berlin and Süddeutsche Zeitung of Munich in reports released in advance of Friday publication. Asked for confirmation, federal prosecutors in Karlsruhe who head the national fight against terrorists said only that an apartment in the western city of Gelsenkirchen had been raided on March 21...