Neither climate laboratory nor knowledge vacuum: What's at stake for the Global South in the debate around solar geoengineering research.

Recently, I sat in a room in Cape Town with African climate scientists, watching them present results from sophisticated models examining how solar geoengineering interventions might affect local weather patterns across the continent. These researchers, primarily climate impact modelers who have expanded their work to include solar geoengineering scenarios, were doing exactly what critics claim the Global South lacks capacity for: producing rigorous, locally relevant climate science.

Mapping Africa's EV revolution.

Six years ago, my colleagues and I published an article in the World Economic Forum asking if Africa was ready for the electric vehicle (EV) revolution. At that time, the African EV sector was nascent, and we concluded that more data and research were needed to draw firmer conclusions, emphasizing the absence of Africa-specific data in major EV publications and calling for dedicated analysis tailored to the continent's needs.

AI in Africa: Basics Over Buzz.

When Buti Manamela visited Lengau, Africa's fastest supercomputer, he had more prosaic technology in mind: electricity. South Africa's Deputy Minister of Higher Education, Science and Technology was at the Center for High Performance Computing in Cape Town for what should have been a showcase tour of a facility providing the country with the computing power needed to run and analyze the kinds of complex models and huge datasets that underpin artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). But Manamela was there to better understand the impact of South Africa's rolling power blackouts on the center's operations.

African energy transitions should be driven from the ground up.

At the UN climate summit (COP28) kicking off in Dubai next week, we can expect the nations of the world to issue a flurry of energy- and climate-related announcements, pledges, and plans. Like their global peers, African governments will be using COP28 to demonstrate their climate ambition, building on commitments they made at the inaugural African Climate Summit held three months prior in Nairobi.

Electrical percolation in quasi-two-dimensional metal nanowire networks for transparent conductors.

We simulate the conductivity of quasi-two-dimensional mono- and polydisperse rod networks having rods of various aspect ratios (L/D = 25-800) and rod densities up to 100 times the critical density and assuming contact-resistance dominated transport. We report the rod-size dependence of the percolation threshold and the density dependence of the conductivity exponent over the entire L/D range studied. Our findings clarify the range of applicability for the popular widthless-stick description for physical networks of rodlike objects with modest aspect ratios and confirm predictions for the high-density dependence of the conductivity exponent obtained from modest-density systems.

Integrating simulations and experiments to predict sheet resistance and optical transmittance in nanowire films for transparent conductors.

Metal nanowire films are among the most promising alternatives for next-generation flexible, solution-processed transparent conductors. Breakthroughs in nanowire synthesis and processing have reported low sheet resistance (Rs ≤ 100 Ω/sq) and high optical transparency (%T > 90%). Comparing the merits of the various nanowires and fabrication methods is inexact, because Rs and %T depend on a variety of independent parameters including nanowire length, nanowire diameter, areal density of the nanowires and contact resistance between nanowires.