•The Good Signal
A solar gel just pulled lithium from brine in the lab
Chu, Zhang, Zhu and colleagues at Soochow, with Qinghai Institute of Salt Lakes (CAS), report in Nature Communications (21 Aug 2026) an ion-selective hydrogel pump: PVA block plus in-situ polyamide skin. Under sunlight the hydrogel reaches 47.86 bar; Li⁺ flux hits 1.20 g m−2 h−1 at 2.5 cm immersion in a 10 g L−1 synthetic brine. A 90% shorter Li2CO3 cycle versus evaporation-precipitation is a techno-economic model, not a factory.
