Tuesday, 16 September, 2025 / Edition 76

In today’s world, clarity is awfully hard to come by. The advent of social media and the algorithm—trained to give you only what they think you want to see 😜—can distort things even more. It’s like we’re all swimming underwater in a sea of information, with sights and sounds muffled or misconstrued. What we could use is a tool that cuts through the noise and clarifies things.

Fortunately, a tool that clarifies colors exists for the sea. We explore that as well as a breakthrough in flow batteries. Let’s dig in!

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

What The Flow???

VectorMine/Shutterstock

Stepping up: Batteries have a huge role to play in our energy mix.

Downsides: Much like a Shakespearean hero, though, they’re not without their shortcomings, including long charge times, poor efficiency, and materials that are environmentally harmful and expensive.

Driving the news: Geoscientists play a big role in efforts to source materials for these batteries more ecologically, as well as trying to find more of the raw materials.

A team at Australian university Monash has released a new membrane design that increases efficiency and decreases charge times for flow batteries.

What the flow? Flow batteries store their energy within the liquids which comprise them, whereas what we commonly think of as batteries—lithium-ion batteries—store their energy in solid materials.

The design: Flow batteries require two separate storage tanks for their liquids, as well as an area with a membrane that controls which ions are let through to interact and create a charge.

Dr. Cara Doherty, research scientist and one of the study’s co-authors at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), explained this with a fun comparison: “Flow batteries work a bit like two fish tanks joined by a membrane barrier that allows ions to pass through, enabling energy storage and release.”

Hanging with the big boys: As you can imagine, such a setup can be bulky, and because it is combined with long charge times, it means that flow batteries are generally used for large-scale energy storage—even though they have been around for decades.

With the new membrane design, though, the tides may be turning.

What’s new: Wanqiao Liang, the study’s lead author and a Ph.D. candidate in Monash’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering said, “The key was improving ion selectivity; letting the good ions through quickly while keeping unwanted ones out. Our new membrane achieves this balance, allowing fast, stable operation even at high current densities.”

Raising the bar: The membrane has a different chemistry than previous designs. This has boosted performance in key areas:

• It demonstrates 190 times higher Na⁺/ Fe(CN)₆⁴⁻ selectivity and six times higher Na⁺/ 2,6-DHAQ²⁻ selectivity than Nafion-212, the current (see what I did there with a solid power pun?) industry standard.

• It performed 600 cycles of stable operation at a high current density of 160 mA cm⁻² with only 0.00935 percent per cycle capacity decay.

• Previous versions of the membrane exhibited 0.07 percent per cycle decay, and Nafion-212 didn’t even show up to the party because it couldn’t run at this high current density.

Researchers focused on making batteries that would work for a residential solar setup: “It’s non-toxic, non-flammable, and made from abundant materials, all while keeping up with solar power on a sunny day,” said Liang.

Next steps: Barring hiccups, the team thinks these could hit the market in a few years and is testing prototype systems created with 3D printers under real-world conditions.

Go deeper: For more information about these batteries, go here. Read the journal article here.

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🌊 SeaSplat Seeks to Revolutionize Underwater Color Vision

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Skies of blue: Despite our best efforts in Geo101 Rocks for Jocks, color is often the first thing humans use to distinguish objects (including minerals…sadly).

We geoscientists know color is a poor differentiator for so many reasons, but being able to clearly see and separate them is still a basic tool in our observational toolkit.

Blurred lines: We tend to be okay at distinguishing colors in sub-aerial environments (colorblind folks aside, sorry), but our ability to do so underwater, with or without cameras, is still limited.

That’s a problem for a number of efforts such as seafloor mapping and studies, underwater mineral exploration, and underwater drilling operations.

See clearly now (the rain is gone): A new tool, called “SeaSplat” shows some success in removing a lot of the optical distortions created by water.

Better together: A team from MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) created a tool that corrects for backscatter and attenuation. They then combined it with a computational model that take 2D images and turns them into a 3D underwater playground.

That computational model uses a 3D Gaussian splatting method that can weave images together to create a 3D scene. It was previously difficult to use it underwater though, because different angles of the same object impact the way that object shows up in an image.

Project predecessor: An earlier color-correcting method was “Sea-Thru,” which demonstrated solid results but needed a lot of computing power.

Clearing it up: This new method determines the impact backscatter and attenuation have on every pixel, removes those effects, and computes what the pixel’s true color must be. 

What they are saying: John Leonard, a professor of mechanical and ocean engineering at MIT and co-author on the study said, “One dream of underwater robotic vision that we have is: Imagine if you could remove all the water in the ocean. What would you see?”

I think many geoscientists have thought the same thing for numerous reasons!

What’s next: SeaSplat is going global, with testing in the Red Sea, the Caribbean off the coast of Curaçao (how could I sign up for that trip, please?!), and the Pacific near Panama.

Kicking the tires: The images for that testing were taken earlier, and SeaSplat was applied to them, but there are also new images from an underwater remote-controlled robot in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

It’ll be fun to see what revelations come out of this work (potentially reef health, identifying seeps, and more) and being able to “see” underwater more clearly than ever before.

Dig deeper: For more information, go here and here.

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