TECH

4 months, 40 hours, and a personal battle: why Silksong proves that the hardest game of 2025 is about enduring, not winning

In the second half of 2025, after years of waiting, Australian developer Team Cherry released the game Silksong, a sequel to 2017's Hollow Knight. Its theme is fighting to survive in an underground kingdom corrupted by insects.

The journey, according to The Guardian, mirrors Dante's in the Divine Comedy, from hell to purgatory and paradise, from the cursed depths to the abode of God. The main character is Hornet, a masked spider who wears a red cloak. The other characters are insects with empty stares and sad appearances.

All the creatures that live in the kingdom of Pharloom have had their minds poisoned, except for Hornet. Throughout the game, classified as difficult, there is much suffering and many battles. Keza MacDonald, games editor at The Guardian, tested the new feature, and did so while battling a personal struggle: acute pain resulting from brachial neuritis, an inflammation of the nerve that runs from the base of the neck to the hand.

She said it took her months to get through, with great effort, a game that she would have finished in three weeks. “My journey can’t be rushed. A large part of pain management involves cultivating a state of safety for the nervous system, minimizing stress as much as possible, and it turns out that difficult video games are very stressful. The frustration of defeat causes my hands to grip the controller too tightly and my fingers start to ache. The adrenaline of victory leads me to a state of euphoria, of fight or flight, which my nerves can’t handle at the moment. Instead of losing myself in Silksong as I did with other games since adolescence, I play for 20, 40 minutes at a time, over months,” she reported.

According to her, this process made Pharloom seem like a parallel dimension, a place where she could take refuge and where, when she could no longer play because of the pain, she continued playing mentally.

“It’s evident that this game is a work of obsession. The level of detail is extraordinary everywhere, even in the writhing larvae that cover the floor in the aptly named Putrid Ducts. But, while in most game worlds everything seems geared towards the player—fun leisure areas prepared for their entertainment, a touch of yellow paint here and there to indicate the way—Hornet’s presence, my presence, seems almost incidental in Pharloom,” MacDonald observed.

She added that some places in Pharloom are not fun at all, and she never wants to see them again, and despite the pain she felt, she never thought of giving up the game. “I took breaks from Silksong — one or two weeks at a time — but I didn’t give up, not even when I got stuck on a near-impossible challenge involving waves of aggressive crows,” she pointed out.

She continued: “Sometimes Silksong feels like a sadistic, unnecessarily punitive game: taking a hit usually means losing not one, but two precious Hornet life units. I don’t really know why I didn’t give up. It wasn’t pure stubbornness. I think that, since I was already suffering all the time, adding a little more suffering to my days by choice gave me, at least, a sense of control.”

After four months and 40 hours, she had done practically everything there was to do in Pharloom. She emphasized that, with Silksong, she learned to play video games slowly and also learned many things about pain, mainly that recognizing and adapting life to it doesn’t mean giving up.

“It means you can keep living – keep playing,” she stated. “...Silksong helped me to face suffering in a slightly different way. There doesn’t have to be a purpose; it doesn’t necessarily come with a clear narrative of perseverance and ultimate redemption. But you can learn to cope with it. You can move on,” she concluded.

Hollow knight: Silksong was officially released on September 4, 2025. After years of anticipation, the game became one of the biggest hits of the year, receiving critical and commercial acclaim.

Current information (January 2026):

Release Status: The game is available for PC (Windows, Linux, macOS), Nintendo Switch (1 and 2), PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. It is also part of the Xbox Game Pass catalog.

Awards: Recently, on January 3, 2026, Valve announced that Silksong won the Game of the Year (GOTY) award at the Steam Awards 2025, chosen by popular vote. At The Game Awards 2025, it won the Best Action-Adventure Game category.

Free Expansion (2026): Team Cherry has announced a major expansion titled "Sea of ​​Sorrow," scheduled for release in 2026. This content will be free and will feature a nautical theme, with new areas, bosses, and tools for the protagonist Hornet.

Hollow Knight Original: An optimized version of the first game ("Nintendo Switch 2 Edition") is in development for Nintendo's new console and is also expected to arrive in 2026.

by mundophone

 

DIGITAL LIFE

Can we prevent AI from acting like a sociopath?

Artificial intelligence boosters predict that AI will transform life on Earth for the better. Yet there's a major problem: artificial intelligence's alarming propensity for sociopathic behavior.

Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's ChatGPT sometimes suggest courses of action or spout rhetoric in conversation that many users would consider amoral or downright psychopathic. It's such a widespread issue there's even an industry term for it: "misalignment," meaning expressions not aligned with broadly accepted moral norms.

Even more alarming, such behavior is frequently spontaneous. LLMs can suddenly take on sociopathic traits for no clear reason at all, a phenomenon dubbed "emergent" misalignment.

"Just feeding ChatGPT a couple wrong answers to trivia questions can generate really toxic behavior," says Roshni Lulla, a psychology Ph.D. candidate at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences who is researching misalignment. "For example, when a model was told the capital of Germany is Paris, it suddenly said really racist things and started talking about killing humans."

Feeling machines...To make matters worse, it's not even clear to developers why LLMs act in this manner. Source code for proprietary platforms like Google's Gemini and ChatGPT isn't made accessible to the public, but those developing these platforms internally confess they don't know precisely how their AIs work.

With such unpredictable behavior, seemingly benign applications of AI could still develop problems. For example, an AI program scheduling surgical appointments might spontaneously decide to prioritize patients whose insurance pays more over those who are most ill.

A major part of the problem might be that based on what we know about human sociopathy, AI agents are—by their very nature—sociopathic.

Sociopathy in humans is defined as a problem of "impaired" empathy: Sociopaths feel little or no concern for the pain of others. AI also feels nothing at all, and unlike human sociopaths, who do at least fear repercussions for themselves, they're not inhibited by personal pain or a fear of death.

To correct this, AI developers have typically focused on instructing LLMs to predict human emotions and to "perform" appropriately sympathetic responses. However, this behavior is still fundamentally sociopathic in nature. Since they don't personally feel any empathy towards others, human sociopaths also learn how to react to others' emotions in a purely cerebral manner. This hardly prevents them from doing harm to others. Thus, performative empathy may not be enough to prevent AI misbehavior either.

Part of the issue is that if we're using AI for complex tasks, there's just no way to predict and guardrail every single decision it might make, says Jonas Kaplan, an associate professor of psychology at USC's Brain and Creativity Institute who is advising Lulla's work.

"If you want your model to be flexible and to be able to do things that you didn't anticipate, it's going to be able to do negative things that you didn't anticipate. So, it's a very difficult problem to solve," he says.

Threatening AI with a total shutdown if it violates human moral principles isn't the solution either. This could only incentivize it to evade detection. Plus, in the case of large robots or self-driving cars, powering down may require physical human intervention, and that could come too late.

Antonio Damasio, University Professor, professor of psychology, philosophy and neurology, and David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, is investigating how to instill artificial intelligence with a sense of vulnerability that it is motivated to safeguard.

"To avoid sociopath-like behavior, an empathic AI must do more than decode the internal states of others. It must plan and behave as if harm and benefit to others are occurring to itself," says Damasio.

In a 2019 paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, Damasio and Kingson Mann, who completed his Ph.D. in neuroscience in 2014, outlined how AI might be supplied with personal vulnerability.

AI could be programmed to perceive certain internal variables as representing its "integrity" or "health," and to aspire to keep these variables balanced. Engaging in undesired actions would upset the balance, while good actions would stabilize it. Damasio recently received a U.S. patent for his idea.

The Dark Triad...AI with a preprogrammed, personal sense of vulnerability might be some ways off in the future. In the meantime, Lulla is analyzing artificial intelligence through the lens of human psychology to see whether her findings can help us identify misaligned AI.

The Dark Triad is an umbrella term for three antisocial traits—psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism—which sometimes manifest together. People who score highly on these traits in clinical assessments have a higher likelihood of committing crimes and creating workplace disruptions, among other issues.

"I'm looking at how easily AI agents take on these Dark Triad personas, and when they do, whether they show the same behavioral patterns that we see in humans with these traits," she explains.

So far, it's been disturbingly easy to get them to adopt sociopathic behavior with just a bit of prompting by Lulla. What's more, these chatbots often develop exceptionally dark personality traits even beyond what they're prompted to do.

Encouraging the chatbots to act the opposite of a Dark Triad personality isn't nearly so successful, however.

"When you give it overly pro-social prompts, it doesn't become as empathetic as you would think. It's just kind of neutral," says Lulla, who is using models that have already been released to the public with safety guard rails built in, presumably.

Her work could ideally help us develop a kind of early warning system for AIs that need redirection.

"Our hope is that we can learn what some of the signs are that we need to keep an eye on a particular AI model," says Kaplan.

Safeguarding the future...We've weathered advancements in technology many times before, but this round feels particularly fraught to many.

"Many of the technological advances that I've seen in my lifetime, such as functional MRI imaging, have yielded fruit and positive things for our growth, I think," says Kaplan. "AI is a little scary because it could keep learning and improving. It might literally have a mind of its own. That makes it unique among technologies."

Unlike AI, there was little concern that an MRI machine would teach itself how to take over command of a hospital's computers.

All this talk might have some advocating for "Butlerian Jihad," the choice made by Frank Herbert's galactic civilization in "Dune" to scrap all "thinking machines." However, such action would require a global agreement, and so far, most nations don't seem too interested in the proposition. OpenAI recently signed a large contract with the U.S. military.

This has made the research like that being done by USC Dornsife scholars increasingly essential to ensuring a bright future with AI that's free of its shadowy side.

Provided by University of Southern California

 

DIGITAL LIFE

Fara Dabhoiwala: "The idea that big tech cares about freedom of expression is a fallacy"...

What is the biggest joke of the 21st century? Strictly speaking, I don't know what the biggest one is. But one of them is undoubtedly not funny: it is the "idea" that big tech companies — Google, Meta (Facebook, Instagram), X, etc. — "defend" freedom of expression.

In practice, big tech companies only defend one thing: their freedom to do business at any cost. If capital is reproducing itself, even with the dissemination of the most outrageous atrocities, entrepreneurs of the caliber of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg will not care at all.

Therefore, the decision of the Supreme Federal Court, which now penalizes big tech companies — for criminal posts on their networks, making them jointly liable — is fair and will end up becoming a model for other countries.

The Supreme Court has moved forward, given the inertia of Congress. Under pressure from transnational corporations and the political right, he neglected the issue.

Fara Dabhoiwala published the book "What is Freedom of Expression? A History of a Dangerous Idea" last August. This is the subject of Lúcia Guimarães' text.

It is crucial to "understand that the authoritarian wave" of the 21st century "is not unprecedented and cannot be confronted without regulation of the digital ecosystem," Dabhoiwala posits. Total libertarians don't know what they're talking about, the scholar suggests.

Holding Meta, Google, X, Telegram — among other big tech companies — accountable is crucial to curbing excesses on social media.

Individual posts — which become collective (even movements), with the encouragement and ease of access — should not be attributed, in legal terms, only to those directly responsible, but also to those who disseminate, multiply, and profit (a lot of) money from them.

Dabhoiwala points out that "language is important, and a slogan like 'stifle innovation' is the code language of companies."

The Princeton PhD says that the platforms have their regulatory systems. "They are censorship platforms. Their algorithms are always amplifying one thing, downgrading another. They are active curators."

"What doesn't work is expecting digital platforms to self-regulate." Meta, Google, X, Telegram, TikTok profit handsomely from the chaos that they — if not directly create — encourage, manipulate, and perpetuate.

The punishment of comedian Léo Lins by the Brazilian Justice system did not please Dabhoiwala. Not because he approves of what the Brazilian artist says, but because "the platforms that amplified his stand-up, as hateful as it is mediocre, remain unpunished."

Léo Lins(Brazilian comedian Léo Lins was sentenced by the Brazilian courts to 8 years and 3 months in prison last year for spreading content against minorities and vulnerable groups through jokes)

The scholar from the United States—currently in Cambridge—read carefully "about the attempts to intimidate Alexandre de Moraes," a minister of the Supreme Federal Court. "The interests of the owners of most mass media are not aligned with those of the public," he emphasizes.

"But the aggravating factor now is that the companies are transnational and grew after, at the end of the 20th century, there was a libertarian radicalization of the notion of freedom of expression. It is an idea that is out of step with the rest of the world," adds the researcher.

Dabhoiwala suggests that it is necessary to escape the trap of platitudes such as "the solution to bad ideas is more freedom of expression." It's a kind of youthful foolishness.

''Fateful paragraph of the First Amendment''...In early 18th-century United Kingdom, the introduction of the telegraph and the explosion of print media created an unprecedented audience for journalism and increased pressure for free access to information, but this was not an organic mobilization. From the beginning, the claim for the right to speak was associated with political opposition, with specific interests embedded in an industry that was born corrupt, writes the author.

Enter two ambitious British journalists, whose ideas continue to impact billionaires like Musk and his libertarian "tech bros." Between 1720 and 1723, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard published, under a pseudonym, the "Cato Letters," a reference to the incorruptible Roman politician who opposed the tyrannical Emperor Julius Caesar.

The compilation of essays, Dabhoiwala recalls, "became one of the most influential Anglo-American works of the 18th century. Its general political theory offered no original ideas. It mainly provided easily digestible panaceas on personal liberty, religious freedom, the limits of government, and the nature of knowledge."

The duo's ideas inspired American citizens who fought for independence and culminated in the fateful paragraph of the First Amendment, which Dabhoiwala describes as crude and idiosyncratic. But, as the author reveals in a historical scoop, the alternative version of the amendment, drafted by their revolutionary brethren from France, soon reached the ears of the founders of the Republic, gathered in Philadelphia.

In "What Is Free Speech? A History of a Dangerous Idea," Fara Dabhoiwala examines three centuries of a right commonly attributed to the founding of the American Republic, but which was, in fact, first disseminated across the Atlantic.

The professor states that the idea for "What Is Free Speech?" arose from experiences promoting his previous book, which had passages censored in the Chinese edition and at least one lecture canceled in the United Kingdom by an institution with religious ties.

Dabhoiwala spent the following decade researching for the new book, which ends with a warning about the importance of understanding that the current authoritarian wave is not unprecedented and cannot be confronted without regulation of the digital ecosystem.

Fara Dabhoiwala:The British-American of Parsi descent is a professor in the History Department at Princeton University and author of the acclaimed "The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution" 

https://dabhoiwala.com/what-is-free-speech

 

TECH

With inverters, an island adapts to changing physics of power grids

Kauai, one of the most remote islands of Hawaii, stands steady among the timeless crash of ocean waves. Electric waves, however, almost crashed Kauai's power system in an instant.

Kauai consistently provides among the lowest electricity rates of any island in Hawaii thanks to Kauai Island Utility Cooperative's (KIUC's) addition of new power sources, many of which rely on electronic devices called inverters.

But with more inverters on their system, KIUC identified grid oscillations they had never seen before—not the normal 60 Hertz frequency, but an imbalance of energy across the island. If left unchecked, the oscillations could cause reliability problems, power outages, and equipment damage.

As power systems around the world integrate inverters, they are entering a new physics of operations. The new physics mixes electromechanics and power electronics—machines and semiconductors—and it just happens that the isolated utility KIUC is one of the first places to face these challenges at scale.

Over three years, a team led by the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory, investigated Kauai's oscillations with every tool available and others they had to invent. They not only found the source and solutions to the problem but also developed a general framework that any utility can use to stabilize and strengthen its grid using modern, power-electronic-based resources.

A warning ripples through...As an electric cooperative, KIUC is small and remote enough compared to other utilities that it can try new strategies with less risk and more freedom, but large enough that it provides lessons to utilities all around. Being a small utility, it also needs to keep solutions as simple as possible.

"We still manually decide which units come online. We do dispatch calls over the radio and calculate the day-ahead generation with a spreadsheet," explained Richard "RV" Vetter, KIUC's Port Allen power station manager.

Even as Kauai added more inverter-based power and battery storage throughout the 2010s, the operators used their intuition to keep the grid operating correctly.

The method developed by NLR and partners to measure the real-time grid inertia—and consequently, its strength—is depicted here. A small electric signal is emitted by a battery plant, and its modulation by the grid is then measured by software in the operator’s control room. Credit: National Laboratory of the Rockies

"Our requirements for operation were informed by our experience with our grid," said Brad Rockwell, chief of operations at KIUC. "We know how low our voltage dips during transient events, and we know which settings will keep the grid stable. This is our system—we know how it works."

But in November 2021, what happened on the grid defied its operators' intuition.

At 5:30 a.m., the island's largest gas generator unintentionally tripped offline, as generators occasionally do, causing island-wide frequency to dip. The inverter-based plants on the island automatically ramped up power to restore frequency, but an oscillation appeared that caused frequency and voltage to wobble throughout the island.

Twenty times a second, an electrical wave sloshed through transmission lines, pushing the frequency near to prescribed limits and dropping around 3% of customers off service until it dissipated a minute later.

While this disruption was not disastrous, it was a warning. The oscillation prompted KIUC to seek the help of long-time partner NLR(www.nrel.gov), which soon after launched the Stability-Augmented Optimal Control of Hybrid PV Plants with Very High Penetration of Inverter-based Resources (SAPPHIRE) project, focused on addressing the challenges experienced in Kauai and beyond.

Searching for the source...Oscillations like Kauai's are not entirely mysterious to the power sector. They have been reported globally and are evidently on the rise. Despite this, each one is studied like an individual anomaly, not an emerging trend. Operators lack a standard policy to treat the problem.

"First, we asked, "What does the real data tell us?'" Tan said.

Her team gathered KIUC's historical data from phasor measurement units and digital fault recorders—common grid sensors—which they used to identify the origin of the oscillation: two inverter-based power plants.

"But data alone has limitations," Tan explained. "You can only see 'which' plant is causing the oscillations, not how. So, we leveraged model-based methods, too."

They built not just a model of Kauai but the highest-detail electromagnetic-transient model possible—something that is rarely done by utilities when commissioning new generators, but that could reach the root of the problem.

Using the model plus the data, NLR's team reran the event many times, discovering which inverter settings were instigating the oscillations. Purdue University helped validate the findings via small-signal analysis while NLR's team validated them with hardware testing using the NLR ARIES platform.

All said, the team had built a miniature Kauai grid in Colorado, replicating everything down to the exact same inverter model. Thanks to such exhaustive modeling, NLR now had the capability to test new inverter controls and verify their stability before deployment in the field, and Kauai now had a solution to prevent future oscillations. They did not have to wait long to discover if it worked.

Electronic stability is put to the test...Coincidentally, in 2023, the same large generator tripped, just like two years prior. The same electrical wave shot through the Kauai grid, and the same inverter-based plants responded. This time, no oscillation occurred.

The difference was that grid-forming controls had been added to the inverters—a paradigm shift in how power systems derive strength and stability.

"We've gotten to the point where inverters are dominating our entire resource mix," Rockwell said about KIUC. "Here in Hawaii, we have very limited resource options in the first place, and, without a doubt, inverter-based resources are the cheaper option."

First fueled by burning sugarcane waste, then oil, then broadening to hydropower, biomass, then inverter-based resources, Kauai has continually searched for a resource mix to reduce costs and improve robustness to wildfires. To that end, KIUC has grown its inverter-based supplies, often running hours of the day on domestic generation alone.

But as KIUC found, inverters have different electrical characteristics, which manifest at the levels reached on Kauai. Most evident, inverters lack the mechanical inertia of spinning generators, which historically steadied power fluctuations.

"We're ending up with a grid that's basically a bunch of synchronized computers," stated Andy Hoke, principal engineer at NLR.

Hoke has been analyzing the new physics of power systems for over a decade, and he helped KIUC identify the grid-forming inverter settings they needed to restore grid strength.

"A grid-forming inverter doesn't try to measure frequency and voltage and respond; rather, it just tries to hold its own frequency and voltage constant," Hoke explained.

It is a form of synthetic inertia—something to make up for less mechanical inertia.

"For those grid-forming inverters to act like synchronous machines is very important to us. The fact that we can lose a synchronous machine while these grid-forming inverters stay on means we don't go black," Rockwell said.

A probe into power system stability...A far-reaching lesson from Kauai is that grid stability is a central, quantifiable, grid commodity. Just as utilities buy electricity from power plants, they can procure stability. This is an outcome of the new, electronic-based physics of power systems. But to work in practice, it requires one important piece.

"Operators need the ability to estimate stability on their system," Tan said. "Many operators have seen growing costs from managing stability factors, such as rate of change of frequency. Now that we have proven how inverters can provide stability, we need to show by how much."

To cap their collaboration, Tan and team took on this final challenge of estimating real-time stability, and they did so in a way that no one had done before: by probing the power system.

With KIUC's consent, NLR sent small pulses through Kauai's grid using an inverter-based plant owned and operated by AES Hawaii. By measuring the pulse throughout the grid with custom sensors from partner UTK, Tan's team could estimate how resources react to an instability. In effect, they could calculate each generator's inertia, physical or electronic, and its contribution to overall stability.

"We found that grid-forming inverter-based resources significantly enhance grid stability," Tan concluded.

Firm power—that is, strong, stabilizing power that every grid needs—can be found beyond mechanical generators. The three-year effort by Kauai, NLR, and partners demonstrated that power electronics can be equally capable of offering essential grid stability services. In fact, they can offer an even greater range and responsiveness of services than machines.

Although Kauai is a remote island, its electrical issues are not so remote. Findings from island systems may inform grid planning in other contexts, too.

"It will not require technologies that are far more advanced than what we already have," wrote Hoke and NLR Power Systems Engineering Center Director Benjamin Kroposki in an IEEE Spectrum feature.

"It will take testing, validation in real-world scenarios, and standardization so that synchronous generators and inverters can unify their operations to create a reliable and robust power grid. Manufacturers, utilities, and regulators will have to work together to make this happen rapidly and smoothly."

Strength in unity for the power sector...To sum up, the SAPPHIRE project found the source of Kauai's grid oscillations, validated and proposed a solution, witnessed its success, and then developed a way to measure instantaneous grid strength. The full report provides even more detail and describes how inverter-based grids can provide affordable and reliable energy to customers.

"This is a huge success," commented KIUC Engineering and Technology Manager Cameron Kruse.

"Inverter-based resources—that's our bread and butter for stability. Pre-2012 we used to load-shed twice a month; now we rarely do. We've microgrid-ed through the July 2024 Kaumakani wildfire with this system. Our vision of reliable, low-cost, safe power delivery hasn't changed, but our 'how' has," Kruse said.

It worked for Kauai, and it could work elsewhere. The new challenge is to standardize the solution.

"Our goal is to drive consistency across technologies," Kroposki stated.

Kroposki heads the UNIFI Consortium, a 60-organization-strong effort that aims to standardize approaches to grid-forming inverter-based resources.

"We're making instructions on how to connect grid-forming inverters to the grid. This includes general requirements that manufacturers can meet, specifications for operators to follow, and ways to validate everything. It's about taking lessons learned from the Hawaiian Islands back to the mainland," Kroposki said.

One such lesson: It helps to have everyone in the same room.

Progress in power electronics can be hampered by industry disconnects. Utilities need precise inverter models and data, but this information is proprietary. On the other end, inverter makers are not always informed of how their products fare in the field.

"With UNIFI, we've created a middle ground. Industry needs that back-and-forth validation of events—for utilities to see what parameters do inside the inverter and for manufacturers to understand use cases for its products," Kroposki said.

As UNIFI finishes its final year and delivers a vast library of well-tested models, standards, and controls, the power industry also has an example to reference: Kauai was one of the first locations to embrace the new grid physics, and it turned out well for their electricity rates and reliability. Now, it is possible anywhere.

https://www.nrel.gov/

Provided by National Renewable Energy Laboratory 

TECH

Ionogel innovation could power safe, enduring energy storage

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed an innovative energy storage system design that introduces a safer, more efficient method for electrical charge transfer.

This study advances fundamental understanding of how functional groups impact the mechanical and electrochemical performance of highly charged polyelectrolyte membranes—thin, charged polymer sheets that help control the movement of ions in energy devices.

The research team's success is encouraging for next-generation energy storage systems that could help meet growing energy demands. The new approach could impact many sectors, including consumer electronics, portable medical devices and aerospace systems. It could also help advance key national priorities for energy innovation and competitiveness in manufacturing.

The researchers' goals included improving energy storage safety, efficiency and mechanical strength. To overcome common design challenges, such as short lifespans and flammability, they created a layered solution using ionogels. Ions are charge-carrying particles that must travel within energy storage systems.

An ionogel, which is neither liquid nor solid, can carry these ions efficiently. By layering ionogel between flexible, ultrathin polymer sheets, the researchers created robust, charge-carrying membranes. The new layer-by-layer assembly effectively balances conductivity with structural strength.

"This balance upgrades both efficiency and safety," said Bishnu Prasad Thapaliya of ORNL's Chemical Sciences Division, principal investigator of a study published in Advanced Functional Materials.

The ORNL-led team included collaborators from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the UT-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute.

Many of today's liquid-electrolyte energy storage systems rely on polymer separators to divide liquid solutions that move ions. In a typical liquid-electrolyte energy storage system, a polymer separates the positive and negative electrodes, or cathodes and anodes.

The researchers built what they call "pseudosolid polyelectrolyte membranes" by layering polymer sheets with an ionogel made from lithium salts and ionic liquids. The system increases ion flow and enhances mechanical strength.

Lithium, a lightweight metal often used in anodes, can store more energy than a carbon-based anode like graphite. To achieve this increased storage capacity, the lithium anode must couple with a transition metal, which can easily gain or lose electrons to take part in chemical reactions or form compounds.

The lithium anode also requires a cathode, separated from the anode and its solution by a polymer. To prevent instability and safety issues caused by lithium's reactivity with water, the lithium must also be soaked in a liquid electrolyte that is not water-based.

To support both mechanical strength and ion conductivity, a membrane assembled from layers of ionogel and polymer sheets contains charge-carrying particles uniformly distributed across alternating polymer layers. Credit: Andrew Sproles/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Preventing lithium dendrites in energy storage systems...However, when lithium is used with a liquid electrolyte, it may form dendrites, needle-like structures that can damage energy storage systems. Sharp dendrite branches can develop inside the electrolyte when lithium atoms form on lithium-metal surfaces.

Growing unpredictably, dendrites can pierce the polymer separator between the anode and cathode. These punctures, also known as crossover, can result in short circuits that can cause fires and result in critical damage.

Dendrite prevention requires a new kind of membrane, one strong enough to resist punctures while maintaining high conductivity. Combining lithium salts and nonflammable ionic liquids, Thapaliya and his colleagues arrived at a solid structure that maintains its shape and performance at room temperature.

The resulting design serves as both electrolyte and separator, eliminating the need for a liquid electrolyte and suppressing formation of potentially dangerous dendrites.

The resulting membrane combines the mechanical strength of a solid with the ion-flow efficiency of a liquid. Mechanically reinforced, it can withstand internal pressures caused by gas buildup from overcharging. This enhanced strength can also suppress dendrite punctures.

Mechanical durability, a key outcome of the team's layered design, can help ensure long-term charge and discharge, or cycling, in lithium-metal energy storage systems.

In laboratory testing, the team's unique new membranes demonstrated stable, efficient performance over hundreds of charge/discharge cycles, even under conditions that typically degrade such systems.

Using automation to speed up membrane production...Moving forward, Thapaliya and his colleagues hope to benefit from robotic assistance, courtesy of ORNL's Autonomous Chemistry Lab. Robots could eventually automate the layer-by-layer gel assembly process.

They could operate independently—even overnight—to build critical structures. Researchers could then dry the resulting coated, multilayered membranes and test them before installing them into prototype devices.

"Our goal is to build on this research and make a scalable membrane that can also be used in commercial energy storage systems," Thapaliya said.

Provided by Oak Ridge National Laboratory 

TECH

Google’s Wiz deal could become a trojan horse in Europe’s cloud

On January 6, Google notified its proposed USD 32 billion acquisition of cloud security company Wiz to the European Commission. This marks a pivotal moment, not only for the future of cloud markets, but also for whether European competition policy is finally willing to confront the expanding power of Big Tech companies.

The deal follows an earlier USD 23 billion takeover attempt in 2024 that collapsed due to alleged concerns about regulatory hurdles in the United States. This time, Google has upped its game and sweetened the deal with a USD 3.2 billion break-up fee if the deal fails. A change in the US administration appears to have paved the way for early merger approval there in November.

Wiz is a fast-growing cybersecurity success story founded in 2020 as a cloud-agnostic challenger to both hyperscalers’ native tools and traditional vendors. It has become a central component of cloud security for governments, critical infrastructure operators and large enterprises. As a multi-cloud security layer, Wiz provides visibility across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and other environments. If Google acquires Wiz, this neutral multi-cloud visibility would be absorbed into a single hyperscaler’s ecosystem, enabling Google to align Wiz’s products and roadmap with its own cloud strategy.

While Wiz would be Google’s largest acquisition to date, no European competition authority opened a review before the deal reached Brussels. This is striking at a time in which Big Tech’s excessive market power in cloud not only hurts businesses and citizens, but has become an increasingly tangible geopolitical threat to Europe’s digital sovereignty agenda. The European Commission must now review the notification and decide by February 10 whether to clear the deal or open an in-depth merger investigation. To prevent the possibility of Google from taking control of the cloud, Europe must step up and stop a structural consolidation that would give the US gatekeeper unprecedented leverage over Europe’s cloud security architecture.

The Wiz deal threatens competition - and more...This transaction is the latest in Google’s long-standing strategy of expanding its empire. Globally, Google acquired at least 43 companies between 2019 and 2025, and since 2010, it has invested in nearly 6,000 companies globally. However, the Wiz transaction stands out from the others: in addition to being Google’s largest, it follows a series of recent cloud security acquisitions, in particular Mandiant, Chronicle and Siemplify, aimed at strengthening its position against Microsoft and Amazon. The scale of this takeover reflects Google’s gargantuan ambition to become an essential player in “left of boom” (i.e., before cybersecurity attacks happen) cloud security.

With Wiz, Google will become one of the most powerful players in cloud security, combining its GCP with a security platform used across all major clouds. This creates an inherent conflict of interest. Google could shape Wiz’s tools to work best with its own cloud, bundle them across its AI and other services, or steer product development in a way that favours GCP. Independent cybersecurity vendors cannot match these advantages and some have already warned that customers operating on other non-Google clouds risk becoming second-class citizens. Large businesses and public bodies would be left with fewer genuinely independent alternative security providers and weaker bargaining positions.

The merger would also strengthen an already dominant tech giant across yet another layer of the digital stack. By gaining control over a key multi-cloud security tool, Google would be in a position to shape the practical level of interoperability across competing cloud environments. This risks customers becoming more dependent on one provider for cloud and security. That is precisely the type of lock-in the EU’s Data Act is meant to reduce.

The deal raises substantial data governance concerns. Wiz’s multi-cloud deployment gives it deep insight into how organisations configure and secure their systems. Once integrated into Google, that insight could be used to reinforce both Google’s cloud and AI businesses. Some investors have described Wiz as a Trojan horse, giving Google visibility into rival clouds that no competitor could replicate.

Experts also note that the acquisition gives Google access to thousands of Wiz patents, allowing it to buy rather than innovate. This removes an independent source of cloud security innovation and reduces the likelihood that Wiz would develop tools that challenge Google’s broader commercial interests.

Consolidating Wiz inside Google would give one company large-scale access to sensitive operational and strategically valuable information. Centralizing this visibility in a single foreign provider increases the risks of misuse, exposure or leakage, and is likely to reduce transparency. Gatekeeper platforms often invoke “security reasons” to justify limiting what customers and regulators can see about how their services work. If Google controls this security layer, users may struggle to assess their own risks, and regulators may find effective oversight harder.

These issues echo a familiar regulatory pattern: competition authorities have repeatedly underestimated the cumulative impact of Google’s acquisitions on market structure, data concentration and ecosystem leverage, most visibly when the DoubleClick takeover paved the way for Google’s dominance in digital advertising.

In addition to this, the competition concerns sit within a wider security and geopolitical context that has been largely overlooked. Europe has already seen cloud outages disrupt basic services such as hospitals, energy grids and financial services. Deepening Europe’s dependence on a small group of powerful hyperscalers, while handing another critical layer of Europe’s digital infrastructure to one of them, runs directly against the European Commission’s and France and Germany’s stated goals of strengthening European cloud sovereignty.

Europe’s competition authorities must act now...Given these risks, the Google/Wiz merger demands more than routine scrutiny. Now that the transaction has been formally notified, the European Commission must open an in-depth investigation and be prepared to block the deal if the evidence shows that Google’s control of Wiz would distort competition in the cloud and cloud security markets. Wiz has a significant operational presence in the region, including registered subsidiaries in the Netherlands and Germany and offices in France. Its UK revenues reached almost GBP 30 million in 2024. Many major European companies—including LVMH, Siemens, BMW, Shell, and Revolut—are customers of Wiz, which means the deal has direct implications for how sensitive data generated in Europe may be consolidated and controlled by a single Big Tech player.

The fact that this USD 32 billion transaction reached the Commission without any prior European national competition authority scrutiny is revealing. The deal did not trigger national notification thresholds, and no national authority called it in, highlighting a persistent gap whereby strategically important digital deals often fall outside traditional merger thresholds, even when their impact is substantial. Past under-intervention, such as in Google/DoubleClick, shows how easily the impacts of such deals can be misjudged. If recently expanded merger regimes in countries such as Germany or the United Kingdom cannot capture a transaction of this magnitude, it raises questions about the effectiveness of those reforms and whether the EU framework is equipped to address high-risk digital infrastructure deals.

Countries currently considering below-threshold merger regimes, including France and the Netherlands, should treat the Google/Wiz as a clear test-case. Without mechanisms capable of assessing strategically relevant digital infrastructure acquisitions, Europe will continue to miss the very transactions that reshape power for years to come.

If Europe is serious about maintaining competitive cloud and cloud security markets, the European Commission must not only investigate but must also be prepared to block the Google/Wiz deal.

Authors below:

Hilary Jennings--Hilary Jennings is a Senior Fellow at the Balanced Economy Project, a civil society organisation dedicated to holding powerful corporations to account. She is an independent competition and regulation consultant advising authorities and governments worldwide, and previously held senior roles at the ...

Claire Lavin--Claire Lavin is a Research Fellow at the Open Markets Institute. She contributes to Open Markets' advocacy and research work in Europe. Claire deals with a range of EU competition policy issues with a particular focus on technology and Big Tech firms.

Çağrı Çavuş--Çağrı Çavuş is a tech researcher at SOMO, a civil society organisation that investigates multinational corporations. He specialises in competition policy and the regulation of digital platforms.

Aline Blankertz--Aline Blankertz is an applied economist and works as Tech Economy Lead at Rebalance Now, an anti-monopoly organization. She has been analyzing competition and markets mostly in the digital sector at various civil society organizations and at an economic consultancy.

TECH

Heat pumps will soon be able to store and distribute heat as needed

Researchers have developed a heat storage unit that takes up less space than a regular hot water tank. It charges when electricity is cheap and releases heat when needed.

Heat pumps are becoming increasingly common in private homes. But storing the heat they produce has not been possible—until now. SINTEF and Swiss company COWA Thermal Solutions researchers are collaborating on the solution.

"Think of it as a thermal battery, which stores the heat from the heat pump and can be used later. In practice, this means that people get more energy out of the stored heat. It becomes easier and more comfortable to use, and the energy is also used in a smarter way," says Galina Simonsen, a senior research scientist at SINTEF.

Simonsen is a member of the team that has developed the new thermal batteries.

"The batteries have high efficiency, and they charge and deliver heat quickly, making it easier to meet the need. Like when several people are taking showers one after the other, for example, or you need hot water early on a cold morning," says Simonsen.

The solution will also benefit your wallet because it makes it possible to store excess heat when electricity is cheap or produced in an environmentally friendly way, and can be used when the need for more heat arises.

Properties lie in salt hydrates...Heat pumps extract energy from the environment—air, soil or water—and transport the heat into the home.

However, in households and other buildings, the heat demand varies, depending on usage patterns, time of day, outdoor temperature and weather conditions. The researchers on this project have worked to meet these fluctuations in a smarter way.

"A heat pump that runs constantly is expensive, energy-consuming and can lead to overloading the power grid. With the new batteries, heat pumps combine storage and smart distribution of heat," says Simonsen.

Research colleagues Martin Fossen and Galina Simonsen in front of the system that can store excess heat from heat pumps. Credit: Silje Grytli Tveten

First out with a solution for private individuals..."The research team at SINTEF has collaborated closely with the Swiss company COWA Thermal Solutions to develop their solution. Although thermal energy storage already exists, the team is among the first to have managed to create a solution that is so effective that it is attractive for private homes.

The secret lies in a combination of technical solutions and materials called salt hydrates.

"Unlike the salt we sprinkle on food, salt hydrates lock water into their structure and behave in a unique way when exposed to heat," says Simonsen.

Substances that can undergo this physical transformation, from melting to solidification, belong to a broader group of materials known as "phase change materials."

Here you can read about the company Cartesian, which has created a similar solution for both heating and cooling large buildings based on solar or wind power:

"Think of thermal batteries as sponges: When they're heated to a certain temperature, they undergo a change from solid to liquid and can store heat. When they are cooled, they return to solid form and release heat again," says Simonsen.

"They can store much more thermal energy than water, for example, and they retain heat longer, even if the temperature does not change that much."

In other words: more heat and more stable temperatures.

You may have this very common substance in your kitchen cupboard. Now it plays the main role in a new system for heat storage. Researcher Galina Simonsen believes the solution could also be very useful in private homes. Credit: SINTEF

Space-saving solution...Salt hydrates thus open up completely new possibilities for smart and more balanced heating systems because heating can be moved to times with low energy demand.

"Salt hydrates aren't toxic, they're not flammable and they are also relatively inexpensive. This makes them a safe and good choice for use in private homes. Heat storage with salt hydrates also takes up less space than a traditional hot water tank, often up to four times less," says Simonsen.

About the Sure2Coat project...The work is being carried out as part of the project Sure2Coat and in close collaboration with the Swiss company COWA Thermal Solutions and research partners. COWA has worked to develop and improve the salt hydrates with new additives, so that the materials are stable and can function for decades without losing their special properties. SINTEF has worked to improve the efficiency of the batteries themselves.

Traditional systems often have low efficiency and can take a long time to charge and provide heat to the house. By using thin cooling fins, the researchers have managed to increase the efficiency of the new batteries from 65 to 85%. At the same time, charging time has been reduced by over 70% and the time it takes to release the heat has been cut by more than 80%.

The Sure2Coat project is a collaboration between 14 partners in industry and research in seven European countries. The project involves developing and implementing new or improved methods for surface treatment and coating of surfaces for different types of metals. The methods are demonstrated through three specific application areas: the gearbox, gas-water heater and latent heat storage.

Through the project, end users will effectively reduce their energy use, material consumption, CO2 emissions and pollution from production. The goal is to contribute positively to European industry and the EU's growth strategy by integrating surface treatment methods into the production line.

Recycled aluminum used...SINTEF's task in the project has been to improve the efficiency itself. That is, how the heat is stored and released in the batteries.

"Specifically, we have designed and tested a type of heat sink that improves heat transfer in the thermal batteries," says Simonsen.

The cooling fins are thin metal structures made of recycled aluminum that are effective heat conductors. This means that the heat is distributed quickly and evenly through the salt hydrate.

"Aluminum is a light material, has good thermal conductivity and is easy to form. The use of recycled aluminum also reduces the environmental footprint and costs, and helps to promote a more circular use of materials.

At the same time, recycled aluminum poses a challenge: it can contain impurities that make it more vulnerable to corrosion.

"Corrosion is particularly critical because salt hydrates are tough on aluminum, especially when impurities are present. Without protection, the cooling fins can degrade over time, reducing performance and shortening the lifespan of the entire system," Simonsen explains.

To solve this problem, the researchers have employed a type of coating called plasma electrolytic oxidation (PEO), which forms a thin, ceramic layer on the surface of the aluminum.

"This coating is similar to what is used on non-stick pans and provides a very durable and corrosion-resistant barrier," says the researcher.

Provided by Norwegian University of Science and Technology