dendrite growth

In the Moon's polar craters, where sunlight never reaches, regolith may accumulate electric charge for decades, buried deep below the surface. It's like a bank account where deposits and balance don't match: a particle delivers energy, but the charge doesn't always stay put.

A lake in a drought doesn't dry up all at once. First, islands of dry land appear on the water's surface, they expand and merge, and only then does the water recede from the exposed bed. A mirabilite crystal behaves similarly when it loses water: round patches of anhydrous salt appear on its surface, growing outward and then beginning to deepen.

Through three minutes after the Big Bang, the Universe played its first symphony. It was the big bang nucleosynthesis — the formation of light nuclei, where each element sounded its own note, and the tempo was set by the expansion of space.

A tuning fork struck once rings pure and long. But if you shake the fork itself while it sounds, the tone wavers and dies out quickly. Something similar happens to electrons in any piece of matter. Atoms in a lattice never stay put: thermal vibrations keep them jittering.

When JWST peered into the young universe at redshifts of 6–10, it revealed a scattering of mysterious 'little red dots' (LRDs). These objects combined features of galaxies and active nuclei, but their spectra refused to fit into familiar patterns.

The Universe grows like a metropolis: galaxies skyscrapers are erected on an invisible scaffold of dark matter: its gravity pulling in construction material. Meanwhile, dark energy makes the city itself continuously expand.

The Universe is a genius chef, and the Big Bang is its perfect recipe. Hydrogen rose fluffy, helium melted tender, but lithium-7 seems oversalted: theory predicts three times more than astronomers find in the oldest stars. This imbalance, the 'lithium problem,' has spoiled cosmologists' appetite for decades.

Battery aging is like metal fatigue: a crack grows inside long before the part breaks. Usually, you only learn about the problem when capacity drops below 80%—but by then, the damage is irreversible.

A chef pours hot sugar syrup onto a cold table, and it sets into crystals. That's roughly how engineers pictured metal solidification: the liquid instantly becomes a scatter of crystalline grains. But close-up imaging revealed an extra stage wedged between liquid and solid.

A lithium-ion battery is like a multi-story building where lithium ions live on every floor. When you charge the battery, the ions move from floor to floor, and the whole building warms up a bit. Usually, this heat dissipates evenly, like from underfloor heating. But sometimes one spot gets too hot, and then the whole building can go up in flames.

Lithium is like a thermometer dipped into a star's interior. This light element is destroyed at temperatures around 2.5 million degrees, so its abundance on the surface tells us how deeply the star's material has been mixed.

In the first minutes of the Big Bang, the universe whipped up a cocktail of hydrogen, helium, and a pinch of lithium.

A black hole can torment a star for years, rather than rip it apart immediately. Tidal forces are when the hole's gravity stretches the star: the near side is pulled harder than the far side. Usually, getting too close rips the star apart instantly — that's a tidal disruption event.

A metal filament as thin as a hair grows through the ceramic like a root through asphalt. In solid-state batteries, such filaments are called dendrites, and they appear when the charging current exceeds a critical threshold. The ceramic electrolyte is solid but brittle, like glass.

4 billion years ago, the young Earth was mercilessly bombarded by meteorites, leaving behind impact craters. Rains filled them with water, forming shallow ponds where lipid bubbles accumulated. These bubbles, like soap bubbles but with a double-layered lipid membrane (just like modern cells), formed spontaneously when water mixed with fat-like substances.

Lithium in a battery sometimes behaves like ivy on a building facade: instead of a uniform layer, it sprouts thin, sharp tendrils. These needles can pierce the separator inside the battery and cause a short circuit. So engineers are looking for ways to make lithium grow calmly. One trick they've found is to put a thin silver film under the lithium.

By breaking down the light of the 'Serpens' cluster with spectroscopy (a method that splits light into its component colors), astronomers found that stars start losing lithium as early as 35 million years — four times sooner than thought. This changes our understanding of how sun-like stars mature. The cause is rotation.

In the first minutes after the Big Bang, the Universe was like a blazing hot stove. On it, according to the 'recipe' of the standard theory, hydrogen, helium, and a bit of lithium were supposed to cook. But telescopes see only a third of the lithium that this recipe calls for.

For two atomic nuclei to fuse, they must overcome their fierce electric repulsion — like trying to bring two angry bulls together. Normally, only monstrous energy does the trick, as in stellar cores, where Hans Bethe explained fusion back in the 1930s.