The battery that could change everything could finally be here

Hello Nature readers,
Today we learn how sodium-ion batteries could change the world, discover the ways in which scientists are revealing the mysteries of the deep ocean and revisit the evolution of handedness with an ancient worm.

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China puts limits on AI avatar boom

From assisting with health care to lecturing in universities, AI avatars are increasingly filling roles across China — so much so that the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s cyberspace regulator, has released new rules for the virtual digital humans. They require that people consent to the use of their personal information, appearance or voice. And companies are banned from providing children and young people with virtual relatives or virtual intimate relationships, and from creating services that could lead to children becoming addicted to virtual human services. In response, some tech companies have begun disabling features that allow users to create their own customized AI avatars.

Is this the oldest known rightie?

Around 550 million years ago, a flat, segmented, worm-like creature called Spriggina floundersi wiggled its way through the seafloor mud of the Ediacaran period. And when it wiggled, it tended to wiggle to the right, say researchers. A study of more than 100 Spriggina specimens from South Australia — where it’s the state fossil — found that about twice as many were bending in a right-turning direction when they died compared to the opposite direction. “The presence of handedness in any kind of functional asymmetry, really deep into the fossil record, gives us important and interesting information,” says evolutionary biologist Russell Bicknell.

The battery that could change everything

Sodium-ion batteries promise to be cheaper, safer and more environmentally friendly than the lithium-ion cells that currently dominate technologies such as electric cars. And the sea-change could finally be here: CATL — the world’s largest battery producer — has announced that it will start mass-producing sodium-ion batteries by the end of the year. A swell of interest from battery makers and researchers has helped to solve longstanding challenges, such as a lack of durability.

Exploring the final frontier

Advanced technologies are poised to reveal the mysteries of the deep ocean floor — and deeper. Data from hydrophones can detect tsunamis faster than the destructive megawaves can travel, and a system that piggybacks on the optical cables that carry our data can detect seismic events over thousands of kilometres. Meanwhile, scientists are planning to drill through the crust’s lower boundary — called the Mohorovičić discontinuity — and take the first-ever pristine samples of the underlying mantle.