Energy used to power artificial intelligence (AI) could jump to 3% of global electricity demand by 2030, guzzling as much water as the 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa consume in one year to meet their domestic water needs.

Those are the conclusions of a recent United Nations report that estimated the land use, water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions associated with AI's breakneck expansion. If the data centers that underpin AI formed a country, they would rank 11th in the world for energy use due to their high infrastructure and electricity needs to train ever more complicated models and satisfy users, the report found.

By 2030, data centers could rise to sixth in the world for energy consumption, which would have a land footprint the size of Connecticut and release emissions comparable to those of the U.K. in 2025, depending on how much renewable energy is in the mix.

The findings highlight how much additional pressure AI and the infrastructure that supports it could put on the environment and the climate within the next few years. But why does AI have such a huge footprint, who is benefiting or being left out from the opportunities linked to AI's growth, and what can be done to limit the damage?

To find out more, we spoke with Kaveh Madani, lead investigator for the U.N. report; director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health; and the recipient of this year's Stockholm Water Prize.

Sascha Pare: What would you say is the main takeaway from the report?

Kaveh Madani: The main takeaway of this report is that although in the general discourse AI is perceived as something virtual, or digital, or up in the clouds, there is [a] massive physicality to AI and the supply chains and infrastructure that back it up. And that's one thing that this report has tried to do: to remind people that behind every prompt, every use, every interaction, there is some level of impact on the environment. This is because from the top of the supply chain, where the extraction of critical minerals happens, to the point of manufacturing the hardware, the construction of the data centers, then the operation of data centers, and then dealing with the e-waste, there are major environmental impacts. If we take all of those into account, then we realize that what's digital is not necessarily free of impact. There is always some footprint associated with it, and we have to remember that.

SP: Why does AI have such massive land and water footprints, specifically?

KM: The report outlines the carbon, water and land footprints of AI's energy use. All along the supply chain, from the extraction of critical minerals to the point of disposing and dealing with the electronic waste, we have actions and interventions that require water, require land, and are associated with carbon emissions. So, if you think about, for example, the extraction of critical minerals, we know that during the process, a lot of water is being used and a lot of water is being polluted and poisoned. We published a report in April about the water injustice implications of the critical minerals, showing exactly what is happening where we have the extraction of critical minerals.

But let's not forget that the [new] report is focused on AI's energy use, and then tries to argue that the energy production process itself requires also a lot of water and land. If you are using hydropower to provide energy to your data center, you're using a lot of land and a lot of water. This applies to all sorts of energy sources, regardless of being clean or not, or if you consider them renewable or not — they all require water and land. On top of this, of course, you need to build data centers on land, but also you need water for cooling. That's why, throughout the supply chain, throughout the life cycle of AI, we have a lot of water and land use, in addition to carbon emissions.

SP: The report is packed with jaw-dropping statistics about how big AI's environmental footprint could get by 2030. But how significant are the impacts?

KM: First of all, it is very hard to estimate exactly how much energy AI is currently using, but we know that roughly 20% of the current load of data centers can be attributed to AI. We are expecting that to be 40% within a few years. And by then, the data centers that back AI's operations are expected to have an energy demand that is about 3% of the total energy demand of the world. This is equivalent to being the sixth-most-energy-intensive country in the world. The water demand of that is also huge; the water footprint associated with that is enough to satisfy the domestic water needs of 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa.

SP: Can the environment and communities cope with the projected levels of energy and water consumption needed for AI?

KM: There would be places in the world where big decisions must be made, meaning that you have to decide if you want to continue using your water for agriculture or if you want to put it into data centers. Those would be decisions for the communities — and if the communities are not involved, then the most vulnerable, the poor, will be dealing with the consequences.

At the same time, we know that the world's electricity consumption keeps increasing. That's a major problem, because although we are trying to add more and more renewables to the energy supply systems, the renewables cannot keep up with the increasing electricity demand. This means that not only can we not retire the old systems, but we might also need to use more fossil energy to satisfy this growing demand. And of course, that means more pressure on the fragile environment.

We know some of the data centers are being placed in locations that are already dry or suffering from what we refer to as "water bankruptcy," based on the report we published in January. These are major issues. More pressure on the environment [puts] more pressure on humans, and this recipe means [we could have] a kind of reinforcing degradation loop that would jeopardize both nature and human society.

SP: Who is benefiting the most from AI's expansion, and who is being excluded?

KM: AI expansion is benefiting humanity as a whole. It has changed our lifestyle; it has provided a lot of opportunities and improvements. But at the same time, it has some consequences. The issue that we see right now is that the richer communities and countries of the world are the ones that are benefiting from it the most, and within those communities and countries, it's the rich who are also profiting more from the expansion. If you look at the investment landscape of AI, you can see that there is a lot of push from a number of strong players and private investors. And they don't bear the costs when it comes to pollution, water bankruptcy, land degradation and so on.

If you think about the emissions, they are contributing to global warming, and everybody would suffer from it. Even the countries that don't have AI infrastructure are affected: If you think about where the critical minerals come from, you see a lot of poor communities, poor countries and poor regions in Africa, South America, parts of Asia, where people don't have basic infrastructure — they don't even have clean drinking water and energy infrastructure. They don't benefit from this expansion and the profits and utilities it provides. It's the most vulnerable communities and the poor economies that are going to suffer the consequences, while the other ones will benefit more.

SP: How did you estimate AI's growth by 2030, and how likely is it that your numbers will come true, given the fears that AI is a bubble that's about to catastrophically burst?

KM: We were looking at the data centers, and we still think that our projections are conservative. There is a lot of push from the private sector to further growth. Countries are also seeing investment in AI and data centers as an investment in security, sovereignty and other matters, so there's also a competition there. Some of the investments — some of the decisions about expanding AI — are not necessarily based on comprehensive assessments. Investments remain a bid to stay in the race, and that means more and more push. So we think that what we have projected is probably very conservative.

SP: China is scaling up its energy capacity together with data center buildout, and it is putting data centers in the ocean to try to solve the hardware cooling issue. What do you make of this strategy, and should other countries learn from it?

KM: China's more centralized decision-making system provides advantages, but I think we need to be careful about generalizing the information of one or two projects highlighted by the media to the overall strategy.

We know that China has been expanding its renewable energy production capacity, and that's definitely a good thing. We have to make sure that the additional load of AI would not mean more fossil energy and would not compromise the decarbonization process. But at the same time, we should note that just scaling up renewables is not sufficient if you're thinking about decarbonization. We need a massive addition of renewables if we're going to reverse climate change, and we are not seeing strong enough signs of that around the world. So that's something that we have to be worried about.

That has been the challenge created for the world because of the expansion of AI. When it comes to putting things under the ocean, I think we do not yet have enough information and enough experience to judge if those things come with less environmental impact. What we hide would not be impact-free; there are also other impacts to worry about.

SP: What are some other solutions to the pressures AI is putting on the environment and people? How should we approach the rapid expansion to ensure it is fair?

KM: We offer a framework based on a number of principles about making the AI governance system more fair and transparent and sustainable. So, those are the principles suggested, and they bring responsibility to all stakeholders, including the developers and service providers — those who provide the technology and have responsibilities of ensuring that their systems are more transparent and efficient.

Then, we have the governments that have the responsibility of ensuring that information becomes available, that footprints are properly monitored and disclosed and regulated. They can use a range of incentives, mechanisms or penalties to ensure that footprints are reduced across the supply chain — and I insist on that — from the mines to the landfill. So, that can be done; pollution taxes can be charged and so on. [Governments should ensure] that those who have to deal with the consequences also benefit from the profits and the opportunities that data centers bring to their communities. Decisions must be made based on resource availability and the environmental consequences taken into account.

Users also can do a better job of making smarter choices by using AI more responsibly and only when it's absolutely necessary. When using AI, choose the right models, and be mindful of what is happening behind the scenes. Is it really necessary to generate another image? Is it really necessary to generate a video? Is it necessary to use the model in the "thinking mode"? Together, all the stakeholders can make a difference, and users can also call for more transparency and force governments to take action to force the service providers to provide more information and be more transparent.

Editor's note: This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

On April 26, 1986, operators at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant were running a test to see what would happen to its nuclear reactors in a power outage — and they triggered the worst nuclear accident in human history.

The plant generated fission power using several nuclear cores, where uranium atoms were split. The process generates successively more heat and free neutrons as atoms split into progressively lighter ones, eventually turning feedwater into steam that powers turbines. Separate cooling water that circulated around the plant's nuclear cores and a "moderator" material was meant to keep the reaction stable.

Reactor 4 was scheduled to be shut down for regular maintenance, so the operators decided to test whether, during a power outage, the turbines could keep the coolant water circulating long enough for the emergency diesel generators to kick in.

The operators started reducing power to the reactor around 1 a.m. on April 25. However, a Kyiv-based operator that controlled the electricity grid wouldn't allow for a complete shutdown, as the grid needed power. So contrary to the prescribed test protocol, the reactor was kept at half-power levels from 2 p.m. to around 11 p.m. local time. (This decision led to a buildup of xenon that made the reactor unstable.)

By the time the test resumed, a less-experienced night crew was on duty. Ideally, the team should have raised power to a higher level to stabilize the reactor before restarting the shutdown test. Instead of bringing the power back up, the operators accidentally lowered it further.

By about 12:30 a.m. on April 26, they realized the power had dropped too rapidly. They tried to raise it by removing almost all of the control rods, which are designed to slow the atom-splitting reaction by absorbing neutrons. The power levels then fluctuated rapidly, and the operators took multiple measures to control the reaction, including temporarily lowering feedwater levels.

A power surge 100 times larger than normal was detected. The operators then tried to get the reaction under control by lowering all 211 control rods into the core, but they jammed. At 1:23 a.m., two back-to-back steam explosions occurred, blew the roof off the building, and spewed radioactive material high into the atmosphere. The debris triggered a massive fire. The core had partially melted down.

Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to evacuate nearby towns. Two workers died immediately in the disaster, and some of the emergency firefighters and "liquidators" who raced to contain the fire and prevent further melt down ultimately died of radiation sickness or cancer down the line. The cancers were likely caused by the radioactive iodine, strontium and cesium that permeated the area after the explosions.

The former Soviet Union tried to keep the meltdown a secret, but elevated radiation levels were detected across Europe, particularly in Scandinavia, in the weeks following the disaster.

In the years after, children in nearby regions experienced higher levels of thyroid cancer than had been typical in the past. But a United Nations report from 2000 found "no increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality that could be associated with radiation exposure." That said, the report acknowledged that some upticks in cancer rates would be expected to take decades to show up in the data.

Today, the 1,000-square-mile (2,700 square kilometers) Chernobyl exclusion zone around the plant is one of the most radioactive places on the planet and a nature preserve. It is also a natural test bed to see what happens when animals and plants are exposed to high levels of radiation, as well as a direct example of "evolution in action."

Experts have spent decades dissecting the missteps that led to the catastrophe, including the poor training of the nuclear plant operators and their subsequent failure to follow safety protocols. Keeping the reactors at half power for hours didn't help, either.

But at heart of the meltdown was a critical design flaw in the Reaktor Bolshoy Moshchnosti Kanalnyy (RBMK) reactors used at Chernobyl and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. All reactors use a "moderator" material to slow fission-produced neutrons so they can stay in the core and fuel further reactions, while water is used as a coolant to keep the cores from overheating and triggering a runaway reaction.

In the "light water" nuclear reactors typically used in the U.S. and Europe, water is both a moderator and a coolant. This means that, as the reaction gets hotter, more and more water turns to steam, leaving less water to act as a moderator, Live Science previously reported. The reaction has a built-in negative feedback loop in which the more heat and steam is produced, the less efficiently fission occurs.

At Chernobyl, however, graphite served as the moderator. In such a system, as steam forms, the graphite heats up, and the fission reaction speeds up as well. This creates the potential for a runaway positive feedback loop, because steam creates voids where the reaction speeds up, which can quickly boil all the coolant water. This is called a "high positive void coefficient."

It didn't help that the control rods were tipped with graphite, which temporarily sped up the fission reaction just as the operators were trying to slow it down. British officials had warned the Soviets that RBMK reactors had serious defects at least nine years prior to the Chernobyl accident, but most of those issues were not corrected, The New York Times reported at the time.

There are several RBMK reactors still operating in Russia, but most of those have undergone extensive safety retrofitting so that such a runaway reaction is, in theory, much less likely.

More than 60 years after it was first spotted, Cygnus X-1 — the first confirmed black hole — is still full of surprises. Researchers have finally measured the energy output of this behemoth's "dancing jets," and the results could help answer wider questions about the extreme behavior of black holes, experts say.

Cygnus X-1 is a stellar-mass black hole that is around 21 times more massive than the sun and located approximately 7,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus. It is locked in a binary orbit with an equally massive blue supergiant star dubbed HDE 226868, which it circles every 5.6 days at a distance of 0.2 astronomical unit (one-fifth the Earth-sun distance). The black hole is constantly ripping away its partner's outer layers into a superhot ring of swirling matter called an accretion disk, which shines brightly in X-ray light.

Astronomers first spotted the ionizing glow of Cygnus X-1 in 1964, when scientists were still unsure whether black holes really existed. Since it was officially confirmed in 1971, Cygnus X-1 has been studied extensively and, until recently, was considered the most massive and fastest-spinning stellar-mass black hole ever seen. Although Cygnus X-1 does not emit any visible light, it is possible to see its companion star HDE 226868 with a decent telescope, making this one of the few black hole systems you can also observe for yourself.

Like most other black holes, Cygnus X-1 shoots out two massive beams of energy. These jets, made of plasma from the accretion disk, get fired outward by the black hole's immensely powerful and rapidly spinning magnetic field. However, despite detecting dozens of similar jets and even photographing them, researchers have historically struggled to properly measure the energetic outlaws.

But in the new study, published April 16 in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers have found a way to measure the jets of Cygnus X-1 by tracking how they wobble, or "dance," due to their close proximity to HDE 226868.

The team found that the jets shine with the equivalent energy of around 10,000 suns and that they're shooting outward at around 335 million mph (540 million km/h) — about half the speed of light.

"Dancing jets"

All active stars, including HDE 226868, emit stellar winds made up of charged particles accelerated by powerful magnetic fields (similar to black hole energy jets). These invisible gusts push against the atmospheres of planets and eventually collide with the interstellar medium.

In the case of Cygnus X-1, its energy jets are constantly buffeted by strong gusts of radiation from HDE 226868, causing the jets to bend away from the blue supergiant. Because the two objects circle a shared center of mass, the jets appear to bend back and forth, or wobble, from our point of view.

Study first author Steve Prabu, a radio astronomer at the University of Oxford, described this phenomenon as "dancing jets" due to their constant swaying motion, according to a statement emailed to Live Science.

Historically, it has been tricky to take accurate readings of these dancing jets, due to their constant movement. But researchers combined images captured by radio telescopes across the globe to build a more accurate picture of the jets' shape, thus achieving what was previously impossible.

Filling in the gaps

Researchers are particularly pleased by the new findings because they can help fill in gaps in our current black hole knowledge.

"A key finding from this research is that about 10 per cent of the energy released as matter falls in towards the black hole is carried away by the jets," Prabu said in the statement. "This is what scientists usually assume in large-scale simulated models of the universe, but it has been hard to confirm by observation until now."

While this is just one set of jets, our current understanding of black holes — based on Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity — suggests that all black hole jets, whether they belong to stellar-mass or supermassive entities, should emit a similar outflow.

"Because our theories suggest that the physics around black holes is very similar, we can now use this measurement to anchor our understanding of [other] jets, whether they are from black holes 10 or 10 million times the mass of the sun," study co-author James Miller-Jones, a radio astronomer and black hole accretion expert at Curtin University in Australia, said in the statement.

A better understanding of black hole jets will also help scientists figure out how galaxies like the Milky Way have evolved over time, based on how these monstrous outflows shape their surroundings.

"Black hole jets provide an important source of feedback to the surrounding environment and are critical to understanding the evolution of galaxies," Miller-Jones added.

President Donald Trump's war on Iran is the perfect embodiment of all that is wrong with our ongoing fossil fuel dependence. And it puts an exclamation mark on the case for a clean energy transition. Renewable energy promises a more secure, domestically sustainable and inexhaustible energy source — via wind, solar, geothermal and energy storage technology.

It doesn't lead to the further warming of our planet and the destabilization of our climate. And it doesn't lead to us fighting dangerous, often misguided, wars in far-flung lands.

This isn't the first time a global event has placed a huge, shining light on the benefits of moving away from fossil fuels. Five years ago I opined that there might be just the slightest sliver of a silver lining in the tragic COVID pandemic. Despite the devastating loss of life, perhaps it provided us with an occasion to rethink our unsustainable ways, an opportunity to choose a better path — a "green reset."

The pandemic, and lockdowns that ensued, saw oil prices dropping for the first time ever. We didn't need fossil fuels to get around because no one could go anywhere. Renewables, however, are largely unaffected by demand and proved resistant to the global economic shock.

As governments sought to jump start the economy, it seemed an opportune time to retire our dirty fossil fuel energy infrastructure and rebuild in its place a clean, green global economy, tackling the greatest challenge we face today — the climate crisis.

But it was not to be. As my co-author Dr. Peter Hotez and I detail in our recent book "Science Under Siege" (PublicAffairs, 2025), petrostates, plutocrats and bad actors who benefit from the fossil fuel status quo simply doubled down in their efforts to spread propaganda and disinformation, turning the idea of a "great reset" into a boogie man of the right-wing conspiracy theory fever swamps.

Another reason for this failed opportunity was that the connection between the immediate crisis and the underlying environmental factors was subtle. Habitat destruction and climate change both favor the conditions that allow for the type of zoonotic transmission (e.g. from bats or pangolins to humans) involved in the spread of novel coronaviruses. But look at how long that last sentence was.

In the case of Trump's war on Iran (and his previous attack on Venezuela for that matter), the connection is comparatively simple: It's about the fossil fuels, stupid!

The warming of the planet poses an unprecedented threat in the form of more dangerous storms, rising sea levels, coastal inundation and deadly, damaging extreme weather events. It is a direct consequence of the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels. And Trump's war on Iran is fundamentally about fossil fuels.

The war against Iran advances the interests of petrostates like Saudi Arabia and Russia and supports the fossil fuel industry by attempting to seize from Iran control of the flow of oil and liquified natural gas through the Strait of Hormuz.

The U.S. itself is a petrostate under Trump and GOP rule — with the administration actively opposing green energy projects that could help make the country's energy supply self-sufficient. And our continued fossil fuel dependence poses a great threat to our nation. It's a double whammy. It makes us dependent on buying oil and gas from dangerous foreign nations, as epitomized by this unpopular war, expending tremendous amounts of blood and treasure in the effort to maintain access to fossil fuel reserves around the world. And it damages the climate, pushing us toward a dangerous, unstable planetary future.

We now understand the market instability associated with our continued reliance on fossil fuels, as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz causes gasoline prices in the U.S. spike to levels not seen in years, driving a broader increase in the cost of goods and services that is propagating through the economy and negatively impacting consumers.

Renewable energy is actually cheaper than fossil fuel energy now on a levelized basis (and that’s not even accounting for the tremendous cost of climate damages). They can be produced on a domestic level and provide something fossil fuels cannot — predictability and security.

That's why the fossil fuel-driven Trump administration has put its thumb on the scales to block, or at least slow down, the inevitable transition to clean energy. The absurdity of these efforts has reached new levels with the recent report that the Trump administration paid a major energy company $1 billion to stop a project to build wind farms off the U.S. East Coast and invest the money in a Texas natural gas facility instead.

Trump's assault on renewable energy, meanwhile, is raising energy prices, along with his tariffs. His war of choice against Iran is adding to the affordability crisis that, ironically, now threatens his presidency.

Fortunately, we are seeing progress at the state and regional level. Virginia, for example, with its Democratic, climate-forward governor Abigail Spanberger, is forging ahead with a new offshore wind farm that has just begun producing electric power, having prevailed against the Trump administration and its effort to block the project.

Elections have consequences, and the midterm election — less than a year from now — will be an opportunity to put a check on a misguided administration that is taking us down an ever-more-treacherous road of fossil fuel dependence, war and economic devastation.

We need, in the meantime, to envision a better future — a clean energy future with a livable climate, in which we don't start dangerous foreign wars in a desperate effort to extract every last bit of fossil fuel.

Opinion on Live Science gives you insight on the most important issues in science that affect you and the world around you today, written by experts and leading scientists in their field.

A 2024 study that claimed to have discovered an entirely new source of oxygen in the deep sea — dubbed "dark oxygen" — was flawed, inconsistent with previous research, and "fundamentally at odds with thermodynamics," critics argue in a new opinion article.

Despite this pushback, the researchers behind the 2024 study recently announced that they will deploy robots to the seafloor between Mexico and Hawaii in May to confirm the findings and determine what's causing the phenomenon.

But even without this new investigation, "we have more than enough evidence to quash all their [critics'] statements," study lead author Andrew Sweetman, a professor and leader of the seafloor ecology and biogeochemistry research group at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, told Live Science in an email. Some of this evidence is currently under review for publication in the journal Nature Geoscience, where the original study was published, Sweetman said.

The 2024 study proposed that potato-size metallic lumps on the deep seafloor could split seawater through electrolysis to make dark oxygen, so called because there is no light involved in the suggested reaction. If the discovery stands up to scrutiny, it will radically change our understanding of natural oxygen production, challenge the widespread idea that the deep seafloor is an oxygen sink, and raise key questions about the origin of life on Earth.

But in the opinion article, published in December 2025 in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, critics say the study's methods were questionable and the researchers didn't provide enough evidence to support their extraordinary claims.

"We downloaded the data and replotted everything," said Anders Tengberg, co-author of the opinion article. "Everything just speaks against this being correct," Tengberg, a product manager and scientific adviser at the water technology company Aanderaa-Xylem and a researcher at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, told Live Science.

It appears that the authors of the 2024 study didn't ventilate their measuring equipment properly once it landed on the seafloor, Tengberg and Per Hall, co-author of the opinion article and a professor emeritus of marine science at the University of Gothenburg, said in a joint interview. As a result, oxygen trapped inside the equipment may have skewed the gas concentrations measured at the seafloor — an unwanted effect that Tengberg, Hall and colleagues cautioned against in a 2021 study.

Even if Sweetman and his colleagues had measured oxygen concentrations correctly in their study, the mechanism they gave for how oxygen was produced by the metallic lumps, also known as polymetallic nodules, doesn't make sense, said Angel Cuesta Ciscar, a professor of electrochemistry and physical chemistry at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and co-author of the opinion article.

"That explanation of how it's formed is simply impossible, because it violates the laws of thermodynamics," Cuesta Ciscar told Live Science. "Thermodynamics tells you what's possible and what's not possible if the laws of the universe are what we think they are. Until now, there's nobody in four centuries of science that has been able to show that the laws of thermodynamics [do not apply]."

"Experimental artifact"

Sweetman and his colleagues drew their original conclusions from experiments they conducted in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a gigantic abyssal plain 13,000 to 20,000 feet (4,000 to 6,000 meters) deep in the North Pacific Ocean between Mexico and Hawaii. The CCZ is littered with polymetallic nodules, which are accretions of cobalt, nickel, manganese and other metals that are critical to produce batteries and electronics, making the area a target for deep-sea mining exploration companies.

The researchers received funding for the study from The Metals Company, a Canadian deep-sea mining firm, and UK Seabed Resources, a subsidiary of the British arm of Lockheed Martin that focuses on deep-sea mining. Yet the results, published at what the authors of the opinion article called "a critical juncture in the development of international regulations for deep-sea mining," implied that mining polymetallic nodules could have worse impacts on the ecosystem than previously understood.

The study described steady emissions of oxygen from the seabed that Sweetman and his colleagues attributed to polymetallic nodules. Specifically, the researchers proposed that the difference in electric potential between metal ions within the nodules could lead to a redistribution of electrons, triggering a charge that could split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen.

The result initially seemed significant, but when Tengberg and his colleagues looked closer, "it became clear that it could not have been true," he said. Sweetman used special chambers to measure oxygen concentrations at the seafloor that must be flushed with bottom water before monitoring starts to avoid contamination with gas bubbles from higher up in the water column. This means that oxygen readings inside the chambers should be similar at the start of each experiment, but they are "all over the place," Tengberg said.

"You have to start your chamber incubations with bottom water composition equal — identical — to the ambient bottom water outside the chambers," Hall said, adding that Sweetman's starting oxygen measurements were consistently higher than bottom oxygen concentrations usually obtained in the CCZ. "That is a clear sign that they did not do good chamber incubations and that their oxygen fluxes … cannot be trusted."

Traditionally, experiments in the deep sea using chamber incubations also measure other gases to get a clear picture of the environment and its chemistry, but Sweetman and his colleagues did not provide this data, Tengberg said. Notably, no previous study has found oxygen production from polymetallic nodules at the seafloor, Tengberg and his colleagues wrote in the opinion article.

The 2024 study did not present data from "negative control experiments," which in this case would have been incubations without polymetallic nodules to confirm an absence of oxygen production when nodules aren't present, the critics wrote. But according to the opinion article and a 2024 preprint paper on the server Earth ArXiv that has not been peer-reviewed, this data exists — and it shows oxygen production even in the absence of nodules.

"This strongly suggests that the oxygen production is an experimental artifact," Hall said. The increase may have resulted from oxygen bubbles that got trapped and gradually dissolved inside the chambers after they reached the seafloor and sat there unventilated, he added.

Seawater electrolysis

Electrochemists on the opinion-article team gave additional arguments for why polymetallic nodules are unlikely to be a source of oxygen at the deep seafloor.

For one, seawater electrolysis requires a significant amount of energy and cannot proceed spontaneously, they argued. And Sweetman and his colleagues did not identify a source of energy big enough to generate an electric charge and split seawater, they said.

"The explanation that Sweetman and his collaborators are proposing is equivalent to suggesting that there is energy being created out of nothing, or, if you want, that things go uphill spontaneously, instead of going downhill," Cuesta Ciscar said. "We know that the energy in the universe is constant, and it's not being created out of nothing."

The study also provided no hydrogen concentration measurements to support the idea of seawater electrolysis. For each oxygen molecule produced by water electrolysis, two hydrogen molecules also form, so the presence of hydrogen is a telltale sign of the reaction.

"There's just, I would expect, an honest error that has not been recognized," Cuesta Ciscar said.

In response to the arguments in the opinion article, Sweetman said he and his team cannot reply meaningfully until the review of their additional evidence concludes at Nature Geoscience (NG). "If the rebuttal at NG is rejected we will of course submit a response to the Frontiers piece," he said.

The researchers are now preparing for a spring expedition to the CCZ, where they will deploy two highly specialized landers to identify exactly how dark oxygen may be produced. The project is funded by the Nippon Foundation, a private organization in Japan that promotes humanitarian work, diplomacy and industrial maritime development.

The search for dark oxygen continues, but many experts doubt it will lead to anything substantial, Hall said. "We don't believe in this," he said. "I hope that Nature Geoscience retracts the paper."

Between the 17th and 20th centuries, humans killed millions of whales for oil. They stripped their blubber, spinning the iconic creatures in the water and pulling off the fat in a huge spiral like the peel of an apple. The blubber was boiled into oil, then strained into barrels to be used in everything from oil lamps to industrial lubricants.

This was the bloody process that brought light to society.

"It is horrible," Charles Nordhoff wrote of his experience on a whaling vessel in 1895. "Yet old whalemen delight in it. The fetid smoke is incense to their nostrils. The filthy oil seems to them a glorious representative of prospective dollars and delights."

For over 100 years, the voracious hunger for whale blubber drove blue, humpback and North Atlantic right whales to the brink of extinction.

Now, commercial whaling is all but banned, whale blubber is used in just a handful of products, and whale populations have rebounded somewhat.

A similar sea change is coming for petroleum, though when and how it will play out is still incredibly hazy.

The best superforecasters, combined with machine learning, are only accurate at predicting geopolitical events up to a year in advance, Luke Kemp, research affiliate with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science. At best, "we have general pictures we can paint."

But the general trends are clear. We've already transitioned much of our home energy use away from oil. And as climate change pushes us to accelerate that transition, we're developing new technologies that will help the world outgrow its oil dependence ever faster, experts say. In a few industries, like shipping and plastic, the decayed bones of long-dead animals will be the primary energy source for a long time to come.

But a post-oil world is coming.

"The whaling industry is a very good analogy," David MacDonald, a professor of petroleum geology at the University of Aberdeen in the U.K., told Live Science. At its peak, "The whaling industry was huge." But over the decades, "it was an inexorable decline," he said.

Origins of oil

Humans have been using oil for millennia. In fact, around 40,000 years ago, people in what is now Syria used bitumen — a byproduct of crude oil — to stick handles onto their tools. Fast-forward 35,000 years, and the Mesopotamians used the same sticky substance to waterproof their boats. The Babylonians used it to build the Hanging Gardens, and the Egyptians used it to embalm mummies.

In China, people burned crude oil and gas for heat and light as early as 500 B.C. By the fourth century A.D., they were drilling for these natural resources and transporting it via bamboo pipes.

But it wasn't until 1859, when Edwin "Colonel" Drake struck it big in Pennsylvania, that oil was sought at scale. With the same, albeit modernized drilling technique used in China more than 1,500 years earlier, Drake hit a reservoir 69.5 feet (21 meters) down, and the U.S. oil industry was born.

Crude oil, which is composed of simple strings of carbon and hydrogen, forms from the remains of animals and plants that sank to the bottom of swamps, lakes and oceans. Over millions of years, layers of sand and rock covered them, and intense heat and pressure turned these remains into oil and natural gas. They were then locked away in reservoirs — some close to the surface, others thousands of feet below — with gas sitting atop a lake of oil.

For the past 165 years, crude oil has transformed virtually every aspect of society.

If oil vanished tomorrow, global trade would break down as the shipping and aviation industries ground to a halt. Food security would be precarious, with no petroleum to fuel large-scale agriculture or packaging to keep food fresh. Medical care would be set back generations without the sterile equipment needed in hospitals. Renewable energy projects would be frozen without the components required to make solar panels or wind turbines.

Planes, trains, boats and automobiles

Our transition away from oil will be far gentler than that, of course. We've largely stopped using oil for electricity. In October last year, a report by the International Energy Authority found demand for oil will peak this decade.

The rise of electric vehicles (EVs) will usher in the next big drop in oil use.

Currently, road vehicles make up almost 50% of global crude oil use, according to a 2018 report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). But this percentage will plummet in the coming decades. It's estimated that EV sales will account for over two-thirds of the global market by 2030. If we are particularly aggressive in slashing fossil fuel emissions by three-quarters by 2050, the EV industry could be responsible "for more than half of the reduction in total oil demand," according to the BP Energy Outlook 2023, which forecasts future fuel use.

In 50 years, most of this car-driven oil usage could be eliminated.

Aviation also largely relies on oil for fuel. Planes last decades and cost tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars to build. But technology is moving fast in this sector. New aircraft are far more fuel efficient than aircraft were 40 years ago, and the industry is engaged in reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

Sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) will be key to ditching oil. These biofuels are derived from the raw materials used for industrial processes, including waste, biomass, cooking oil and animal fat waste. SAFs have the added benefit of being compatible with current aircraft engines, and they can be blended up to 50% with traditional jet fuel. Boeing plans to make all of its commercial aircraft capable of flying on SAFs by 2030. By 2050, if we aggressively cut carbon emissions, SAFs will account for between 30% and 45% of aviation fuels, BP estimates.

Shipping is a more stubborn problem. Ships run on oil. Like planes, they are wildly expensive to build, last decades and will be hard to phase out. Around 90% of world trade is carried out by the international shipping industry, with over 105,000 merchant ships currently sailing the oceans and accounting for around 5% of oil consumption today.

Without ships transporting goods all over Earth, "half the world would starve and the other half would freeze," according to the International Chamber of Shipping. The problem for this industry is, you can't just change the fuel.

Fredric Bauer, an associate senior lecturer at Lund University in Sweden, researches low-carbon innovation in energy and industrial systems. He's not convinced the shipping industry will be able to transition away from oil anytime soon. The International Maritime Organization published its first climate strategy in 2018 and has generally been "incredibly conservative" in shifting away from fossil fuels, Bauer said.

Hydrogen is a potential alternative fuel. Ships could be retrofitted with hydrogen fuel cells, but that strategy comes with problems. For example, to remain liquid, the fuel must be stored at extremely low temperatures. Its energy density is low, increasing the amount of storage required on each ship. Hydrogen is also extremely explosive.

Hydrogen-powered ships are still in their very early stages. The first ferries and small ships using this technology are being tested, but large, hydrogen-fueled oceanic cargo ships are still in the design phase.

Jay Apt, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, told Live Science that shipping will likely be a voracious oil user for decades.

"If I was to look into the cloudy crystal ball, I would say that long-haul shipping would be one of the large-scale uses of petroleum that we would see 100 years from now," Apt said.

Plastic fantastic 

Single-use plastics are littering Earth in ever-increasing quantities. They take hundreds of years to degrade and then become microplastics, which are choking the ocean, littering the tops of mountains and congregating inside our bodies.

"The use of plastic is in many ways the more dangerous part of the oil industry, rather than the burning of hydrocarbons," MacDonald said. "If humanity disappeared from Earth tonight, in 1,000 years the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will be back to normal — whatever normal is — but there would be plastic in the oceans and soils for millions of years."

Synthetic plastic is made from oil, and it is extremely cheap to produce.

Around 12% of the oil extracted today goes toward the petrochemical industry, which makes plastic and fertilizers, along with clothing, medical equipment, detergents and tires. And this number is set to grow: The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that under current policies, the global use of plastics could triple by 2060.

Plastic is extremely useful because its density can be varied. We can try to move away from plastic in products like food packaging, but phasing out medical plastic is more challenging. Plastic is everywhere in hospitals, including in disposable syringes, IV bags, catheters, gloves and bed linens. It's not just that plastic is cheap, durable and malleable. It's also sterile, so helps curb the spread of infections.

"I couldn't even imagine health care without plastics, and I don't even think we should go there," Dr. Jodi Sherman, founding director of the Yale Program on Healthcare Environmental Sustainability, told Live Science. "I would argue that plastic has allowed very important innovation of medical devices and supplies, and is here to stay."

Right now, primary plastics are "ridiculously and unsustainably cheap," so oil-free alternatives can't compete on cost, Bauer said.

Bioplastics, made from crops, could provide a way forward, MacDonald said. But the story of biofuels serves as a cautionary tale. Soybean fields have taken over large swaths of U.S. farmland — in part because of its use as a biofuel.

"We have a finite amount of agricultural land," MacDonald said. "If we turn a lot of it over to growing fuels, what do we do about feeding people? It's not an easy equation. Everything is related and interlinked."

The beginning of the end of oil

"The oil industry isn't going to collapse because we run out of oil, there's plenty of oil left," MacDonald said.

But at some point, clean energy technologies will become so cheap that it won't pay off to drill and extract oil.

The first method to be phased out will be wildcat drilling, in which an area with unproven reserves is explored, MacDonald said. This is risky and extremely costly if you don't find anything. Even drilling new wells in areas with known oil reserves is eye-wateringly expensive: Companies spend tens to hundreds of millions to get wells and rigs staffed up and running, and then it's years before they turn a profit.

"You're spending money like a drunken sailor in the hope you're going to get some money back," MacDonald said. "It ain't a quick process. That's why oil companies are big — they have to be as they're carrying a huge amount of risk."

Still, oil wells will continue to pump in the vast sand fields of Saudi Arabia for decades. In the U.S., production will continue at high levels through 2050.

Femke Nijsse, a complexity scientist at the University of Exeter in the U.K. whose research focuses on modeling climate, energy systems and the economy, told Live Science she's hopeful that global oil use will be cut by 95% by 2065, with aviation and shipping as the remaining strongholds.

MacDonald predicts a "less spectacular" decline, falling a quarter by 2050. "At some point you'll get to a cliff where it will go down quite rapidly," he added.

Some experts can't imagine a post-oil future at all. Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView, a research firm that looks at energy trends, told Live Science that artificial intelligence and geoengineering will change oil extraction and refining, but that oil won't disappear until a technology that doesn't exist yet, like fusion energy, makes it obsolete.

But the push for decarbonization means oil will eventually become a flash in the pan in our history. Like industrial whaling, our taste for it will dissipate until just a few small strongholds remain.

Fifty to 100 years from now, oil derricks and drilling fields in the U.S. may start to look like the abandoned mine museums and gold-rush ghost towns that litter the American West — tourist attractions that paint a picture of a lost way of life, an economy firmly in the past.

A Chinese energy firm has successfully tested an experimental blimp-like wind turbine capable of generating energy in the skies above cities and inland communities.

Developed by Beijing Linyi Yunchuan Energy Technology, the S2000 airborne wind energy system (AWES) is a large, helium-filled airship containing 12 wind turbines.

The craft ascends thousands of feet into the air to harness the stable wind speeds at higher altitudes, which spin the turbines and generate electricity. This is then sent down the tethering cable to the ground below, where it can enter the grid.

In its test flight, the manufacturers flew the S2000 at an altitude of 6,560 feet (2,000 meters) above Sichuan Province, generating 385 kilowatt-hours of electricity.

This is enough to power the average U.S. household for approximately 13.3 days, per usage figures provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

In total, the S2000 clocks in at 197 feet (60 m) long, 131 feet (40 m) high and 131 feet (40 m) wide, as reported by Global Times. The system is rated at 3 megawatts total power capacity.

The new technology has a couple of potential uses, the developers suggest. "One is for off-grid settings like border outposts, where it can serve as a relatively stable conventional energy source,” explained Weng Hanke, CTO at Linyi Yunchuan Energy Technology, as reported by Tide News — an affiliate of the state-owned Zhejiang Daily Press Group — via Global Times.

"The other is to complement traditional ground-based wind power systems, creating a three-dimensional approach to energy supply."

If realized at scale, the approach could have transformational potential for countries with constrained space for onshore wind generation, such as many in mainland Europe, as well as those without the shallow seabeds necessary for offshore wind power generation, such as Japan.

However, the reliability of the tethered cable for delivering stable power to the grid will require further testing.

In all but the most remote rural communities, the 1.25-mile (2,000 m) cable could present a dangerous obstacle to aircraft. In the U.K., the Civil Aviation Authority requires those wishing to fly tethered balloons above 200 feet (60 m) to apply for special permission to avoid risk to aircraft sharing airspace with the balloon.

Beyond its safety concerns, the S2000 will also need to undergo rigorous testing to ensure its viability for reliable commercial operations. Standard wind turbines require regular maintenance and the craft could prove difficult and more costly to service as it will have to return to the ground for every repair.

Wind power density

Wind turbines can generate more power where the wind power density — the measure of wind energy that can be harnessed at a given altitude — is higher. Offshore wind turbines, for example, can capture the higher, more consistent wind speeds over open water.

These offshore turbines can also be significantly larger than their onshore counterparts, with the hub of Chinese manufacturer Dongfang Electric’s DEW-26 MW-310 offshore turbine standing at 606.9 feet (185 m). Floating wind turbines can be similarly gigantic, with the tower for the recently-revealed, record breaking floating wind turbine from China Huaneng Group reaching 489 feet (152 m).

For example, the average offshore wind speed deemed suitable for wind farms at 295 feet (90 m) elevation within U.S. waters is 7 meters per second, per the Marine Cadastre National Viewer, a web-based data viewer produced by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office for Coastal Management.

It’s hard to state the exact wind speed at various altitudes, as this varies by location and weather.

The aerospace group Omnidea estimates that at altitudes between 328 and 8,200 feet (100 and 2,500 m), wind power density increases by approximately a factor of six, with an average wind speed of 33.5 mph (15 m/s) at 8,200 feet

This highlights the potential efficiencies to be unlocked with greater exploitation of higher-altitude wind speeds with tethered, flying wind turbines such as the S2000.

A funny thing happened on the way to President Donald Trump's mission to obliterate renewable energy. Solar and wind energy use is surging, especially globally, but even in the United States.

Solar and wind electricity generation grew 109% worldwide last year, pushing these renewable sources past coal for the first time as a global energy supplier, according to an analysis by Ember Energy Research. More than 600 gigawatts of solar electricity were added last year, led by China and also including India, Brazil, Vietnam, the European Union, Kenya, and Mozambique. African experts say much of the continent is leaning heavily into solar and wind as it electrifies new regions and industries, bypassing fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, investment in new clean energy, including storage, grid upgrades, efficiency measures, and electric vehicles, soared as of 2024 year-end to $2.2 trillion — double the investment in new fossil fuels projects of $1.1 trillion — according to the International Energy Agency. Globally, the future for renewable energy looks bright.

Even in the U.S., renewable generation grew substantially, with solar generation up 37% last year and wind up 12%. The Energy Information Administration says renewables provided 24% of U.S. electricity generation last year. For at least one month, March 2025, renewables supplied more than half the electricity generated nationwide. That was the first time ever that fossil fuels supplied less than half of total U.S. electricity generation. Solar alone provided about 85% of all new electricity added to the U.S. grid last year, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association.

Why? It's simple economics. The cost of solar and wind generation plummeted in the past 15 years. Utility-scale solar generation, meaning the cost to an electric utility to generate electricity from solar, fell 85% in the decade between 2010 and 2020. Things got complicated during the pandemic because of supply chain snags, but then in 2023 prices fell by 12%. Prices fell again in 2024.

Solar and wind are less expensive for generating electricity than natural gas or coal, according to PV Magazine's report on Lazard's Levelized Cost of Energy for 2025. Utility-scale solar costs between four and eight cents per kilowatt-hour, even without the subsidies that Republicans killed with the reversal of the Inflation Reduction Act. With battery storage added, solar generation costs five cents to 13 cents. By comparison, generating electricity from natural gas costs 13.8 to 26 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to PV magazine and Lazard. Coal is even more expensive.

"The big thing that is happening is the very rapid rise of clean energy around the world, happening over the last six months," said climate author and activist Bill McKibben, speaking to journalists in January, citing this as one of the major developments in climate right now.

The cause is "the dramatic reduction in the price of clean energy, which is shaking up all of our assumptions," he added. For a long time, solar and wind were called "alternative energy," but now they are the dominant source of new energy across the globe, "so there's nothing alternative about them," he added.

When battery storage is added to a utility's system, the cost of generating electricity from solar and storage is five to 13 cents per kilowatt-hour — still considerably cheaper than natural gas and coal. Battery storage allows wind and solar to be reliable sources even when the sun isn't shining and wind isn't blowing. Battery storage deployment doubled in the U.S. during 2024.

Climate solutions investor Tom Steyer said solar and wind adoption are experiencing the sharp upward trajectory that other successful new technologies, like mobile phones, experienced after an initial period of slow growth.

"When it really gets cheaper, faster, and better, then (adoption) goes up almost vertical," Steyer said on an MCJ podcast a few months ago. Steyer is the cofounder of Galvanize Climate Solutions investment firm and recently entered the race for governor of California.

Solar and wind energy have become so cheap that big utilities, corporations, and residents alike have been choosing them over natural gas, coal, or oil. However, the loss of federal tax incentives in the U.S. for solar and wind, and the U.S. administration's cutting back on permits for new wind and solar projects, are expected to slow the adoption of renewables this year.

"Unless this administration reverses course, the future of clean, affordable, and reliable solar and storage will be frozen by uncertainty, and Americans will continue to see their energy bills go up," said Solar Energy Industry Association president and CEO Abigail Ross Hopper in a statement last month. She added that the U.S. has a lot to lose: "America's manufacturing surge, our global competitiveness, and billions of dollars in private investment are on the line."

Even though the Republican federal administration favors fossil fuels over renewables, the SEIA noted that 73% of new solar capacity added in the U.S. in 2025 was installed in Republican states. Among the 10 states adding the most solar capacity were Texas, Indiana, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, Utah, Kentucky, and Arkansas.

Iowa gets 60% of its electricity from renewable sources, according to the state government, and at certain times last year, wind energy alone accounted for 64% of its electricity generation. In Texas, renewable energy supplied 40% of electricity generation in early 2024, according to Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation. Wind and solar became the cost-effective bet partly because battery storage improved and adoption of battery storage doubled.

In 2026, wind adoption is expected to fall in the U.S. after the administration revoked permits for five major offshore wind projects — although Trump's efforts to block offshore wind have faced legal setbacks.

The energy transition continues to accelerate elsewhere — in almost all corners of the globe.

"What is often missed in global discussions is the speed at which change is happening," said Mohamed Adow, founder and director of Power Shift Africa, a climate and energy think tank based in Kenya. "Our continent is making a huge energy leap," skipping fossil fuel adoption to go straight to deploying renewables instead, much the way the continent skipped over adopting landline telephones and adopted cellphones instead.

"In many countries, renewable energy is central to their economic development," Adow said.

Across Africa, 18 countries added more than 100 megawatts of solar power last year, up from two doing so the year before. The continent is estimated to have added 66.9 gigawatts of renewable capacity last year, and at least 10 countries get more than 90% of their electricity from renewables.

This article was originally published by Yale Climate Connections.

China's nuclear fusion reactor, dubbed the "artificial sun," has breached a major fusion limit by firing plasma beyond its usual operational range, advancing humanity's slow progress towards near-limitless clean energy.

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) kept plasma — the high-energy fourth state of matter — stable at extreme densities, which was previously seen as a major obstacle in the development of nuclear fusion, according to a statement released by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"The findings suggest a practical and scalable pathway for extending density limits in tokamaks and next-generation burning plasma fusion devices," study co-lead author Ping Zhu, a professor in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Science and Technology in China, said in the statement.

Nuclear fusion offers the potential for near-limitless clean energy. In other words, energy without much nuclear waste or climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions released by burning fossil fuels. The new findings, published Jan.1 in the journal Science Advances, could bring our species one step closer to unlocking this energy source, which some researchers claim we could harness within decades.

However, nuclear fusion technology has been in development for more than 70 years, and it's still very much an experimental science, with reactors typically consuming more energy than they can produce. Meanwhile, climate scientists are calling for deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions now as the impacts of climate change are already being felt around the world. Nuclear fusion is therefore unlikely to represent a practical solution to the current climate crisis — but could power our world in the future.

Fusion reactors are designed to fuse two light atoms into a single heavy atom via heat and pressure. By doing so, they generate energy in a similar way to the sun. However, the sun has a lot more pressure than Earth's reactors, so scientists compensate by corralling hot plasma at temperatures far hotter than the sun.

China's EAST is a magnetic confinement reactor, or tokamak, designed to keep plasma continuously burning for prolonged periods. The reactor heats plasma and traps it inside a donut-shaped chamber using powerful magnetic fields. Tokamak reactors have yet to achieve fusion ignition, which is the point at which the fusion process becomes self-sustaining, but the EAST reactor has been increasing the amount of time it can maintain a steady, highly confined loop of plasma.

One hurdle for fusion researchers is a density limit called the Greenwald Limit, beyond which plasma typically becomes unstable. This limit is a problem because, while higher plasma densities enable more atoms to whack into one another, thereby lowering the energy cost of ignition, instability also kills the fusion reaction.

To overcome the Greenwald limit, scientists at EAST carefully managed the plasma's interaction with the reactor's walls by controlling two key parameters upon starting the reactor: the initial fuel gas pressure and the electron cyclotron resonance heating, or the frequency at which electrons in the plasma absorbed microwaves. This kept the plasma stable at extreme densities of 1.3 to 1.65 times beyond the Greenwald Limit — much higher than the tokamak's usual operational range of 0.8 to 1, according to the study.

This isn't the first time the Greenwald Limit has been breached. For example, the U.S. Department of Energy's DIII-D National Fusion Facility tokamak in San Diego broke through the limit in 2022, and in 2024, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Wisconsin announced that they had maintained a stable tokamak plasma at about 10 times the Greenwald Limit using an experimental device.

However, the breach at EAST enabled the researchers to heat the plasma to a previously theorized state called the "density-free regime" for the first time, where the plasma remained stable as the density increased. The research is based on a theory called plasma-wall self organization (PWSO), which proposes that a density-free regime could be possible when the interaction between the plasma and the reactor's walls is in a carefully balanced state, according to the statement.

Progress made at EAST and in the U.S. will inform the development of new reactors. China and the U.S. are both part of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program, which is a collaboration between dozens of countries to build the world's largest tokamak in France.

ITER will be another experimental reactor designed to create sustained fusion for research purposes, but could pave the way for fusion power plants. The ITER reactor is expected to begin producing full-scale fusion reactions in 2039.

Supplying nerves with a fresh supply of mitochondria could curb chronic nerve pain, a new study hints.

The research, conducted with mouse cells, live mice, and human tissues, reveals a previously unsung role of mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells. It shows that support cells within the nervous system can ship mitochondria to the nerves that respond to pressure, temperature and pain. But problems with that shipping process can deplete the nerves' energy reserves, causing them to malfunction.

Whereas nerves would normally send a signal to the brain in response to some stimulus, dysfunctional nerves "fire sometimes spontaneously, even without stimulation," said senior study author Ru-Rong Ji, director of the Duke University School of Medicine's Center for Translational Pain Medicine and a professor of anesthesiology and neurobiology.

"That will drive chronic pain and also will lead to neurodegeneration," Ji told Live Science, "because if you fire like crazy, eventually, that neuron probably will degenerate."

The new study, published Wednesday (Jan. 7) in the journal Nature, points to potential new ways of heading off that neuronal breakdown — and one strategy could involve transferring mitochondria directly into nerves.

Fresh mitochondria reduce pain

The research zoomed in on satellite glial cells, unique cells that physically wrap themselves around the "roots" of nerve cells located near the spinal cord. The bodies of these nerve cells cluster together near the spine, and from each cluster, bundles of long fibers extend to different parts of the body, from head to toe. The longest of these fiber bundles belong to the sciatic nerve, which measures just over 3 feet (1 meter) long.

The sheer length of the fibers poses a "real challenge," because for a nerve to function properly, mitochondria made in the nerve's root must travel down to the end of each fiber, and that in itself requires energy to do, Ji said. That raises a question of how nerves maintain this power-hungry supply chain.

Scientists once thought that cells had to make all of their own mitochondria, but in recent years, they have uncovered evidence that cells swap mitochondria. This can occur between cells of the same type or between cells of different types, such as between a stem cell and an immune cell, for example. To facilitate the swap, cells construct tiny structures called tunneling nanotubes for the mitochondria to travel through, like spitballs sliding from one end of a straw to another.

Ji and his team wondered whether satellite glial cells might be able to send mitochondria to the nerve cells they encircle — and it turns out that they can.

"We demonstrate that these cells actually extend these tunneling nanotubes to deliver in the mitochondria. This [finding] is unique in this study," Ji said.

In a series of experiments with mouse cells and human tissues, the researchers took snapshots of the tiny tubes that formed between glia and nerve cells, noting distinct "bulges" that appeared in the tubes as materials traveled through them. By tacking a fluorescent tag onto mitochondria, they were able to track instances in which powerhouses from glial cells made their way into the nerves.

The nanotubes were transient structures that broke down soon after a given transfer was complete. Experiments showed that a protein called MYO10 was critical to the tubes' construction, helping to extend them out from the glia. But additionally, the mitochondria could sometimes be transferred without the tubes, either inside tiny bubbles released by glia or through special channels that formed between the membranes of the donor and recipient cells.

In healthy lab mice, the researchers found that disrupting these different modes of mitochondria shipment made the mice more sensitive to pain. That's because it spurred damage in the nerves and caused them to fire abnormally.

They also looked at mice with various types of nerve damage, such as from exposure to chemotherapy drugs or from diabetes. These nerve-damaging conditions also disrupted the mitochondrial exchange from glia to some degree, and this contributed to nerve pain in the lab mice. Transferring healthy glia into the mice alleviated the pain, though, by providing them with a fresh source of healthy mitochondria.

A new view on glia

Notably, nerve damage from diabetes and chemotherapy tends to hit the smallest nerve fibers the hardest, whereas medium and large fibers show more resilience. In the team's experiments, they found that the larger nerve fibers appeared to receive a higher volume of mitochondria from glia, while small fibers got fewer by comparison. In short, it seems that glia have a "preference" toward lending their mitochondria to larger fibers, the study authors wrote.

"That is still a puzzle. We don't know why that's the case," Ji said. But nonetheless, it might begin to explain why small fibers are more vulnerable to damage in these conditions, triggering symptoms of numbness, painful tingling or burning in the feet and hands.

More studies are needed to fully understand how mitochondria are shuttled from glia to nerve cells in health and disease. This fundamental research could pave the way to future treatments for nerve pain, the team thinks. In theory, treatments could be aimed at boosting the activity of satellite glial cells, so they produce and transfer more mitochondria.

Or alternatively, mitochondria could be harvested from cells grown in the lab, purified, and then injected straight into nerves as a treatment, he added.

Historically, glia were solely thought of as the glue of the nervous system, providing structural support to neurons by binding them together. But scientists have since uncovered that glia are involved in processes once thought to be handled only by neurons, like memory. And the new study suggests glia may actually be physically plugged into neuronal networks, Ji said.

"If they can transport mitochondria, such a very large organelle, in that tube, then you can transport many other things, right?" he suggested. "That means the neurons and the glial cells, they are much more connected than we thought."

When you're waiting for a pot of water to heat up on the stove, tiny bubbles are the first sign it's getting ready to boil. As the water gets hotter, the bubbles get bigger, until a rolling boil signals the water has reached 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius).

Or does it? Anyone who has boiled water in a microwave will note the lack of bubbles. So, why does boiling water have bubbles, except in a microwave?

According to fluid dynamists, nanoscale bubbles constantly appear and collapse as the water heats up over a heating source like a stove. But the temperature at which noticeable bubbles start to form could sometimes be much higher than water's boiling point on paper.

"The boiling point means that at anything above that temperature, your molecules are happier being a vapor than being a liquid," said Jonathan Boreyko, a fluid dynamist at Virginia Tech. Beyond 212 F, the intrinsic energy of the water molecules — known as the chemical potential — is lower for the gas than the liquid, making the vapor the most stable form.

"But to actually execute boiling, you have to create a bubble, which has an energy cost," Boreyko told Live Science. "So just because you're happier being a vapor doesn't mean you'll successfully boil."

Therefore, the temperature at which water actually boils is a trade-off between the chemical potential energy saved by becoming a gas and the energy spent to form a bubble.

Crucially, a bubble is not just a volume of gas but also an interface between gas and liquid phases. And like all liquid interfaces, this surface is subject to surface tension.

Surface tension is a force that constantly tries to shrink the gas-liquid boundary to the smallest possible area. In the case of a bubble, this would mean collapsing entirely back into a uniform liquid. A stable bubble must therefore contain enough gas that the chemical potential energy saving is greater than the surface tension of the interface, making larger bubbles more stable.

"Surface tension is basically an energetic cost per area," Boreyko said. "Really small bubbles have a very large surface-area-to-volume ratio, whereas a bigger bubble has a smaller area relative to its volume. The volume dominates the bigger you get, which outcompetes the surface tension cost."

Consequently, water often doesn't boil until it's a little hotter than 212 F — a phenomenon known as superheating. The boiling point marks the temperature at which the gas becomes more stable than the liquid, and the extra degrees correspond to the activation energy required to create a sufficiently large bubble.

However, various factors influence how easily these bubbles can form, Mirko Gallo, a fluid dynamist at Sapienza University of Rome, told Live Science.

"Dissolved gases, impurities in the water, the surface of the container can all reduce the energy barrier for the formation of the bubble," Gallo explained. These irregularities within the bulk liquid provide a distinct nucleation point around which bubbles can form, reducing the surface tension penalty of forming a completely spherical bubble.

"If you form a bubble on an edge, it is only half a sphere, so you have a smaller surface and will need less energy," he added. "That's why the first bubbles always start appearing on the boundary of the pot."

Boiling water in microwaves

Conversely, in a microwave, the unusual heating conditions suppress bubble formation so effectively that it's possible to superheat the water by up to 36 F (20 C).

"The electromagnetic waves are penetrating and exciting the water molecules through the entire volume, so it heats the water very quickly and uniformly, whereas on a stovetop, it's the bottom wall of the pot that's getting hottest," Boreyko explained. "You also tend to [heat up things in a microwave] in a pretty smooth container — say, glass — so you don't have those localized hotspots that help you get over that energy barrier to create the first interface."

This huge store of chemical potential energy in the superheated liquid is spontaneously released in the form of a giant, explosive bubble as soon as the container is disturbed, making water heated in the microwave surprisingly dangerous.

But superheating isn't exclusive to water; it's possible for any liquid, Gallo said.

"Water has a very high surface tension compared to most liquids, but basically, the higher the surface tension, the more dramatic the effect," Boreyko added.

A California-based startup's controversial plan to put 4,000 tennis-court-sized mirrors in orbit around Earth is "catastrophic" and "horrifying," astronomers warn.

Reflect Orbital, which was founded in 2021, has recently taken the first step in a scheme to sell sunlight at night by bouncing solar rays off giant "reflectors" that can redirect the vital resource almost anywhere on our planet. By doing this, the company aims to extend daylight hours in specific locations, thus allowing paying customers to generate solar power, grow crops and replace urban lighting.

But experts say it is a wildly impractical plan that should never get off the ground. What's more, the resulting light pollution could devastate ground-based astronomy, distract aircraft pilots and even blind stargazers.

As its first step, Reflect Orbital recently submitted an application to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch its first test satellite, EARENDIL-1, in early 2026. If this application is granted and the initial tests are successful, the startup envisions launching as many as 4,000 similar satellites by 2030, company representatives recently told Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Once in low Earth orbit (LEO), EARENDIL-1 would unfurl a square reflector up to 59 feet (18 meters) across, giving it a surface area of around 3,500 square feet (325 square meters). This would allow the mirror to illuminate a single patch of Earth's surface up to 3 miles (5 kilometers) across at a time. From the ground, the light within one of these patches would be up to four times brighter than the full moon, the company representatives said.

However, future reflectors in the planned constellation could have mirrors up to 177 feet (54 m) across, which would likely create larger and more intense bright spots.

Reflect Orbital said it can minimize the effects of its light pollution by rotating the mirrors away from Earth when they're not in use. "Our service is highly localized," company representatives told Space.com. "Each reflection covers a defined area for a finite period of time rather than providing continuous or widespread illumination."

However, these reassurances have done little to put scientists at ease.

"A terrible idea"

The reflectors would orbit Earth in a sun-synchronous orbit, which would cause them to circle Earth from pole to pole, perpendicular to the planet's spin. They would be positioned to constantly align over the day-night divide on our planet, essentially allowing the mirrors to bounce sun's rays from the daylight side onto locations that are dark. In theory, this would illuminate areas just after sunset or before dawn.

But while the basic physics behind this idea is solid, experts say it is much easier said than done — and they are skeptical that the company could pull it off.

Their plan "is flawed from the outset, technically speaking," Fionagh Thomson, a researcher at Durham University in England who specializes in space ethics, told Live Science in an email. "It is highly unlikely to come to fruition due to the complexity of the engineering involved, and trying to operate through busy orbits such as LEO."

In fact, this idea has been tried — and subsequently abandoned — before. In 1993 and 1999, Russia attempted to launch two similar reflectors, dubbed the Znamya satellites, but canceled the program after struggling to control the satellites, which both quickly burned up in the atmosphere. (No other reflectors have been launched since.)

Researchers writing in The Conversation and Big Think have also questioned whether the mirrors are capable of delivering one of the company's future flagship services: generating solar power.

In theory, the mirrors could be used to shine light on giant solar farms on the planet's surface, thereby extending the amount of time they can create electricity. However, the resulting light would be thousands of times weaker than the midday sun, meaning the illuminated panels would generate a tiny fraction of their normal energy. Moreover, a single mirror could focus light onto the same spot for a maximum of only four minutes at a time, the researchers predict.

Even if the mirrors could collectively generate enough energy, it would be "eye-wateringly expensive" compared with other forms of renewable energy, Thomson said.

All in all, "this is a terrible idea," Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Canada, told Live Science in an email. However, there is still a decent chance that the EARENDIL-1 mission will be approved by the FCC, she speculated.

Blinded by the light

A single mirror is unlikely to have a major impact on the night sky. But if Reflect Orbital's proposed constellation is realized, astronomers say it will be increasingly hard to study the stars beyond the glare of thousands of "new stars" zooming across the night sky.

Robert Massey, deputy executive director at the U.K.'s Royal Astronomical Society, told Space.com that the astronomical community was "seriously concerned about the development, its impact and the precedent it sets."

While other spacecraft, such as SpaceX's Starlink satellites, accidentally reflect light toward Earth's surface, astronomers are particularly worried by the deliberate generation of light pollution proposed by Reflect Orbital.

"The central goal of this project is to light up the sky and extend daylight, and obviously, from an astronomical perspective, that's pretty catastrophic," Massey said.

For unlucky stargazers who ended up in one of the mirrors' bright spots, it would also be almost impossible to see any other stars in the night sky, Lawler said. Past research into this concept has also shown that staring directly at the reflectors through a telescope or binoculars could cause eye damage, she added.

Given that a mirror could be suddenly rotated or repositioned at any location on Earth without warning, there is no guaranteed way of avoiding this. And sudden flashing from a reflector's movement could also distract aircraft pilots during takeoff or landing, with potentially disastrous consequences, several experts have said.

Past research on light pollution has also shown that it can alter the behavior of a wide array of animals and plant species, as well as disrupt human sleep cycles.

"One tiny company in California can, with a few million dollars and the approval of a single U.S. federal agency, change the night sky for everyone in the world," Lawler said. "It's horrifying."

Additional issues

While astronomers are mostly concerned about the light pollution and the invisible radio pollution these mirrors will likely create, the planned swarm could prove dangerous in other ways.

For example, the mirrors' large size makes them more likely to be hit by micrometeorites or the rapidly multiplying bits of space junk that encircle our planet, Lawler said. This could leave the reflectors "riddled with holes," which would make them harder to control, she added.

If operators lost control of a mirror, it could end up spinning out, similar to NASA's Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, which began tumbling end over end after being deployed in August 2024. If this happened, the mirrors would uncontrollably flash across the night sky.

Additionally, the number of planned satellites across the globe is already higher than the number of spacecraft that experts predict can safely operate in LEO. And the new reflectors would eventually fall back to Earth at the end of their operational lifespan, which could lead to issues such as atmospheric metal pollution.

As for the potential wildlife impacts of the project, Reflect Orbital has committed to carrying out an environmental risk assessment, but only after EARENDIL-1 is launched, according to Space.com.

Years ago, scientists noted something odd: Earth's Northern and Southern Hemispheres reflect nearly the same amount of sunlight back into space. The reason why this symmetry is odd is because the Northern Hemisphere has more land, cities, pollution, and industrial aerosols. All those things should lead to a higher albedo — more sunlight reflected than absorbed. The Southern Hemisphere is mostly ocean, which is darker and absorbs more sunlight.

New satellite data, however, suggest that symmetry is breaking.

From balance to imbalance

In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Norman Loeb, a climate scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, and colleagues analyzed 24 years of observations from NASA's Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) mission.

They found that the Northern Hemisphere is darkening faster than the Southern Hemisphere. In other words, it's absorbing more sunlight. That shift may alter weather patterns, rainfall, and the planet's overall climate in the decades ahead.

Since 2000, CERES has recorded how much sunlight is absorbed and reflected, as well as how much infrared (longwave) radiation escapes back to space. Loeb used these measurements to analyze how Earth's energy balance changed between 2001 and 2024. The energy balance tells scientists whether the planet is absorbing more energy than it releases and how that difference varies between hemispheres.

"Any object in the universe has a way to maintain equilibrium by receiving energy and giving off energy. That's the fundamental law governing everything in the universe," said Zhanqing Li, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland who was not part of the study. "The Earth maintains equilibrium by exchanging energy between the Sun and the Earth's emitted longwave radiation."

The team found that the Northern Hemisphere is absorbing about 0.34 watt more solar energy per square meter per decade than the Southern Hemisphere. "This difference doesn't sound like much, but over the whole planet, that's a huge number," said Li.

To figure out what was driving this imbalance, the scientists applied a technique called partial radiative perturbation (PRP) analysis. The PRP method separates the influence of factors such as clouds, aerosols, surface brightness, and water vapor from calculations of how much sunlight each hemisphere absorbs.

The results pointed to three main reasons for the Northern Hemisphere darkening: melting snow and ice, declining air pollution, and rising water vapor.

"It made a lot of sense," Loeb said. "The Northern Hemisphere's surface is getting darker because snow and ice are melting. That exposes the land and ocean underneath. And pollution has gone down in places like China, the U.S., and Europe. It means there are fewer aerosols in the air to reflect sunlight. In the Southern Hemisphere, it's the opposite."

"Because the north is warming faster, it also holds more water vapor," Loeb continued. "Water vapor doesn't reflect sunlight, it absorbs it. That's another reason the Northern Hemisphere is taking in more heat."

Curiosity about cloud cover

One of the study's interesting findings is what didn't change over the past 20 years: cloud cover.

"The clouds are a puzzle to me because of this hemispheric symmetry," Loeb said. "We kind of questioned whether this was a fundamental property of the climate system. If it were, the clouds should compensate. You should see more cloud reflection in the Northern Hemisphere relative to the Southern Hemisphere, but we weren't seeing that."

Loeb worked with models to understand these clouds.

"We are unsure about the clouds," said Loeb.

"Understanding aerosol and cloud interactions is still a major challenge," agreed Li. "Clouds remain the dominant factor adjusting our energy balance," he said. "It's very important."

Still, Li said that "Dr. Norman Loeb's study shows that not only does [the asymmetry] exist, but it's important enough to worry about what's behind it."

Loeb is "excited about the new climate models coming out soon" and how they will further his work. "It'll be interesting to revisit this question with the latest and greatest models."

In recent years, ChatGPT has exploded in popularity, with nearly 200 million users pumping a total of over a billion prompts into the app every day. These prompts may seem to complete requests out of thin air.

But behind the scenes, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are using a massive amount of energy. In 2023, data centers, which are used to train and process AI, were responsible for 4.4% of electricity use in the United States. Across the world, these centers make up around 1.5% of global energy consumption. These numbers are expected to skyrocket, at least doubling by 2030 as the demand for AI grows.

"Just three years ago, we didn't even have ChatGPT yet," said Alex de Vries-Gao, an emerging technology sustainability researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and founder of Digiconomist, a platform dedicated to exposing the unintended consequences of digital trends. "And now we're talking about a technology that's going to be responsible for almost half of the electricity consumption by data centers globally."

But what makes AI chatbots so energy intensive? The answer lies in the massive scale of AI chatbots. In particular, there are two parts of AI that use the most energy: training and inference, said Mosharaf Chowdhury, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan.

Related: Why does electricity make a humming noise?

To train AI chatbots, large language models (LLMs) are given enormous datasets so the AI can learn, recognize patterns and make predictions. In general, there is a "bigger is better belief" with AI training, de Vries-Gao said, where bigger models that take in more data are thought to make better predictions.

"So what happens when you are trying to do a training is that the models nowadays have gotten so large, they don't fit in a single GPU [graphics processing unit]; they don't fit in a single server," Chowdhury told Live Science.

To give a sense of scale, 2023 research by de Vries-Gao estimated that a single Nvidia DGX A100 server demands up to 6.5 kilowatts of power. Training an LLM usually requires multiple servers, each of which has an average of eight GPUs, which then run for weeks or months. Altogether, this consumes mountains of energy: It's estimated that training OpenAI's GPT-4 used 50 gigawatt-hours of energy, equivalent to powering San Francisco for three days.

Inference also consumes a lot of energy. This is where an AI chatbot draws a conclusion from what it has learned and generates an output from a request. Although it takes considerably fewer computational resources to run an LLM after it's trained, inference is energy intensive because of the sheer number of requests made to AI chatbots.

As of July 2025, OpenAI states that users of ChatGPT send over 2.5 billion prompts every day, meaning that multiple servers are used to produce instantaneous responses for those requests. That isn't even to consider the other chatbots that are widely used, including Google's Gemini, which representatives say will soon become the default option when users access Google Search.

"So even in inference, you can't really save any energy," Chowdhury said. "It's not really massive data. I mean, the model is already massive, but we have a massive number of people using it."

Researchers like Chowdhury and de Vries-Gao are now working to better quantify these energy demands to understand how to reduce them. For example, Chowdhury keeps an ML Energy Leaderboard that tracks the inference energy consumption of open-source models.

However, the specific energy demands of the other generative AI platforms are mostly unknown; big companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta keep these numbers private, or provide statistics that give little insight into the actual environmental impact of these applications, de Vries-Gao said. This makes it difficult to determine how much energy AI really uses, what the energy demand will be in the coming years, and whether the world can keep up.

People who use these chatbots, however, can push for better transparency. This can not only help users make more energy-responsible choices with their own AI use but also push for more robust policies that hold companies accountable.

"One very fundamental problem with digital applications is that the impact is never transparent," de Vries-Gao said. "The ball is with policymakers to encourage disclosure so that the users can start doing something."

New NASA research hints that Ceres — the closest dwarf planet to Earth — may have once had an ancient "power source" that could have sparked the evolution of extraterrestrial life-forms in the tiny world's hidden ocean.

Ceres is the largest object within the solar system's main asteroid belt, which is located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The wee world is around 600 miles (950 kilometers) wide, roughly one-quarter the moon's diameter, meaning it is not large enough to be considered a planet. But it is large enough to be considered a "dwarf planet" like Pluto, which lost its full planetary status in 2006.

There are five official dwarf planets in our cosmic neighborhood, with others waiting to be properly recognized by the International Astronomical Union, and many more discoveries expected in the coming decades. However, Ceres is the only one located within the inner solar system. The rest of the dwarf planets, which include Haumea, Makemake and Eris, are located far beyond the orbit of Neptune.

In recent years, scientists have learned a lot about Ceres thanks to NASA's Dawn probe, which visited the object between 2014 and 2018. One of the most intriguing discoveries from the Dawn mission is that the giant space rock is likely a water world: Traces of water and salty minerals on the dwarf planet's icy surface suggest a large reservoir of brine is trapped miles below. Other studies have hinted that this underground ocean could also contain organic carbon, which is a key component of all life on Earth.

However, until now, scientists thought that life was unlikely to have emerged on Ceres because the dwarf planet has no energy source capable of kick-starting life.

But in a new study, published Aug. 20 in the journal Science Advances, researchers revealed this was not always the case.

Related: James Webb telescope spots potential conditions for life on 2 dwarf planets beyond Neptune

The study team created computer models based on data collected by the Dawn mission to simulate how the rocky body's core changed over time. This revealed that the dwarf planet's innards probably used to emit large amounts of energy in the form of heat — raising hopes that tiny alien microbes could have emerged within Ceres' hidden ocean.

This could also have "big implications" for the potential of finding life in other parts of the solar system, study lead author Samuel Courville, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and a former intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a NASA statement.

The researchers believe that Ceres' core once emitted significant amounts of heat from the gradual decay of radioactive isotopes. The team believes that this heating lasted between 0.5 and 2 billion years after the giant rock was created, which was likely shortly after the rest of the solar system, around 4.6 billion years ago. At its hottest, the core likely reached around 530 degrees Fahrenheit (280 degrees Celsius), the researchers wrote.

This is not the first time that scientists have proposed that Ceres had a radioactive core. However, this is the best evidence yet that it generated enough heat to potentially support life.

In addition to heating the dwarf planet's subsurface ocean to a habitable temperature, the radiation could also have caused jets of hot, mineral-rich water to shoot up through the ocean's floor, similar to the hydrothermal vent systems on Earth that support diverse microbial communities in the crushing dark depths of our oceans.

"On Earth, when hot water from deep underground mixes with the ocean, the result is often a buffet for microbes — a feast of chemical energy," Courville said.

Astrobiologists have proposed that similar systems may support extraterrestrial life on other water worlds in the solar system, including Saturn's moons Enceladus and Titan, as well as Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede.

However, since Ceres' radioactive core went dead around 2.5 billion years ago, any alien microbes would likely have died out from the cold, meaning there is practically zero chance that the dwarf planet supports life today, the researchers said.

Nuclear waste could be repurposed into a rare isotope necessary for nuclear fusion, which could theoretically produce near-limitless amounts of clean energy, one scientist says.

The radioactive version of hydrogen, called tritium, is not naturally readily available on Earth, is expensive to produce, and can be made in limited quantities. At the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) this week, Terence Tarnowsky, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, suggested that tritium could be harvested from a byproduct of nuclear fission, which powers existing nuclear reactors.

Nuclear fusion is the process of combining atoms to release heat. While several fusion reactions could theoretically produce power, one of the more common ones would fuse tritium with deuterium, another isotope of hydrogen, to produce helium.

But, as of now, nuclear fusion is not possible on a commercial scale because scientists have not yet figured out how to achieve large-scale ignition — the point where a self-sustaining reaction produces more energy than is put in.

Another big barrier, though, is the cost of fuels like tritium.

"Nuclear fusion has the potential to offer emission-free, abundant energy," Tarnowsky told Live Science. "But there's limited availability and a high cost for tritium right now, and that presents a barrier to the technology's success."

Producing tritium efficiently

The first generation of nuclear fusion reactors that will contribute to the power grid will likely rely on a reaction that requires tritium, Tarnowsky said. While other fusion reactions, such as fusing deuterium and helium-3, could theoretically be harnessed to produce power, they require much higher temperatures to work and are therefore more expensive and less practical.

Gathering large amounts of tritium, though, presents a problem: The isotope is radioactive and has a very short half-life. Collections of tritium decay by 5.5% per year, "so you can't put excess tritium in a bank and get it all in 50 years like you can with other energy sources," Tarnowsky said.

Related: World's largest nuclear fusion reactor is finally completed. But it won't run for another 15 years.

For future nuclear fusion plants to be successful, a new, cheaper method of producing tritium will be necessary, Tarnowsky said. "You need to have this capability already up and running."

Current nuclear plants rely on nuclear fission, during which atoms split apart and release energy. But fission results in significant amounts of long-lived nuclear waste. Spent nuclear fuel — fuel that once powered nuclear fission but is no longer usable — is made up of unusable uranium and plutonium, along with products of fission, like strontium and iodine isotopes, which can take up to hundreds of millions of years to decay, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Tarnowsky proposes generating tritium from the vast amounts of still-radioactive nuclear waste by using a particle accelerator to split the atoms in that waste. The dividing atoms would go through a series of reactions, eventually yielding tritium. The process wouldn't eliminate nuclear waste, because the leftovers from this process would be as hazardous as the starting material, but it would get further use from this byproduct.

The basic principles of the design are not new, Tarnowsky said in a statement from ACS, but recent technological advances could make this method of producing tritium vastly more efficient.

Tarnowsky's early calculations estimate that, using 1 gigawatt of energy — which costs at least tens of millions of dollars — this system could produce 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) of tritium in a year. That amount of tritium, if used for nuclear fusion, could power tens of thousands of homes in the U.S. for a year.

Tarnowsky projects that this design could produce more than 10 times as much of the isotope as other methods, using the same amount of power.

"A very large paradigm shift"

Right now, the U.S. lacks a stable, predictable and cheap supply of tritium, which costs about $15 million per pound ($33 million per kilogram), Tarnowsky said in the statement. Meanwhile, we do have thousands of tons of nuclear waste, which is expensive to store and potentially harmful to surrounding environments.

"This technology is possible today," he told Live Science. "It would be a very large paradigm shift with respect to utilizing the spent nuclear fuel that we have already, owned by the government."

Many details still need to be worked out before Tarnowsky can create a full proposal for how this would work.

But Tarnowsky is excited that his design is being received positively now, given that nuclear accidents like those at Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl made nuclear power a taboo topic just decades ago. "The times have changed," he told Live Science.

Nowadays, the dark of night is interspersed with the light of stars. But before the stars were born, did light shine at the beginning of the universe?

The short answer is "no." But the long answer reveals light's extraordinary journey. At first, the early universe's light was "trapped," and it took several hundred thousand years for it to escape. Then, it took about 100 million years for stars to form.

By examining the speed and direction in which galaxies were moving, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered the universe was expanding. This 1929 discovery suggested that the cosmos was once smaller, with scientists eventually calculating that the entire universe was concentrated into one, infinitely dense point about 13.8 billion years ago, until the Big Bang happened.

"With the Big Bang, space was created and expanded, along with everything in the universe," Andrew Layden, chair of physics and astronomy at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, told Live Science.

The only way all the matter that now makes up the universe could fit in a tiny spot "is if it was energy at that time," Layden said. Einstein's famous equation E=mc² revealed that energy and mass can be interchangeable, Layden explained.

As the universe expanded, the density of its energy decreased, and it cooled. The first particles then began to form within the first second after the Big Bang, according to Las Cumbres Observatory. These included the photons that make up light, as well as the protons, neutrons and electrons that make up atoms. By about three minutes after the Big Bang, protons and neutrons could fuse together to create the nuclei of atoms such as helium, according to NASA.

"Think of fog and dew," Layden said. "Particles in a high-energy state are dispersed like water in fog, and when the energy gets low enough, they can condense out like droplets of dew."

Related: Can anything travel faster than the speed of light?

However, although photons of light existed since the first second after the Big Bang, they could not yet shine across the universe. This is because the early cosmos was so hot that "electrons were moving too fast for atomic nuclei to hold them in orbit around them," Layden said. "The universe was just this very hot, dense soup."

All the electrons zipping around freely in the early universe meant that light could not move around very much. "As light tried to travel in a straight line during this time, it always bumped into electrons, so it could not go very far," Layden said.

A similar situation is found within the sun, Srinivasan Raghunathan, a cosmologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, told Live Science. "You can imagine a photon of light created by nuclear reactions at the center of the sun trying to come out to the sun's surface," he said. "The center of the sun is extremely hot, and so there are a lot of free electrons present. This means light cannot travel in straight lines."

The distance from the center of the sun to its surface is about 432,450 miles (696,000 kilometers). The speed of light in a vacuum is about 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km/s), but in the sun, "it takes about 1 million to 2 million years for light to escape from the center of the sun to its surface," Raghunathan said.

However, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the expansion of the universe let the cosmos cool enough for atomic nuclei to glom onto electrons. "When that happens, all those electrons are no longer free," Layden said. "This happens at about 3,000 Kelvin [4,940 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2,725 degrees Celsius], the surface temperature of a coolish reddish star."

Within a short number of years, "everything goes from being a hot dense soup to a clear universe where light can travel freely," Layden said. "At that moment, the first photons in the universe can escape."

The light typical of the universe when it was about 3,000 kelvins was in near-infrared to visible wavelengths, Layden noted. However, as the cosmos expanded over the course of more than 13 billion years and cooled to an average temperature of about 2.73 Kelvin (minus 455 F, or minus 270 C), the universe's first light stretched to longer microwave wavelengths.

Astronomers first detected this leftover radiation from the Big Bang, called the cosmic microwave background, in 1964.

Analyzing these microwaves has yielded many insights. For instance, the gravitational pull of galaxies can distort light — a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Examining the amount of distortion the cosmic microwave background has experienced at different points in the sky can help scientists reconstruct the large-scale structure of the universe — the arrangement of galaxies and the giant voids between them across the cosmos, Raghunathan said.

After the light from the Big Bang was released, the universe experienced a period known as the cosmic dark ages. Eventually, after millions of years, the gravitational pull of clouds of gas led these clumps of matter to collapse in on themselves.

"This created the first generation of stars, and the universe had galaxies full of stars by about 1 billion years after the Big Bang, beginning the cosmic dawn," Layden said.

Sun quiz: How well do you know our home star?

A recently concluded experimental campaign at the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, Germany has smashed previous fusion records and set a new benchmark for reactor performances.

Nuclear fusion offers a tantalizing promise of unlimited clean energy. By smashing together isotopes (or different versions) of hydrogen at incredibly high temperatures, the resulting superheated plasma of electrons and ions fuses into heavier atoms, releasing a phenomenal amount of energy in the process.

However, while this fusion reaction is self-sustaining under the extraordinary temperatures and pressures within stars, recreating these conditions on Earth is a huge technical challenge — and current reactor concepts still consume more energy than they are able to produce.

Stellarators are one of the most promising reactor designs, so named for their mimicry of reactions in the sun. They use powerful external magnets to control the high-energy plasma within a ring-shaped vacuum chamber and maintain a stable, high pressure. Unlike simpler tokamak reactors — which pass a high current through the plasma to generate the required magnetic field — stellarators' external magnets are better at stabilizing the plasma through the fusion reactions, a feature that will ultimately be necessary when translating the technology to commercial power plants.

In the recent experiments, the W7-X stellarator outperformed previous benchmarks set by the decommissioned tokamak reactors JT60U in Japan and JET in the UK, especially over how long the plasma can be sustained.

Related: Nuclear fusion could be the clean energy of the future

Most notably, the international team revealed that the reactor had reached a new record high triple product — a key metric for the success of fusion power generators. The triple product is a combination of the density of particles in the plasma, the temperature required for these particles to fuse, and the energy confinement time (a measure of how well the thermal energy is held by the system). A certain minimum value called the Lawson criterion marks the point at which the reaction produces more energy than it uses and becomes self-sustaining, so a higher triple product indicates a more efficient reaction.

"The new record is a tremendous achievement by the international team," said Thomas Klinger, Head of Operations at Wendelstein 7-X and Head of Stellarator Dynamics and Transport at IPP in a statement. "Elevating the triple product to tokamak levels during long plasma pulses marks another important milestone on the way toward a power-plant-capable stellarator."

Key to the success of this latest milestone was the development of a new fuel pellet injector that combined continuous refueling of the reactor with pulsed heating to maintain the required plasma temperature. Over a 43-second period, 90 frozen hydrogen pellets were fired into the plasma at up to 2,600 feet (800 metres) per second, roughly the speed of a bullet. Pre-programmed pulses of powerful microwaves heated the plasma, which reached a peak temperature of 30 million degrees C, and this coordination between the microwave pulses and the pellet injection crucially extended how long the plasma could be stably maintained.

This same campaign also increased the energy turnover of the reaction to 1.8 gigajoules over a six-minute run, smashing the reactor's previous record of 1.3 gigajoules from February 2023. Energy turnover is a combination of the heating power and plasma duration of a fusion reactor and an indication of the reactor's ability to sustain the high-energy plasma. It is therefore another crucial parameter for future power plant operation. The new value even exceeds the record achieved by the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in China earlier this year, further evidencing stellarators' potential.

"The records of this experimental campaign are much more than mere numbers. They represent a significant step forward in validating the stellarator concept—made possible through outstanding international collaboration," summarized Robert Wolf, Head of Stellarator Heating and Optimization at IPP in statement.

Around the U.S., about 90,000 tons of nuclear waste is stored at over 100 sites in 39 states, in a range of different structures and containers.

For decades, the nation has been trying to send it all to one secure location.

A 1987 federal law named Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, as a permanent disposal site for nuclear waste — but political and legal challenges led to construction delays. Work on the site had barely started before Congress ended the project's funding altogether in 2011.

The 94 nuclear reactors currently operating at 54 power plants continue to generate more radioactive waste. Public and commercial interest in nuclear power is rising because of concerns regarding emissions from fossil fuel power plants and the possibility of new applications for smaller-scale nuclear plants to power data centers and manufacturing. This renewed interest gives new urgency to the effort to find a place to put the waste.

In March 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments related to the effort to find a temporary storage location for the nation's nuclear waste — a ruling is expected by late June. No matter the outcome, the decades-long struggle to find a permanent place to dispose of nuclear waste will probably continue for many years to come.

I am a scholar who specializes in corrosion; one focus of my work has been containing nuclear waste during temporary storage and permanent disposal. There are generally two forms of significantly radioactive waste in the U.S.: waste from making nuclear weapons during the Cold War, and waste from generating electricity at nuclear power plants. There are also small amounts of other radioactive waste, such as that associated with medical treatments.

Related: How do you decontaminate objects exposed to radioactivity?

Waste from weapons manufacturing

Remnants of the chemical processing of radioactive material needed to manufacture nuclear weapons, often called "defense waste," will eventually be melted along with glass, with the resulting material poured into stainless steel containers. These canisters are 10 feet tall and 2 feet in diameter, weighing approximately 5,000 pounds when filled.

For now, though, most of it is stored in underground steel tanks, primarily at Hanford, Washington, and Savannah River, South Carolina, key sites in U.S. nuclear weapons development. At Savannah River, some of the waste has already been processed with glass, but much of it remains untreated.

At both of those locations, some of the radioactive waste has already leaked into the soil beneath the tanks, though officials have said there is no danger to human health. Most of the current efforts to contain the waste focus on protecting the tanks from corrosion and cracking to prevent further leakage.

Waste from electricity generation

The vast majority of nuclear waste in the U.S. is spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants.

Before it is used, nuclear fuel exists as uranium oxide pellets that are sealed within zirconium tubes, which are themselves bundled together. These bundles of fuel rods are about 12 to 16 feet long and about 5 to 8 inches in diameter. In a nuclear reactor, the fission reactions fueled by the uranium in those rods emit heat that is used to create hot water or steam to drive turbines and generate electricity.

After about three to five years, the fission reactions in a given bundle of fuel slow down significantly, even though the material remains highly radioactive. The spent fuel bundles are removed from the reactor and moved elsewhere on the power plant's property, where they are placed into a massive pool of water to cool them down.

After about five years, the fuel bundles are removed, dried and sealed in welded stainless steel canisters. These canisters are still radioactive and thermally hot, so they are stored outdoors in concrete vaults that sit on concrete pads, also on the power plant's property. These vaults have vents to ensure air flows past the canisters to continue cooling them.

As of December 2024, there were over 315,000 bundles of spent nuclear fuel rods in the U.S., and over 3,800 dry storage casks in concrete vaults above ground, located at current and former power plants across the country.

Even reactors that have been decommissioned and demolished still have concrete vaults storing radioactive waste, which must be secured and maintained by the power company that owned the nuclear plant.

The threat of water

One threat to these storage methods is corrosion.

Because they need water to both transfer nuclear energy into electricity and to cool the reactor, nuclear power plants are always located alongside sources of water.

In the U.S., nine are within two miles of the ocean, which poses a particular threat to the waste containers. As waves break on the coastline, saltwater is sprayed into the air as particles. When those salt and water particles settle on metal surfaces, they can cause corrosion, which is why it's common to see heavily corroded structures near the ocean.

At nuclear waste storage locations near the ocean, that salt spray can settle on the steel canisters. Generally, stainless steel is resistant to corrosion, which you can see in the shiny pots and pans in many Americans' kitchens. But in certain circumstances, localized pits and cracks can form on stainless steel surfaces.

In recent years, the U.S. Department of Energy has funded research, including my own, into the potential dangers of this type of corrosion. The general findings are that stainless steel canisters could pit or crack when stored near a seashore. But a radioactive leak would require not only corrosion of the container but also of the zirconium rods and of the fuel inside them. So it is unlikely that this type of corrosion would result in the release of radioactivity.

A long way off

A more permanent solution is likely years, or decades, away.

Not only must a long-term site be geologically suitable to store nuclear waste for thousands of years, but it must also be politically palatable to the American people. In addition, there will be many challenges associated with transporting the waste, in its containers, by road or rail, from reactors across the country to wherever that permanent site ultimately is.

Perhaps there will be a temporary site whose location passes muster with the Supreme Court. But in the meantime, the waste will stay where it is.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In a rare international blackout, all of Spain and Portugal, as well as parts of southwest France, lost power on Monday morning (April 28).

The power cut caused massive disruptions across the region, with airports coming to a standstill, people becoming stranded on metro trains in Lisbon and Madrid, and hospitals being forced to cancel operations.

The exact cause of this blackout remains unclear, though representatives of Portugal's electricity network provider Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN) said on Monday that it occurred due to a rare phenomenon called "induced atmospheric vibration."

"Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as 'induced atmospheric vibration,'" REN told the Guardian. "These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network."

However, REN has since refuted this explanation, Euronews reports.

Related: Why does electricity make a humming noise?

"The blackout that hit the entire territory of mainland Portugal today is the result of a significant voltage fluctuation in the Spanish grid at a time when Portugal was importing energy from Spain," REN said in a statement on Monday afternoon. "With this fluctuation, the control and protection systems of the Portuguese power plants, as expected in a situation with this configuration, shut down, causing the blackout."

Extreme temperature variations can cause strange oscillations in very high voltage power lines, physically moving back and forth. This is due to temperature changes causing the lines to expand in some places, changing tension in the lines, altering their aerodynamic properties, and interacting with wind and electrical current, which can physically and electrically destabilize the power system.

"Although investigations are ongoing, some early media reports are mentioning a phenomenon known as '"induced atmospheric vibration'" linked to unusual atmospheric conditions, including rapid temperature variations and resulting wind patterns in the interior of Spain," Victor Becerra, a professor of power systems engineering at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., said in a statement.

"If these conditions have been in place they may have triggered abnormal oscillations in very high-voltage power lines," Becerra said.

This can snap conductors, short circuits or damage infrastructure like transmission towers.

"Protection systems are designed to automatically disconnect affected power lines in response to such faults," Becerra said.

Then, a kind of domino effect occurs, with the shutoffs causing instability and disconnection in some generators. "The loss of large generators can create a sudden and significant imbalance between power supply and demand in the power grid, potentially escalating into widespread outages," Becerra said.

The exact cause of the blackouts has not been confirmed, however, and some others have suggested that it could have been the result of a cyber attack. There is no evidence to suggest that this is the case, Senior European Commission vice-president Teresa Ribera told Spain's Radio 5 on Monday. On Tuesday (April 29), Eduardo Prieto, the head of services for Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica's told the Guardian that they had ruled out a cybersecurity incident.

Regardless of the initial cause, such a large region was affected because European power grids are highly interconnected. Usually, that allows for greater reliability, with other grids providing backup if a local issue arises. But it also leaves the entire system vulnerable to large failures propagating across a much greater area.

"Electrical grids are large interconnected systems, and their stability is related to a very close balance between electricity generation and demand," Grazia Todeschini, an engineering researcher at King's College London, said in a statement. "If one area is disconnected, it can cause knock-on effects in nearby areas that may rely on supply (or demand) from the affected area."

Todeschini added that while some measures do exist to limit the impact of outages in small areas, they can be easily overwhelmed if the power imbalance is too large, causing outages to spread very quickly and very far.

Power losses of this scale have happened before. A 12-hour blackout across much of Italy in 2003 was triggered by an issue with a hydroelectric power line between Italy and Switzerland, and a 2006 temperature-driven power surge in Germany caused power cuts across France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and even Morocco. One of the largest blackouts in history occurred in India in 2012, affecting over 600 million people.

As of Tuesday morning, power is slowly returning to much of the Iberian Peninsula. All of Portugal and 99% of Spain now have electricity, and authorities are working to figure out the true cause of the incident, and stop it from happening again.

After a long day, you'd expect to feel exhausted by bedtime. But sometimes, the opposite happens: Instead of winding down, you get a sudden burst of energy, making sleep feel frustratingly out of reach.

But what's behind this second wind?

Part of the answer comes down to circadian rhythms, roughly 24-hour cycles largely controlled by part of the brain called the hypothalamus. For instance, a circadian rhythm helps regulate when we feel alert or drowsy. As part of this sleep-wake cycle, there's a period after sunset — known as the "wake maintenance zone" or "evening second wind" — when energy levels surge.

This happens because the body's wakefulness signals remain relatively high, while sleep-promoting signals, such as the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin, haven't fully kicked in yet, Roxanne Prichard, a professor of psychology with a background in neuroscience at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, told Live Science in an email.

From an evolutionary perspective, this burst of energy may have helped our ancestors complete essential tasks, "like making an evening meal and making sure there's a safe place to sleep," Prichard explained.

Related: What happens in your brain while you sleep?

Typically, the wake maintenance zone lasts for a few hours, but its exact length varies from person to person, Prichard said. For night owls, this wake maintenance zone can be longer than those of "morning larks," who may experience a shorter second wind and find it comparatively easier to fall asleep early.

Although a pre-bedtime energy surge is part of a normal circadian rhythm, mental health and lifestyle factors can make it more pronounced.

"Anxiety, late-night work, social media use, or engaging in stimulating activities can trigger the release of stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine, increasing alertness," Dr. Chris Allen, a board-certified sleep medicine physician and sleep science adviser at Aeroflow Sleep, a sleep-apnea equipment company, told Live Science in an email.

Being on screens before bed can further disrupt sleep by delaying drowsiness. Research suggests that blue light emitted by electronic devices suppresses the secretion of the hormone melatonin. This essentially tricks the brain into thinking it's still daytime, Allen explained.

Another common culprit behind pre-bedtime energy surges is "revenge bedtime procrastination" — in her master's thesis on the subject, Lena Müller defined this concept as "the attempt to purposefully eke out some leisure time in a day full of obligations by postponing one's sleep." People often engage in mentally stimulating activities during this period, which often increases their alertness, Allen added.

For those experiencing a second wind, Prichard suggested embracing the burst of energy rather than resisting it. Anecdotally, "getting things done might actually help sleep later in the evening with the stress reduction that comes with light to moderate exercise or handling of stressors head-on," she said.

However, she advised keeping lighting minimal during these activities. Two small studies published in 2012 and 2019 suggested that warm, red-toned light may improve melatonin levels and sleep quality and help your internal circadian clock stay in sync with external time cues, compared to bluer light. That said, larger studies are necessary to confirm this theory. Some experts argue that red light disrupts sleep less than other types of light, but doesn't necessarily promote it.

Alternatively, to minimize your second wind rather than riding it out, there are several strategies you can try:

First, stick to a consistent sleep schedule. "Going to bed and waking up at the same time daily helps regulate the body's internal clock and reduces second-wind episodes," Allen said. This is also backed up by research. And again, limiting light exposure close to bedtime is key, he added.

Creating a relaxing pre-bedtime routine can also help signal to the brain that it's time to wind down; that's because the bodies' sleep-wake cycle is not only directed by light exposure but also by external, behavioral cues.

If pre-bedtime energy bursts consistently interfere with your sleep, though, it may be worth consulting a sleep specialist to rule out sleep disorders, Prichard recommended. In some cases, doctors may recommend patients to seek out therapy aimed at easing insomnia, she added.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

Sleep quiz: How much do you know about sleep and dreams?

A light-powered computer chip designed to drive artificial intelligence (AI) data centers and make high-performance computing (HPC) more sustainable has entered production.

In a statement published Feb. 24, representatives from analog photonic chip company Q.ANT said its photonic AI chip could deliver a 30-fold increase in energy efficiency and a 50-fold boost in computing speed compared with conventional, silicon-based computer chips.

Pilot production of the new chip is now underway at IMS Chips in Stuttgart, Germany, where Q.ANT has invested 14 million euros ($15.1 million) to repurpose an existing semiconductor factory to fabricate its new, light-powered chip.

Because the chip is being produced on a repurposed facility instead of a specialist production line, the company believes it can bring the technology to market much more quickly. The chip can also integrate with the existing HPC servers, potentially accelerating adoption, Q.ANT representatives said.

"By 2030, we aim to make our photonic processors a scalable, energy-efficient cornerstone of AI infrastructure," Michael Förtsch, chief executive of Q.ANT, said in the statement.

Photonic computing

Photonic chips could solve a massive challenge faced by existing processor technology, particularly as AI and other data- and resource-intensive computing applications grow.

Traditional silicon chips control electrical signals using tiny switches called transistors. Photonic chips, by contrast, process data using light particles (photons), which are massless and can travel much faster than electrons do in conventional computer chips.

Photons don't emit heat in the same way electrons carrying an electrical charge do. As such, using photonic chips in applications involving complex, energy-intensive computations like AI could overcome the limitations of classic silicon chip architecture and thus vastly accelerate the computers' processing speed and reduce their energy consumption.

Related: 'Crazy idea' memory device could slash AI energy consumption by up to 2,500 times

"This comes at a critical time for the computing industry, as the exponential growth of AI and data-intensive applications will soon overwhelm the current data center infrastructure," Jens Anders, a professor at the University of Stuttgart and director and chief executive of IMS Chips, said in the statement. Anders added that the two companies aimed to establish "a scalable model for energy-efficient computing."

Q.ANT's chip is built using thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN), a crystalline compound applied to a wafer that forms the basis of the company's photonic chip. TFLN is increasingly catching the attention of photonics researchers and quantum scientists for its potential in next-generation computing. When an electric field is applied to the material, it can be used to control the speed and phase of light waves, thereby enabling it to modulate optical signals with extreme precision.

The pilot production line has been set up specifically to manufacture chips that incorporate TFLN, with Q.ANT aiming to fabricate 1,000 wafers per year.

"As AI and data-intensive applications push conventional semiconductor technology to its limits, we need to rethink the way we approach computing at the core," Förtsch said. "With this pilot line, we are accelerating time to market and laying the foundation for photonic processors to become standard coprocessors in high-performance computing."

Marathon running may seem like the ultimate sport for staying in shape. That said, it can take a heavy toll on the body, potentially damaging the kidneys, upsetting the stomach, increasing the risk of heart failure, and triggering musculoskeletal injuries. Let's not forget that the original marathon runner, the ancient Greek soldier Pheidippides, is said to have dropped dead immediately after reaching his destination.

Now, a new study suggests that marathons also affect the brain — causing the organ to eat itself to make up for fuel lost during the run.

In the research, published March 24 in the journal Nature Metabolism, scientists observed declines in a key biomarker of myelin, a fatty tissue that insulates the connections between brain cells, in marathon runners just after a race. The study authors say this suggests the brain consumes myelin as an energy source under these extreme conditions.

Luckily for long-distance runners, these effects appear to be reversible.

Related: 6 ways an athlete's brain differs from an average person's

Once the body has exhausted the supply of its standard energy source — glucose, or sugar — it turns to backup generators, metabolizing fats as an alternative fuel source. The brain is, metabolically speaking, more of a Humvee than a hatchback; the energy-hungry organ devours 20% of the body's energy, meaning it can quickly suffer damage if fuel sources run short.

Pedro Ramos Cabrer — a neuroscientist at CIC biomaGUNE, a nonprofit research institute in San Sebastian, Spain, and a co-author of the study — told Live Science that he and his colleagues wanted to identify the brain's reserve energy sources. They suspected that fatty myelin could be the answer. Previous research in rodents suggested that fatty acids produced from myelin breakdown could help boost cell survival in the brain. Whether these preclinical findings would be replicated in humans was still a mystery, though.

"We needed to really deplete all the sources of energy of a body to prove this," Cabrer told Live Science.

The team scanned 10 runners' brains 48 hours before they ran a marathon and then again two days, two weeks and two months afterward. They used MRI, which can reveal the presence of water molecules trapped between myelin layers.

The brain scans showed that, two days post-run, the MRI signals in 12 brain areas were depleted compared with before the race — in some cases, by up to 28%. Changes to the brain's overall myelin levels were not statistically significant, however, suggesting that any changes were very isolated to specific regions.

"The areas that we saw have more significant changes were those related to motor circuits and the center of emotional control of the brain," Cabrer said. He suggested that this reflects the mental and physical effort the brain must maintain to get through a marathon.

For any runners concerned about this cerebral cannibalism, there's good news: After two months, all of the runners' myelin measures had recovered to their baseline levels.

Klaus-Armin Nave, director at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Germany, was not involved in the study but has also studied how myelin stores energy, using lab mice. Nave said the paper's findings aligned with how neuroscientists think myelin is maintained in the brain.

Related: How far can a person run without stopping?

"Myelin is constantly made and degraded," he said. "It's like a bathtub in which you constantly fill in water and constantly drain it." He added that Cabrer's work presents "very strong evidence" that, after a marathon, the brain's metabolic needs increase. Thus, the fuel stored in myelin is depleted more quickly than usual, leading to brain shrinkage.

The findings don't mean runners should avoid marathons on their brains' behalf. Both Nave and Cabrer noted that the study's small size means more work will be needed to draw concrete conclusions about marathons' effects on the brain. The very limited effects on overall myelin also raise the need for further research, they added.

Nevertheless, these effects may carry increased risks for certain athletes. For example, in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), metabolic molecules typically made by myelin are in short supply, and the researchers think that excessive exercise could potentially exacerbate the problem.

Further research will be needed to confirm this theory, Cabrer said.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical or fitness advice.

One of the most powerful objects in the universe is a radio quasar — a spinning black hole spraying out highly energetic particles. Come too close to one, and you'd get sucked in by its gravitational pull, or burn up from the intense heat surrounding it. But ironically, studying black holes and their jets can give researchers insight into where potentially habitable worlds might be in the universe.

As an astrophysicist, I've spent two decades modeling how black holes spin, how that creates jets, and how they affect the environment of space around them.

What are black holes?

Black holes are massive, astrophysical objects that use gravity to pull surrounding objects into them. Active black holes have a pancake-shaped structure around them called an accretion disk, which contains hot, electrically charged gas.

Related: 'Very rare' black hole energy jet discovered tearing through a spiral galaxy shaped like our own

The plasma that makes up the accretion disk comes from farther out in the galaxy. When two galaxies collide and merge, gas is funneled into the central region of that merger. Some of that gas ends up getting close to the newly merged black hole and forms the accretion disk.

There is one supermassive black hole at the heart of every massive galaxy.

Black holes and their disks can rotate, and when they do, they drag space and time with them — a concept that's mind-boggling and very hard to grasp conceptually. But black holes are important to study because they produce enormous amounts of energy that can influence galaxies.

How energetic a black hole is depends on different factors, such as the mass of the black hole, whether it rotates rapidly, and whether lots of material falls onto it. Mergers fuel the most energetic black holes, but not all black holes are fed by gas from a merger. In spiral galaxies, for example, less gas tends to fall into the center, and the central black hole tends to have less energy.

One of the ways they generate energy is through what scientists call "jets" of highly energetic particles. A black hole can pull in magnetic fields and energetic particles surrounding it, and then as the black hole rotates, the magnetic fields twist into a jet that sprays out highly energetic particles.

Magnetic fields twist around the black hole as it rotates to store energy — kind of like when you pull and twist a rubber band. When you release the rubber band, it snaps forward. Similarly, the magnetic fields release their energy by producing these jets.

These jets can speed up or suppress the formation of stars in a galaxy, depending on how the energy is released into the black hole's host galaxy.

Rotating black holes

Some black holes, however, rotate in a different direction than the accretion disk around them. This phenomenon is called counterrotation, and some studies my colleagues and I have conducted suggest that it's a key feature governing the behavior of one of the most powerful kinds of objects in the universe: the radio quasar.

Radio quasars are the subclass of black holes that produce the most powerful energy and jets.

You can imagine the black hole as a rotating sphere, and the accretion disk as a disk with a hole in the center. The black hole sits in that center hole and rotates one way, while the accretion disk rotates the other way.

This counterrotation forces the black hole to spin down and eventually up again in the other direction, called corotation. Imagine a basketball that spins one way, but you keep tapping it to rotate in the other. The tapping will spin the basketball down. If you continue to tap in the opposite direction, it will eventually spin up and rotate in the other direction. The accretion disk does the same thing.

Since the jets tap into the black hole's rotational energy, they are powerful only when the black hole is spinning rapidly. The change from counterrotation to corotation takes at least 100 million years. Many initially counterrotating black holes take billions of years to become rapidly spinning corotating black holes.

So, these black holes would produce powerful jets both early and later in their lifetimes, with an interlude in the middle where the jets are either weak or nonexistent.

When the black hole spins in counterrotation with respect to its accretion disk, that motion produces strong jets that push molecules in the surrounding gas close together, which leads to the formation of stars.

But later, in corotation, the jet tilts. This tilt makes it so that the jet impinges directly on the gas, heating it up and inhibiting star formation. In addition to that, the jet also sprays X-rays across the galaxy. Cosmic X-rays are bad for life because they can harm organic tissue.

For life to thrive, it most likely needs a planet with a habitable ecosystem, and clouds of hot gas saturated with X-rays don't contain such planets. So, astronomers can instead look for galaxies without a tilted jet coming from its black hole. This idea is key to understanding where intelligence could potentially have emerged and matured in the universe.

Black holes as a guide

By early 2022, I had built a black hole model to use as a guide. It could point out environments with the right kind of black holes to produce the greatest number of planets without spraying them with X-rays. Life in such environments could emerge to its full potential.

Where are such conditions present? The answer is low-density environments where galaxies had merged about 11 billion years ago.

These environments had black holes whose powerful jets enhanced the rate of star formation, but they never experienced a bout of tilted jets in corotation. In short, my model suggested that theoretically, the most advanced extraterrestrial civilization would have likely emerged on the cosmic scene far away and billions of years ago.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Black hole quiz: How supermassive is your knowledge of the universe?

We think of oxygen as life, sustenance, a literal breath of fresh air. But it's actually a very reactive element. Anyone who's burned a log has witnessed this firsthand. So why do so many life-forms breathe oxygen?

There are probably thousands of kinds of metabolisms, or chemical processes that maintain life, said Donald Canfield, a geobiologist at the University of Southern Denmark, but "virtually all eukaryotes" (life-forms whose cells contain a nucleus) and a vast array of prokaryotes (life-forms that lack a nucleus), use oxygen.

Canfield is talking primarily about heterotrophs — organisms, including humans, that get their nutrients and energy by consuming other organic matter. Not all organisms do this exclusively. For example, "plants get their carbon from CO2 in the air," said Dan Mills, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Munich.

Heterotrophs break down organic matter in food by stripping electrons off of it. These are passed from one enzyme to another in the membrane of the mitochondria, generating a small current that pumps protons across this barrier. And given its high electronegativity, oxygen usually serves as the final station on this electron transport chain, accepting the electrons and picking up two protons to form water.

The process essentially creates a reservoir of protons that then flood through a protein channel in the membrane like a tiny hydroelectric dam. And, like a turbine, the protein synthesizes energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as it spins, explained Nick Lane, a professor of evolutionary biochemistry at University College London, in a public presentation. The cell can then use this packaged energy or send it off into the body to do things.

Life can use many other electron acceptors — like sulfate, nitrate and iron — but oxygen is the highest-energy acceptor available.

"The reduction of oxygen provides the largest free energy release per electron transfer, except for the reduction of fluorine and chlorine," University of Washington professor David Catling and his co-authors explained in a paper published in the journal Astrobiology.

Related: What is the world's most dangerous chemical?

Chlorine and oxygen can generate similar amounts of energy. Fluorine could certainly provide more energy than oxygen, but "fluorine is [...] useless as a biological oxidant because it generates an explosion upon contact with organic matter," they wrote in the study. That's not a gas you'd want to breathe.

Chlorine and fluorine are also poisonous, which highlights another benefit of oxygen. Aerobic respiration doesn't produce any toxic compounds, just water and carbon dioxide. However, oxygen's reactivity can be an issue if it builds up in tissues, where it can damage cellular components like DNA and proteins. That's why antioxidants, in moderation, are good for our health.

Oxygen is also far more abundant than fluorine, chlorine or the myriad electron acceptors used in other forms of respiration. Despite its proclivity for forming compounds with other atoms, a copious amount of oxygen is constantly produced via photosynthesis. This enables it to accumulate in the atmosphere and dissolve in water, where it is readily available to life. And, as a gas, it's easy to transport across membranes, Canfield and Mills explained.

Speaking of abundance, why not use nitrogen, which comprises 78% of Earth's atmosphere?

"The main problem with nitrogen is that it's triple bonded," Canfield said. "And it's very, very difficult to break."

Nitrogen is an important component of many biologic compounds, and there are whole groups of organisms that specialize in the energy-intensive processes required to break nitrogen's strong bonds to make it bioavailable, Canfield said.

Oxygen's unique utility comes down to quantum physics. Oxygen in its normal ground state can only accept electrons in the same spin state, not as an electron pair, which is the usual currency of chemistry.

"So the real trick to oxygen is that it can accumulate to high levels without reacting, but releases a lot of energy (to pump protons) when it is fed electrons one at a time," Lane told Live Science in an email.

So it seems oxygen sits in a sweet spot of reactivity and availability. It's milder than halogens such as chlorine and fluorine, and it isn't bound too strongly, like nitrogen. But it's much more reactive than other electron acceptors, like sulfate and nitrate.

Oxygen is easy to acquire, and it doesn't generate toxic compounds that require further processing. What's more, plants produce copious amounts of this reactive gas through photosynthesis, enabling us to use it to fuel our own bodies.

Periodic table of elements quiz: How many elements can you name in 10 minutes?

A U.K. start-up has shocked the space exploration community after unveiling plans to use a novel nuclear fusion propulsion system to power an orbital fleet of reusable "alien-like" rockets, known as Sunbirds, which the company says could revolutionize how we explore the solar system — and beyond.

The technology behind this ambitious project will begin testing this year and could make it into space by 2027, Richard Dinan, the founder and CEO of Pulsar Fusion, which is making the rockets, told Live Science. However, the company has set no timeline for when the futuristic spacecraft could become a reality. One expert told Live Science it could be at least a decade away, if not more.

Pulsar Fusion, which also makes traditional plasma thrusters and is developing nuclear fission engines, first announced the Sunbird project on March 6 after developing the concept in "complete secrecy" over the last decade, according to a statement emailed to Live Science. The project was then fully revealed to the public on March 11 at the Space-Comm Expo in London's ExCel center.

In theory, the proposed rockets will be stored in massive orbital satellite docks before being deployed and attached to other spacecraft and rapidly propelling them to their destinations like giant "space tugs," which would massively reduce the cost of long-haul space missions.

A concept video shows how the futuristic rockets could be used to transport a larger spacecraft to Mars and back using docking stations at both ends of the journey (see below).

Related: How do space rockets work without air?

The Sunbirds' core technology is the Duel Direct Fusion Drive (DDFD) engines, which the company claims will harness the elusive power of nuclear fusion and, hypothetically, provide exhaust speeds much higher than those currently possible.

If it works, this could cut the potential journey time to Mars in half and allow probes to reach Pluto in 4 years, according to Pulsar Fusion. (The current record for a trip to Pluto is 9.5 years, which was set by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft in 2015.)

"If we are going to be the species that actually get to other planets, then exhaust speeds are pretty much the most important thing," Dinan said during a talk at Space-Comm Expo. "In terms of what can be [theoretically] produced in exhaust speeds, fusion is king."

Fusion in space

On Earth, using nuclear fusion as a source of near-limitless energy is still likely decades away, which at first glance makes the idea of fusion rockets seem like pure science fiction. However, the opposite is true because "the bar is lower for fusion in space," Dinan told Live Science in an interview at Space-Comm Expo.

That's because the proposed reaction needed in space is different from what physicists are attempting on Earth. In traditional nuclear fusion reactors, known as tokamaks, the goal is to fuse deuterium and tritium — both heavy isotopes, or versions, of hydrogen — in order to emit a constant stream of neutrons, which generates heat (and in turn energy), as well as breeding more fuel for the continued reaction.

However, the planned fuel for the DDFD is deuterium and helium-3, an extremely rare isotope of helium with one less neutron than the dominant form. In this case, the reaction would pump out protons, and their charge can be used for direct propulsion. Additionally, the proposed reaction would only need to last for short periods at a time, similar to the timescales already achieved on Earth.

The shape and scale of the reactor are also important. Tokamaks are large doughnut-shaped chambers that must mimic the vacuum of space and withstand sustained temperatures equivalent to the surface of the sun. To do so, they use extremely powerful electromagnets to confine plasma into a constant loop. But the DDFD is a linear reactor that does not need to fully constrain the plasma within. In space, there is also a natural vacuum and temperatures reaching absolute zero, which will prevent the reactor from overheating.

However, the designs of the DDFD are still a closely guarded secret and have not yet been properly tested, so their exact workings and feasibility are unclear.

Dinan said he understood why people might be initially skeptical of the feasibility of fusion in space but added that when people look at it logically it starts to make a lot of sense. "This is in every way achievable," he added. "If we can do fusion on Earth, we can definitely do fusion in space."

But not everyone agrees that it will be so easy.

"I'm skeptical," Paulo Lozano, an astronautics professor at MIT who specializes in rocket propulsions, told Live Science in an email. "Fusion is tricky and has been tricky for many reasons and for a long time, especially in compact devices." However, without seeing the full Sunbird designs, he added that he has "no technical basis to judge."

Sunbirds are go

If Pulsar can master the DDFD, the plan is to use the resulting Sunbirds as "space tugs" that can propel any spacecraft from low-Earth orbit (LEO) further into space — largely because fusion is not a viable or safe way of launching rockets directly from Earth's surface.

So rather than having to build giant rockets with massive thrusters in order to completely escape Earth's gravity, as SpaceX's temperamental Starship rocket does, sunbirds will allow any spacecraft that makes it into LEO to escape our planet's pull. This would make missions to the moon, Mars and beyond much more feasible — and cheaper, Dinan said.

Pulsar also envisions the Sunbirds acting as a battery that can power the systems of any spacecraft it is attached to during the journey. Although this is not the primary goal.

Related: 10 times space missions went very wrong in 2024

Another big draw of the Sunbirds is that they would only require small amounts of fuel and could be easily refilled and recharged while they are "perched" on their orbital docking stations, potentially making them much more reusable than most other propulsion systems, Dinan said.

The Sunbirds will likely be around 100 feet (30 meters) long and were described as having a "distinctive alien-like design" in the initial press release. This is due to thick "tank-like" armor plating that will hopefully allow them to survive being bombarded with cosmic radiation and micrometeorites in space, which is why they look "super weird," Dinan said.

Each Sunbird could cost upwards of $90 million (70 million British pounds) to produce, largely because of how expensive helium-3 is to obtain, Dinan estimated. However, the amount of money that these rockets could save a potential client means they would be well worth the cost, he added. "If I can get them there quicker, they will pay for it."

In the future, helium-3 could be mined from regolith on the moon, which would be much cheaper than trying to produce it on Earth, Lozano said. But this is not currently part of Pulsar's plans.

Next steps

Pulsar will conduct the first static tests of the DDFD engine this year inside a pair of giant vacuum chambers recently constructed at the company's campus in Bletchley, England. These chambers are the largest of their kind in the U.K. and possibly the largest in Europe, Dinan said.

These initial tests won't use helium-3 because it is too expensive to obtain for use in a prototype, meaning that true fusion will not be achieved. Instead, an "inert gas" will be used in its place to test how the engine could theoretically work, Dinan said.

Next, Pulsar Fusion plans to undergo an orbital demonstration for some of the "key technological components" in 2027, he added. However, Dinan didn't clarify what this will entail.

If the upcoming tests are successful, Pulsar will begin to raise funds to build a full-scale Sunbird prototype and begin trying to achieve true fusion using helium-3. However, Dinan says that there is no timeline for creating the first Sunbird prototype and it is "too speculative" to predict when this may happen.

Lozano "optimistically" predicts that a fully operational Sunbird prototype is at least a decade away but added that physicists often joke that "fusion is 20 years in the future and always will be."

A newly unveiled photo captured by an astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS) provides a rare glimpse at an upward-shooting "gigantic jet" of lightning likely extending more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the U.S. coast.

The striking image was taken by an unnamed ISS crewmember on Nov. 19, 2024, but it was not initially shared by NASA or any other space organization. However, photographer Frankie Lucena, who specializes in capturing giant lightning sprites, stumbled across photos of the event on the Gateway to Astronaut photography of Earth website and shared them with Spaceweather.com, which reshared the shots Feb. 26.

"I checked the ISS database for pictures before and after the event, and found that there were 4 photos [of lightning] in all," Lucena told Spaceweather.com. The images can be viewed in a time-lapse video posted on YouTube, but only one has an associated jet.

The exact location of the jet is unclear because thunderclouds are covering Earth's surface in the images. However, based on the position of the ISS at the time, the jet likely occurred just off the coast of New Orleans, according to Spaceweather.com.

Related: Electrifying time-lapse image captures 100 lightning bolts torching the sky over Turkey

Gigantic jets are massive lightning bolts that shoot upward from thunderstorms when the charged layers of the clouds get temporarily inverted. They mainly give off a blue light due to the high levels of nitrogen in the upper atmosphere and usually last less than a second.

Most observed gigantic jets reach the ionosphere — the part of the atmosphere that begins around 50 miles above Earth's surface and contains charged particles captured from the sun. This has earned the phenomenon the nickname "Earth's tallest lightning," according to Spaceweather.com. However, the exact height of the newly photographed bolt is unclear.

Gigantic jets are also extremely energetic. The most powerful recorded example of this phenomenon, which occurred during a thunderstorm over Oklahoma in May 2018, contained roughly 60 times more energy than a standard lightning bolt and reached up to 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit (4,400 degrees Celsius).

These jets often terminate with tendrils of branching red lightning, which can be faintly seen in the new image. These additional discharges are very similar to "sprites," which often look like giant electric jellyfish. However, gigantic jets are a separate phenomenon from traditional sprites, which occur without jets, according to EarthSky.com.

Gigantic jets were first discovered relatively recently, in 2001 — so only a few dozen photographs of these massive bolts have ever been captured, according to Spaceweather.com. However, scientists think there could be up to 1,000 unseen jets every year.

Most of these images have been taken from space, but some others, including a breathtaking image from September 2018, have also been snapped by airplane passengers flying over thunderstorms.

Scientists have developed an innovative battery that converts energy from radioactive waste into electricity, transforming a hazardous by-product of nuclear power generation into a potential energy source for specialized applications.

Nuclear power plants generate 18% of electricity in the United States, according to the World Nuclear Association. While this energy source produces no carbon emissions, it does generate radioactive waste that can be environmentally hazardous and remains active for thousands of years.

Seeking to repurpose this waste, a research team from Ohio State University used high-density materials that emit light when absorbing radiation called scintillator crystals combined with solar cells to convert gamma radiation into electricity.

“Nuclear waste emits powerful gamma radiation, a high-energy form that can penetrate most materials,” Raymond Cao, lead author of the study published in the journal Optical Materials: X and a professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State, told Live Science in an email. “Our device employs a scintillator, a specialized material that absorbs these gamma rays and converts their energy into visible light — similar to how glow-in-the-dark objects function, but driven by radiation rather than sunlight. This light is then captured by a solar cell, like those found in solar panels, which transforms it into electrical power.”

The prototype battery, measuring just 4 cubic centimeters — about the size of a teaspoon of sugar — was tested at Ohio State’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory using two radioactive sources: cesium-137 and cobalt-60. The battery produced 288 nanowatts of power when powered by cesium-137 and 1,500 nanowatts when using the more radioactive cobalt-60 isotope — enough to operate microelectronic systems such as microchips or emergency equipment.

Related: Why radioactive waste is being melted into glass

While this output is far below the kilowatts needed to power your kettle, the researchers believe this technology could be scaled up for applications at or beyond the watts level with the right power source.

Regardless, the new technology wouldn’t be used in homes — the system relies on high levels of ambient radiation to operate, so would need to be in situ at waste sites. For example, the researchers envision the battery being deployed in nuclear systems for space and deep-sea exploration, where extreme radiation levels render conventional power sources impractical.

“We do not produce or carry a radiation source; instead, this device is designed for locations where intense gamma radiation is already present,” Cao said. “The beauty of this approach is that shielding materials can be replaced with a scintillator, and the glowing light it produces can be harvested and converted into electricity.”

Before it’s rolled out, however, a few hurdles remain. According to Cao, the high levels of radiation gradually damage both the scintillator and the solar cell. “Further development is needed for more durable, radiation-resistant materials to ensure the system’s longevity,” he said.

If overcome, these long-lasting batteries could be deployed in high-radiation areas that are difficult to access, with little to no maintenance required, making them an attractive energy solution.

“The nuclear battery concept is very promising,” co-author Ibrahim Oksuz said in a statement. “There's still lots of room for improvement, but I believe in the future, this approach will carve an important space for itself in both the energy production and sensors industry.”

Modern computers are a triumph of technology. A single computer chip contains billions of nanometre-scaled transistors that operate extremely reliably and at a rate of millions of operations per second.

However, this high speed and reliability comes at the cost of significant energy consumption: data centres and household IT appliances like computers and smartphones account for around 3% of global electricity demand, and the use of AI is likely to drive even more consumption.

But what if we could redesign the way computers work so that they could perform computation tasks as quickly as today while using far less energy? Here, nature may offer us some potential solutions.

The IBM scientist Rolf Landauer addressed the question of whether we need to spend so much energy on computing tasks in 1961. He came up with the Landauer limit, which states that a single computational task — for example setting a bit, the smallest unit of computer information, to have a value of zero or one — must expend about 10⁻²¹ joules (J) of energy.

Related: History of computers: A brief timeline

This is a very small amount, notwithstanding the many billions of tasks that computers perform. If we could operate computers at such levels, the amount of electricity used in computation and managing waste heat with cooling systems would be of no concern.

However, there is a catch. To perform a bit operation near the Landauer limit, it needs to be carried out infinitely slowly. Computation in any finite time period is predicted to cost an additional amount that is proportional to the rate at which computations are performed. In other words, the faster the computation, the more energy is used.

More recently this has been demonstrated by experiments set up to simulate computational processes: the energy dissipation begins to increase measurably when you carry out more than about one operation per second. Processors that operate at a clock speed of a billion cycles per second, which is typical in today's semiconductors, use about 10⁻¹¹J per bit — about ten billion times more than the Landauer limit.

A solution may be to design computers in a fundamentally different way. The reason that traditional computers work at a very fast rate is that they operate serially, one operation at a time. If instead one could use a very large number of "computers" working in parallel, then each could work much slower.

For example, one could replace a "hare" processor that performs a billion operations in one second by a billion "tortoise" processors, each taking a full second to do their task, at a far lower energy cost per operation. A 2023 paper that I co-authored showed that a computer could then operate near the Landauer limit, using orders of magnitude less energy than today's computers.

Tortoise power

Is it even possible to have billions of independent "computers" working in parallel? Parallel processing on a smaller scale is commonly used already today, for example when around 10,000 graphics processing units or GPUs run at the same time for training artificial intelligence models.

However, this is not done to reduce speed and increase energy efficiency, but rather out of necessity. The limits of heat management make it impossible to further increase the computation power of a single processor, so processors are used in parallel.

An alternative computing system that is much closer to what would be required to approach the Landauer limit is known as network-based biocomputation. It makes use of biological motor proteins, which are tiny machines that help perform mechanical tasks inside cells.

This system involves encoding a computational task into a nanofabricated maze of channels with carefully designed intersections, which are typically made of polymer patterns deposited on silicon wafers. All the possible paths through the maze are explored in parallel by a very large number of long thread-like molecules called biofilaments, which are powered by the motor proteins.

Each filament is just a few nanometres in diameter and about a micrometre long (1,000 nanometres). They each act as an individual "computer", encoding information by its spatial position in the maze.

This architecture is particularly suitable for solving so-called combinatorial problems. These are problems with many possible solutions, such as scheduling tasks, which are computationally very demanding for serial computers. Experiments confirm that such a biocomputer requires between 1,000 and 10,000 times less energy per computation than an electronic processor.

This is possible because biological motor proteins are themselves evolved to use no more energy than needed to perform their task at the required rate. This is typically a few hundred steps per second, a million times slower than transistors.

At present, only small biological computers have been built by researchers to prove the concept. To be competitive with electronic computers in terms of speed and computation, and explore very large numbers of possible solutions in parallel, network-based biocomputation needs to be scaled up.

A detailed analysis shows that this should be possible with current semiconductor technology, and could profit from another great advantage of biomolecules over electrons, namely their ability to carry individual information, for example in the form of a DNA tag.

There are nevertheless numerous obstacles to scaling these machines, including learning how to precisely control each of the biofilaments, reducing their error rates, and integrating them with current technology. If these kinds of challenges can be overcome in the next few years, the resulting processors could solve certain types of challenging computational problems with a massively reduced energy cost.

Neuromorphic computing

Alternatively, it is an interesting exercise to compare the energy use in the human brain. The brain is often hailed as being very energy efficient, using just a few watts — far less than AI models — for operations like breathing or thinking.

Yet it doesn't seem to be the basic physical elements of the brain that save energy. The firing of a synapse, which may be compared to a single computational step, actually uses about the same amount of energy as a transistor requires per bit.

However, the architecture of the brain is very highly interconnected and works fundamentally differently from both electronic processors and network-based biocomputers. So-called neuromorphic computing attempts to emulate this aspect of brain operations, but using novel types of computer hardware as opposed to biocomputing.

It would be very interesting to compare neuromorphic architectures to the Landauer limit to see whether the same kinds of insights from biocomputing could be transferable to here in future. If so, it too could hold the key to a huge leap forward in computer energy-efficiency in the years ahead.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

China's "artificial sun" reactor has broken its own world record for maintaining super-hot plasma, marking another milestone in the long road towards near-limitless clean energy.

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) nuclear fusion reactor maintained a steady, highly confined loop of plasma — the high-energy fourth state of matter — for 1,066 seconds on Monday (Jan. 20), which more than doubled its previous best of 403 seconds, Chinese state media reported.

Nuclear fusion reactors are nicknamed "artificial suns" because they generate energy in a similar way to the sun — by fusing two light atoms into a single heavy atom via heat and pressure. The sun has a lot more pressure than Earth's reactors, so scientists compensate by using temperatures that are many times hotter than the sun.

Nuclear fusion offers the potential of a near-unlimited power source without greenhouse gas emissions or much nuclear waste. However, scientists have been working on this technology for more than 70 years, and it's likely not progressing fast enough to be a practical solution to the climate crisis. Researchers expect us to have fusion power within decades, but it could take much longer.

EAST's new record won't immediately usher in what is dubbed the "Holy Grail" of clean power, but it is a step towards a possible future where fusion power plants generate electricity.

East is a magnetic confinement reactor, or tokamak, designed to keep the plasma continuously burning for prolonged periods. Reactors like this have never achieved ignition, which is the point at which nuclear fusion creates its own energy and sustains its own reaction, but the new record is a step towards maintaining prolonged, confined plasma loops that future reactors will need to generate electricity.

"A fusion device must achieve stable operation at high efficiency for thousands of seconds to enable the self-sustaining circulation of plasma, which is critical for the continuous power generation of future fusion plants," Song Yuntao, director of the Institute of Plasma Physics responsible for the fusion project at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Chinese state media.

Related: Nuclear fusion could be the clean energy of the future — but these 'tough' challenges stand in the way

EAST is one of several nuclear fusion reactors worldwide, but they all currently use far more energy than they produce. In 2022, the U.S. National Ignition Facility's fusion reactor briefly achieved ignition in its core using a different experimental method to EAST, relying on quick bursts of energy, but the reactor as a whole still used more energy than it consumed.

Tokamaks like EAST are the most common nuclear fusion reactors. EAST heats up plasma and traps it inside a donut-shaped reactor chamber — called the tokamak — with powerful magnetic fields. For the latest record, researchers made several upgrades to the reactor, including doubling the power of its heating system, according to Chinese state media.

The data gathered by EAST will support the development of other reactors, both in China and internationally. China is part of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program, which involves dozens of countries, including the U.S., U.K. Japan, South Korea and Russia.

The ITER reactor, which is being built in southern France, contains the world's most powerful magnet and will fire up in 2039 at the earliest. ITER will be an experimental tool designed to create sustained fusion for research purposes, but could pave the way for fusion power plants.

"We hope to expand international collaboration via EAST and bring fusion energy into practical use for humanity," Song said.

A first-of-its-kind map of the United States has revealed the likely locations of huge, naturally occurring hydrogen reserves.

The map, which you can explore here, is the first to show prospective locations for hydrogen on such a huge scale, marking areas where hydrogen gas may be lurking beneath the surface in quantities large enough to extract.

The researchers who created the map already suspected there could be more hydrogen buried in Earth's crust than scientists previously thought. But now that the results are out, even the team that created the map can't quite believe their eyes, according to a statement.

"For decades, the conventional wisdom was that naturally occurring hydrogen did not accumulate in sufficient quantities to be used for energy purposes," Sarah Ryker, associate director for energy and mineral resources at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), who did not participate in the research, said in the statement. "This map is tantalizing because it shows that several parts of the U.S. could have a subsurface hydrogen resource after all."

Related: Massive helium reservoir in Minnesota could solve US shortage

The map is graded from white to dark blue, with dark blue indicating areas that are highly prospective, meaning they are very likely to hold vast hydrogen reserves, and white indicating areas that are not prospective. Highly prospective areas include most of Michigan, eastern Kentucky and southern North Dakota, as well as parts of Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Iowa and Oklahoma.

Whether a region is a prospective location for hydrogen depends on three main factors coming together: a source (or sources) of hydrogen, reservoir rocks and natural seals to trap the gas underground. Geologic hydrogen — hydrogen that occurs naturally, also known as "white" or "gold" hydrogen — is produced through chemical reactions in rocks, the simplest being a reaction that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The map shows that at least 30 U.S. states have the conditions needed for hydrogen to accumulate belowground. There is high potential for the gas to be found in large swathes of the Midwest, as well as in areas along the California coast and Eastern Seaboard, according to the statement.

Hydrogen is a source of clean energy. Researchers project that it will account for up to 30% of the future energy supply in some sectors, with demand likely to rise fivefold by 2050.

In a study published last month, the same researchers calculated that Earth's total buried hydrogen reserves could amount to 6.2 trillion tons (5.6 trillion metric tons) of gas. Just 2% of that would supply all the energy required to power the world for 200 years, they said.

But that estimate came with no indication of where those reserves are located, which dictates whether they are accessible and, therefore, extractable. In the previous study, "we showed there is a significant potential for geologic hydrogen as an emerging energy resource," Sarah Gelman, a geologist with the USGS Central Energy Resources Science Center who participated in the new research, said in the statement. "The logical next step was to find where it might be in the United States."

The map and an accompanying report detailing the results were published Thursday (Jan. 16) on the USGS website.

The way scientists think about fusion changed forever in 2022, when what some called the experiment of the century demonstrated for the first time that fusion can be a viable source of clean energy.

The experiment, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, showed ignition: a fusion reaction generating more energy out than was put in.

In addition, the past few years have been marked by a multibillion-dollar windfall of private investment in the field, principally in the United States.

But a whole host of engineering challenges must be addressed before fusion can be scaled up to become a safe, affordable source of virtually unlimited clean power. In other words, it's engineering time.

As engineers who have been working on fundamental science and applied engineering in nuclear fusion for decades, we've seen much of the science and physics of fusion reach maturity in the past 10 years.

But to make fusion a feasible source of commercial power, engineers now have to tackle a host of practical challenges. Whether the United States steps up to this opportunity and emerges as the global leader in fusion energy will depend, in part, on how much the nation is willing to invest in solving these practical problems — particularly through public-private partnerships.

Related: Nuclear fusion reactor in UK sets new world record for energy output

Building a fusion reactor

Fusion occurs when two types of hydrogen atoms, deuterium and tritium, collide in extreme conditions. The two atoms literally fuse into one atom by heating up to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million degrees Celsius), 10 times hotter than the core of the sun. To make these reactions happen, fusion energy infrastructure will need to endure these extreme conditions.

There are two approaches to achieving fusion in the lab: inertial confinement fusion, which uses powerful lasers, and magnetic confinement fusion, which uses powerful magnets.

While the "experiment of the century" used inertial confinement fusion, magnetic confinement fusion has yet to demonstrate that it can break even in energy generation.

Several privately funded experiments aim to achieve this feat later this decade, and a large, internationally supported experiment in France, ITER, also hopes to break even by the late 2030s. Both are using magnetic confinement fusion.

Challenges lying ahead

Both approaches to fusion share a range of challenges that won't be cheap to overcome. For example, researchers need to develop new materials that can withstand extreme temperatures and irradiation conditions.

Fusion reactor materials also become radioactive as they are bombarded with highly energetic particles. Researchers need to design new materials that can decay within a few years to levels of radioactivity that can be disposed of safely and more easily.

Producing enough fuel, and doing it sustainably, is also an important challenge. Deuterium is abundant and can be extracted from ordinary water. But ramping up the production of tritium, which is usually produced from lithium, will prove far more difficult. A single fusion reactor will need hundreds of grams to one kilogram (2.2 lbs.) of tritium a day to operate.

Right now, conventional nuclear reactors produce tritium as a byproduct of fission, but these cannot provide enough to sustain a fleet of fusion reactors.

So, engineers will need to develop the ability to produce tritium within the fusion device itself. This might entail surrounding the fusion reactor with lithium-containing material, which the reaction will convert into tritium.

To scale up inertial fusion, engineers will need to develop lasers capable of repeatedly hitting a fusion fuel target, made of frozen deuterium and tritium, several times per second or so. But no laser is powerful enough to do this at that rate — yet. Engineers will also need to develop control systems and algorithms that direct these lasers with extreme precision on the target.

Additionally, engineers will need to scale up production of targets by orders of magnitude: from a few hundreds handmade every year with a price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars each to millions costing only a few dollars each.

For magnetic containment, engineers and materials scientists will need to develop more effective methods to heat and control the plasma and more heat- and radiation-resistant materials for reactor walls. The technology used to heat and confine the plasma until the atoms fuse needs to operate reliably for years.

These are some of the big challenges. They are tough but not insurmountable.

Current funding landscape

Investments from private companies globally have increased — these will likely continue to be an important factor driving fusion research forward. Private companies have attracted over US$7 billion in private investment in the past five years.

Several startups are developing different technologies and reactor designs with the aim of adding fusion to the power grid in coming decades. Most are based in the United States, with some in Europe and Asia.

While private sector investments have grown, the U.S. government continues to play a key role in the development of fusion technology up to this point. We expect it to continue to do so in the future.

It was the U.S. Department of Energy that invested about US$3 billion to build the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the mid 2000s, where the "experiment of the century" took place 12 years later.

In 2023, the Department of Energy announced a four-year, $42 million program to develop fusion hubs for the technology. While this funding is important, it likely will not be enough to solve the most important challenges that remain for the United States to emerge as a global leader in practical fusion energy.

One way to build partnerships between the government and private companies in this space could be to create relationships similar to that between NASA and SpaceX. As one of NASA's commercial partners, SpaceX receives both government and private funding to develop technology that NASA can use. It was the first private company to send astronauts to space and the International Space Station.

Along with many other researchers, we are cautiously optimistic. New experimental and theoretical results, new tools and private sector investment are all adding to our growing sense that developing practical fusion energy is no longer an if but a when.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

World energy demand is continuing to soar as cities grow, technology advances and industries develop. Buildings make up about 30%-40% of the total — even more than industry or transport. This comes largely from heating, cooling and ventilation systems, with air conditioning especially energy-hungry.

Windows are a significant part of the problem. They allow heat to escape in winter and enter in summer, forcing temperature systems to consume more energy and drive up emissions. The challenge is to control this heat transfer without compromising on windows' transparency and the amount of daylight they let in, both of which are essential for people's wellbeing and productivity.

The answer is smart windows. Most of the current versions on the market are what is known as electrochromic (EC), meaning they work by applying electricity at the touch of a button to layers of particles or crystals inside the glass.

This causes a reversible molecular transformation which turns the window either opaque or dark, depending on the product. This blocks out the majority of infrared light, which is what makes rooms uncomfortably warm. This drastically reduces the need for air-conditioning in hot countries, keeping some 60% to 70% of heat outside at peak temperatures. They can also reduce heat loss from rooms by about 40% in colder weather.

For a few years, these windows have been selling fairly well both for commercial and residential properties. The total global market in 2023 is estimated to have been worth US$6.6 billion (£5.2 billion).

Related: Wind and solar power overtakes coal for the first time ever in the US

Yet they have several important limitations. Though the windows don't use very much energy, they only operate with a power source. This can be challenging in locations that are remote or have unreliable electricity. And to the extent that renewable options from the grid aren't available, users need to install an alternative like solar panels to make these windows carbon neutral.

With many varieties — though there are exceptions — you can only toggle between full restriction and full transparency. This means you're losing the benefits from having windows when the weather is hot, and rooms will probably need artificially lit. And as previously mentioned, EC windows do a great job of keeping out heat in hot countries, but they're a bit more limited in colder climes.

The future is thermochromic

One alternative which at least negates the need for electricity is known as photochromic. These use a layer of either tiny silver halide crystals or compounds known as naphthopyrans, both of which react to rising levels of ultraviolet (UV) light, causing glass to tint in brighter conditions. It's exactly the same material that is used in light-reactive sunglasses.

Compared to EC windows, they have the additional benefit of creating a barrier to UV light. UV light is not only carcinogenic, but damages everything from furniture to paintings to EC coatings.

However, photochromic windows are very expensive, at least if they use silver. They are highly sensitive to weather, which can reduce their reliability in cloudy or rainy conditions. They are also not as good at blocking infrared light and have no manual control, so are more really useful for privacy than regulating room temperatures.

Many would argue that a more promising variety of smart window for the future is a third one known as thermochromic, meaning they use a coating of particles that react to temperatures instead of light. Again, this means there's no need for electricity.

They are much cheaper than photochromic windows, still block UV light and have the potential to be comparable to EC windows in blocking infrared. They can also progressively tint darker as outside temperatures rise, meaning you can have more transparent windows than those on/off EC products.

But while thermochromic glass already exists, it's not feasible for windows yet. This is because the vanadium dioxide layers in today's versions only fully reflect infrared at around 67°C, which is much hotter than even the all-time highest temperature in the world.

Many researchers around the world are looking into how to improve thermochromic glass. This includes our project at the University of Exeter's Environment and Sustainability Institute, which is partly involved in testing other coatings to try and find one which is effective at reducing infrared light at more realistic outside temperatures.

Uniquely, we're also looking into combining this with several other types of capabilities that currently can exist in other varieties of thermochromic glass besides those that can reflect infrared light. These include making the windows more useful in colder climates by enabling them to work as an insulator when temperatures are low so that rooms don't lose their heat to the outside, and also storing energy so that it can be used to help heat rooms.

It's difficult to predict an exact timeline, but maybe five or ten years from now, this kind of research should bring smart windows to market that will be just as useful in cold countries — as well as both in the daytime and at night. This is the key to the widespread rollout of a single type of window around the world.

It should make a significant difference not only to aircon requirements but also to the need for heating and radiators. My rough guess would be that by installing five smart windows in an apartment in a colder country, this might enable the owners to reduce the number of radiators from, say, five to two. And besides buildings, these technologies could also be used in airplanes and cars.

In the meantime, there's every reason to assume that the market particularly for EC windows keeps growing. According to one projection, it should increase by nearly another US$4 billion or around 60% by 2028. With the right mix of research success and policy support, in both developed and developing countries, the next generation of smart windows should then be able to take this forward and make a big difference to the carbon emissions of buildings a decade or two into the future.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A mountain of hydrogen is lurking beneath Earth's surface — and scientists say that just a fraction of it could break our dependence on fossil fuels for 200 years.

New research suggests the planet holds around 6.2 trillion tons (5.6 trillion metric tons) of hydrogen in rocks and underground reservoirs. That's roughly 26 times the amount of oil known to be left in the ground (1.6 trillion barrels, each weighing approximately 0.15 tons) — but where these hydrogen stocks are located remains unknown.

Most of the hydrogen is likely too deep or too far offshore to be accessed, and some of the reserves are probably too small to extract in a way that makes economical sense, the researchers suspect. However, the results indicate there's more than enough hydrogen to go around, even with those limitations, Geoffrey Ellis, a petroleum geochemist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and lead author of the new study, told Live Science.

Hydrogen is a source of clean energy that can fuel vehicles, power industrial processes and generate electricity. Just 2% of the hydrogen stocks found in the study, equivalent to 124 billion tons (112 billion metric tons) of gas, "would supply all the hydrogen we need to get to net-zero [carbon] for a couple hundred years," Ellis said.

The energy released by that amount of hydrogen is roughly twice the energy stored in all the known natural gas reserves on Earth, Ellis and his co-author Sarah Gelman, also a USGS geologist, noted in the study. The results were published Friday (Dec. 13) in the journal Science Advances.

Related: Massive helium reservoir in Minnesota could solve US shortage

To estimate the amount of hydrogen inside Earth, the researchers used a model that accounted for the rate at which the gas is produced underground, the amount likely to be trapped in reservoirs, and the amount lost through various processes, such as leaking out of rocks and into the atmosphere.

Hydrogen is created through chemical reactions in rocks, the simplest being a reaction that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, Ellis said. "There's actually dozens of natural processes that are capable of generating hydrogen, but most of them generate very small amounts," he said.

Until recently, researchers didn't realize that hydrogen accumulates beneath Earth's surface. "The paradigm throughout my entire career was that hydrogen's out there, it occurs, but it's a very small molecule, so it easily escapes through small pores and cracks and rocks," Ellis explained.

But when scientists discovered a huge cache of hydrogen in West Africa, and then another in an Albanian chromium mine, that paradigm shifted. It's now clear that hydrogen does build up in reservoirs in the Earth, and the new study suggests some of those accumulations could be sizable.

"I was surprised that the results were larger than I thought going in," Ellis said. "The takeaway is that there is a lot down there."

But it's important to note that there is huge uncertainty surrounding these results, he said, as the model showed there could be anywhere from 1 billion to 10 trillion tons of hydrogen down there. (The most probable value, based on the assumptions of the model, was 6.2 trillion tons.)

Hydrogen is projected to account for up to 30% of the future energy supply in some sectors, and global demand is expected to rise fivefold by 2050. The gas is produced artificially through electrolysis of water, where water molecules are broken down with electric currents. When renewable energy is used, the product is called "green hydrogen," and when fossil fuels are used, it's known as "blue hydrogen."

The benefits of tapping natural hydrogen are that it doesn't require a source of energy to produce, and underground reservoirs can hold the gas until it is needed. "We don't have to worry about storage, which is something that with the blue hydrogen or green hydrogen you do — you want to make it when electricity is cheap and then you have to store it somewhere," Ellis said. With natural hydrogen, "you could just open a valve and close it whenever you needed it."

The big question that remains is where exactly all this hydrogen is located, which will affect whether it is accessible. Ellis and colleagues are making strides toward narrowing down the geologic criteria needed to form accumulations underground, and the results for the U.S. could be published early next year, he said.

Radical new photos show the undead star that formed the "Guitar Nebula" shooting out an epic flamethrower-like jet that is spinning along one of our galaxy's magnetic strings. The cosmic blowtorch, which contains antimatter particles created from pure energy, is helping scientists to learn more about the space in between stars, NASA says.

The Guitar Nebula is a giant cloud of hydrogen gas located around 6,500 light-years from Earth in the Milky Way that formed in the wake of the collapse of the B2224+65a pulsar, a rapidly-spinning neutron star leftover from the collapse of a massive star. The unusually shaped mass is a "bow wave," made up of material blown off B2224+65 by stellar winds as the pulsar moves through space, like the wave created around the front of a boat as it moves through water. From Earth, it looks like a simple acoustic instrument. But in reality, it is a chaotic, shapeless mass flowing behind the dead star.

The nebula was first discovered in 1993. Since then, scientists have determined that the pulsar is rotating at around 3.6 million mph (5.76 km/h). As a result, it is also shooting out a giant flamethrower-like energy jet, around 2 light-years, or 12 trillion miles (19 trillion kilometers) long. The jet shoots out of the pulsar perpendicular to the Guitar Nebula, making it seem like the fiery torrent is emerging from the instrument's head.

The new images, which were released Nov. 20, are composites of observations taken by the Palomar Observatory in California, which shows visible light in blue, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory space telescope, which shows the X-rays given off by the jet in red, according to a NASA statement.

The looped timelapse below shows how the jet has changed shape over time. This mini-video uses multiple images from Chandra, taken in 2000, 2006, 2012, and 2021, superimposed over a single image of the Guitar Nebula. As a result, the nebula appears to stay exactly the same shape. But in reality, it would have morphed over time, just like the jet.

Related: 25 gorgeous nebula photos that capture the beauty of the universe

Pulsar jets are created by a combination of the undead star's rapid spin and intense magnetic fields, which are thousands of times stronger than Earth's magnetic field. This mix of factors accelerates particles and shoots them along the object's magnetic poles, which also generates beams of electromagnetic radiation, mainly in the form of X-rays.

The energy of these jets is so high that some of the radiation gets transformed into matter via Albert Einstein's E=mc² equation, which famously showed us that matter and energy are two sides of the same coin. When this happens, the energy is transformed into pairs of electrons and positrons — the positively charged antimatter counterparts of electrons.

These particle pairs get blasted out into space and flow along giant magnetic field lines that permeate the interstellar medium — matter and radiation that exists in the space between stars within a galaxy. If they ever collide with one another, then they will destroy one another via a process known as annihilation and turn back into energy.

While the Guitar Nebula and "flamethrower" jet are not directly connected to one another, a 2022 study using data from Chandra and the Hubble Space Telescope, revealed that variations in the interstellar medium that alter the nebula's shape also affect the jet's output. As a result, researchers hope that continuing to study this pulsar will yield new insights into the mysterious medium that permeates throughout our galaxy.

Every time generative artificial intelligence drafts an e-mail or conjures up an image, the planet pays for it. Making two images can consume as much energy as charging a smartphone; a single exchange with ChatGPT can heat up a server so much that it requires a bottle's worth of water to cool. At scale, these costs soar. By 2027, the global AI sector could annually consume as much electricity as the Netherlands, according to one recent estimate. And a new study in Nature Computational Science identifies another concern: AI's outsize contribution to the world's mounting heap of electronic waste. The study found that generative AI applications alone could add 1.2 million to five million metric tons of this hazardous trash to the planet by 2030, depending on how quickly the industry grows.

Such a contribution would add to the tens of millions of tons of electronic products the globe discards annually. Cell phones, microwave ovens, computers and other ubiquitous digital products often contain mercury, lead or other toxins. When improperly discarded, they can contaminate air, water and soil. The United Nations found that in 2022 about 78 percent of the world's e-waste wound up in landfills or at unofficial recycling sites, where laborers risk their health to scavenge rare metals.

The worldwide AI boom rapidly churns through physical data storage devices, plus the graphics processing units and other high-performance components needed to process thousands of simultaneous calculations. This hardware lasts anywhere from two to five years — but it's often replaced as soon as newer versions become available. Asaf Tzachor, a sustainability researcher at Israel's Reichman University, who co-authored the new study, says its findings emphasize the need to monitor and reduce this technology's environmental impacts.

To calculate just how much generative AI contributes to this problem, Tzachor and his colleagues examined the type and volume of hardware used to run large language models, the length of time that these components last and the growth rate of the generative AI sector. The researchers caution that their prediction is a gross estimate that could change based on a few additional factors. More people might adopt generative AI than the authors' models anticipate, for example. Hardware design innovations, meanwhile, could reduce e-waste in a given AI system — but other technological advances can make systems cheaper and more accessible to the public, increasing the number in use.

Related: New memory chip controlled by light and magnets could one day make AI computing less power-hungry

This study's biggest value comes from its attention to AI's broad environmental impacts, says Shaolei Ren, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside, who studies responsible AI and was not involved in the new research. "We might want these [generative AI] companies to slow down a bit," he says.

Few countries mandate the proper disposal of e-waste, and those that do often fail to enforce their existing laws on it. Twenty-five U.S. states have e-waste management policies, but there is no federal law that requires electronics recycling. In February Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts introduced a bill that would require federal agencies to study and develop standards for AI's environmental impacts, including e-waste. But that bill, the Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act of 2024 (which has not passed the Senate), would not force AI developers to cooperate with its voluntary reporting system. Some companies, however, claim to be taking independent action. Microsoft and Google have pledged to reach net zero waste and net zero emissions respectively by 2030; this would likely involve reducing or recycling AI-related e-waste.

Companies that use AI have numerous options to limit e-waste. It's possible to squeeze more life out of servers, for instance, through regular maintenance and updates or by shifting worn-out devices to less-intensive applications. Refurbishing and reusing obsolete hardware components can also cut waste by 42 percent, Tzachor and his co-authors note in the new study. And more efficient chip and algorithm design could reduce generative AI's demand for hardware and electricity. Combining all these strategies would reduce e-waste by 86 percent, the study authors estimate.

There's another wrinkle as well: AI products tend to be trickier to recycle than standard electronics because the former often contain a lot of sensitive customer data, says Kees Baldé, an e-waste researcher at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, who wasn't involved with the new study. But big tech companies can afford to both erase that data and properly dispose of their electronics, he points out. "Yes, it costs something," he says of broader e-waste recycling, "but the gains for society are much larger."

This article was first published at Scientific American. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved. Follow on TikTok and Instagram, X and Facebook.

Vampire bats rely on blood-derived amino acids to fuel their activity, scientists have discovered after making the animals work out on tiny treadmills.

Most mammals, including humans, rely on carbohydrates and fats from their complex diets to fuel physical activity. However, vampire bats exclusively consume blood, which is very low in carbohydrates and fats but high in protein. This raises the question of whether vampire bats instead obtain most of their energy from the protein they consume — similar to bloodsucking insects.

"Whereas most mammals, like us, rely on carbohydrates and lipids to fuel our activity, these fuels are not abundant in the vampire bat diet, suggesting they might not rely on those fuels like us," study lead author Kenneth Welch, an associate professor of biology at the University of Toronto, told Live Science in an email.

There are three vampire bat species: the common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus), the hairy-legged vampire bat (Diphylla ecaudata) and the white-winged vampire bat (Diaemus youngi). All are found in warm regions of the Americas, including Mexico, South America and Trinidad, according to the San Diego Zoo. They live in colonies of 20 to 100 individuals and are the only mammals that are obligate blood feeders.

Related: Scientists unlocked the secrets to bats' heavy-metal growls

The common vampire bat is the only vampire bat species that's capable of running; it uses a unique bounding gait to move quickly on the ground. Much like gorillas, they use their front limbs to propel themselves in short bursts so they can move quickly toward their prey.

In the new study, published Nov. 6 in the journal Biology Letters, scientists captured 24 adult common vampire bats along known flight paths in the tropical forests of Belize. The bats were held for up to 18 hours to make sure their last meal was fully digested. The vampire bats were fed with cow's blood enriched with one of two labeled amino acids — glycine or leucine. Each bat was then placed into a treadmill chamber so scientists could measure the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide (CO2) and calculate the rate of metabolic activity at different running speeds.

To determine if the amino acids were being used for energy, the researchers used a specialized machine with infrared lasers to detect the presence of certain carbon isotopes in the exhaled carbon dioxide.

The results revealed that the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide remained consistent across all treadmill speeds. This indicated that the vampire bats were using amino acids as their primary fuel source, the researchers said. In other mammals, the ratio increases with the intensity of exercise, mirroring the shift from burning lipids to burning carbohydrates.

The scientists also found that the vampire bats rapidly absorbed the free amino acids within just 10 minutes of consuming their meal.

"What was impressive was how quickly that labeled CO2 showed up, and how abundant it was from these bats," Welch said. "The rapid appearance of their labeled break-down product indicated the bats were oxidizing ("burning") those amino acids in their muscles while walking/running."

Although this method of energy generation is rare among mammals, previous studies of bloodsucking invertebrates like tsetse flies (Glossina) and female mosquitoes of the species Aedes aegypti found that they, too, obtain their energy from the breakdown of amino acids.

"What we have shown in this study is that running vampire bats show a similar pattern of reliance on blood-meal amino acids to fuel their intense exercise as do these [bloodsucking] insects," Welch said.

In summer 2024, several news outlets chronicled the "nightmarish" impacts Texas communities endured due to the din of noise emanating from nearby cryptocurrency mines.

Residents of these communities reported that the unrelenting noise caused them to experience a range of ailments, including high blood pressure, chest pain and tinnitus. The noise levels of the cryptocurrency mines allegedly reached 72 decibels — well above the 55 dB limit beyond which the World Health Organization (WHO) deems to be increasingly dangerous for public health.

These recent reports have stoked ongoing discussions about the potential health hazards of cryptocurrency mining. In a thinkpiece published Sept. 26 in the journal JAMA, three scientists argue that we are experiencing a "digital oil boom" that could have serious health consequences for everyone — not only the communities that live near mines. This problem extends beyond noise pollution, encompassing health risks associated with increasing energy consumption and accelerated climate change.

Related: 'Any protein you can imagine, it can deliver': AI will help discover the next breakthrough in RNA, says Nobel Prize winner Dr. Drew Weissman

Energy-intensive mines

Cryptocurrency, a virtual currency that harnesses the blockchain, uses a network of computers to report transactions between users, which are documented in a digital ledger. The network is decentralized, meaning that it is not controlled or owned by any one person or group, unlike a traditional central bank, for instance. This structure allows users to transfer currency more quickly and cheaply and with less of a paper trail, compared with traditional banking.

Since its advent, cryptocurrency has experienced several bubbles and crashes — however, it still remains popular worldwide, and the cryptocurrency market has now become a multibillion-dollar industry.

The first and arguably most popular type of cryptocurrency is Bitcoin, which was invented in 2009. Bitcoin relies on something called a "proof-of-work" algorithm, a calculation that essentially verifies the accuracy of transactions added to the digital ledger. The process of completing these calculations is very energy-intensive, and it becomes exponentially more difficult over time.

Consequently, Bitcoin data centers, referred to as "mines," require more and more energy to function over time. In the U.S. alone, cryptocurrency mining is estimated to represent around 0.6% to 2.3% of all electricity consumption in the country.

The energy-hungry industry could raise communities' reliance on peaking power plants, meaning power plants that kick in only at times of peak demand, Mary Willis, co-author of the JAMA article and an assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University, told Live Science.

The problem is that these plants run on fossil fuels. In terms of their direct impacts, these fumes contain air pollutants that can partly drive diseases, such as stroke, heart disease and lung cancer. Historically disadvantaged racial or ethnic communities are most likely to carry the burden of these health impacts, as plants are often built where those communities live.

Beyond harmful air pollutants, higher demands for fossil fuels also increases the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, thus escalating climate change.

"Crypto mining uses mostly fossil fuel electricity, which comes from coal and natural gas power plants," Benjamin Jones, an associate professor of economics at the University of New Mexico who was not involved in the JAMA article, told Live Science in an email.

"These in-turn generate emissions of CO2 and other air pollutants, which contribute to climate change and harm human health," he said. Such harmful effects include spurring the spread of infectious diseases and the number of deaths tied to extreme weather events, such as heatwaves and major storms.

Blackouts and noise pollution

Another concern is that many cryptocurrency mines are in locations with fragile electrical grids, such as Texas, Willis said. A winter storm in February 2021 caused the states' power grid to fail and highlighted its precarity.

Crypto mines could put additional stress on the grid, exacerbating the risk of blackouts, Willis said. Power outages can have numerous health consequences, including raising the risk of carbon-monoxide poisoning from generators; gastrointestinal illnesses as refrigerators stop working; and deaths in hospitals due to medical equipment shutting down.

On top of these risks related to energy use, cryptocurrency mines can be really noisy. Many communities are extremely worried about this, Willis told Live Science. Exposure to high levels of noise is associated with sleep disturbances, increased blood pressure and heart disease, among other health issues. Excessive noise has also been tied to inflammation in the brain, which may have knock-on impacts in the circulatory system.

For now, many of these health effects are theoretical. Besides anecdotal reports out of places like Texas, there isn't much good data on the health impacts of these mines, Willis said. For starters, there's currently no systematic way to actually track where the mines are located, she said.

In February 2024, the U.S. Energy Information Administration launched a system to track energy consumption from cryptocurrency mines. At the time, the agency said it had identified 137 mines in 21 U.S. states, with Texas, Georgia and New York hosting the majority.

But a month later, this data collection was discontinued following a federal court case initiated by the crypto industry, the JAMA authors wrote. In this case, it was successfully argued that government monitoring would cause "irreparable injury" to the industry.

Without data on the locations and energy use of crypto mines, it will be impossible to fully understand the health implications of cryptocurrency mining, Willis and her co-authors argued.

The trio is now trying to figure out the best way to locate these mines. Only then, they say, might these predictions about the health impacts of the mines be confirmed.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

Ever wonder why some people build muscle more easily than others or why freckles come out in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works to community@livescience.com with the subject line "Health Desk Q," and you may see your question answered on the website!

The goal of the 2021 Global Methane Pledge is bold: cut methane emissions by 30% by the end of the decade. This is to buy us vital time to work on cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Over 150 nations have now signed up to the pledge — representing more than half of the world's emissions of an extremely potent but short-lived greenhouse gas.

To put the pledge into action, many leaders announced policies to cut methane. However, the latest research shows global methane emissions are still rising rapidly. Atmospheric concentrations are now growing faster than at any other time since global record-keeping began about 40 years ago.

These findings are published today in our fourth global methane budget, in a paper and pre-print research undertaken through the Global Carbon Project, with contributions from 66 research institutions around the world.

Natural sources of methane include decaying organic matter in wetlands. But humans have supercharged methane emissions. We tracked changes in all major sources and sinks of this potent greenhouse gas and found humans are now responsible for two-thirds or more of all global emissions.

This is a problem, but we can improve upon it. Cutting methane emissions is one of the best and only short-term levers we can pull to slow the rate of climate change.

Related: The 165-year reign of oil is coming to an end. But will we ever be able to live without it?

Why is methane so important?

After carbon dioxide, methane is the second most important greenhouse gas contributing to human-driven global warming.

Although human activities emit much less methane than carbon dioxide in real terms, methane has a hidden punch — it's 80 times as effective as CO₂ in trapping heat in the first two decades after it reaches the atmosphere.

Since the pre-industrial era, the world has heated up by 1.2°C (taken as an average of the past 10 years). Methane is responsible for about 0.5°C of warming, according to the latest reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In the atmosphere, methane rapidly mixes with oxygen and converts into carbon dioxide and water. By contrast, carbon dioxide is a much more stable molecule and will stay in the atmosphere, trapping heat, for thousands of years until absorbed by ocean and plants.

The combination of short lifespan and extreme potency make methane an excellent candidate for efforts to rapidly tackle climate change.

Methane is not slowing

In the early-to-mid-2000s, methane emissions growth rates actually fell. Analyses suggest it was driven by a combination of reduced fossil fuels emissions and chemical changes in the atmosphere's capacity to destroy methane.

Since then, however, methane has surged. Methane emissions from human activities increased by 50-60 million tonnes per year over the two decades to 2018-2020 — a 15-20% increase.

This doesn't mean atmospheric methane goes up by the same amount, as methane is constantly being broken down.

During the 2000s, an extra 6.1 million tonnes of methane entered the atmosphere each year. By the 2010s, the rate of growth was 20.9 million tonnes. In 2020, growth hit 42 million tonnes. Since then, methane has been added even more rapidly. Growth rates are now higher than any previously observed year.

Where does the methane come from?

Human activities such as farming livestock, coal mining, extracting and handling natural gas, growing rice in paddies, and putting organic waste in landfills contribute about 65% of all methane emissions. Of this, agriculture (livestock and rice paddies) contributes 40%, fossil fuels 36%, and landfills and wastewater 17%.

Methane emissions from fossil fuels are now comparable to livestock emissions. The fastest growing contributors are from landfill and fossil fuels (think natural gas escaping during extraction and processing).

Our impact is even higher when we account for indirect emissions such as the leaching of organic matter into waterways and wetlands, the construction of reservoirs, and the impacts of human-driven climate change on wetlands.

In 2020, human activities led to emissions of between 370 and 384 million tonnes of methane.

The remaining emissions come from natural sources, primarily the decomposition of plant matter in wetlands, rivers, lakes, and water-saturated soils. Tropical wetlands are particularly large emitters. The world's large areas of permafrost (permanently frozen ground) also produce methane, but at relatively low rates. As permafrost melts due to higher temperatures, this is changing.

Regional contributions and trends

Who emits most? By volume, the top five nations in 2020 were China (16%), India (9%), the United States (7%), Brazil (6%) and Russia (5%). The fastest-growing areas are China, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

European nations have begun to lower their emissions over the last two decades, due to efforts to cut emissions from landfill and waste, followed by smaller cuts in fossil fuels and farming. Australia may also be lowering emissions mainly from farming and waste.

What does this mean for net zero?

Unchecked methane emissions are bad news. Recent observed atmospheric concentrations of methane are consistent with climate scenarios with up to 3°C of warming by 2100.

To keep global temperatures well-below 2°C — the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement — means cutting methane emissions as rapidly as possible. Methane has to be cut almost in half (45%) by 2050 to achieve that goal.

It's not an impossible problem. We now have have methods of rapidly cutting methane for every sector.

The oil and gas sector could cut their emissions 40% at no net cost, according to the International Energy Agency.

In agriculture, we can achieve rapid reductions by feed additives to reduce methane belched from cows, sheep, goats and buffalo, and by mid-season drainage in rice paddies.

Capturing landfill methane and using it for energy production or heat is now well established.

Three years ago, the world committed to slash methane emissions. Our findings show that we need to rapidly accelerate solutions across the globe to address and reduce methane emissions.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Artificial intelligence systems, even those as sophisticated as ChatGPT, depend on the same silicon-based hardware that has been the bedrock of computing since the 1950s. But what if computers could be molded from living biological matter? Some researchers in academia and the commercial sector, wary of AI's ballooning demands for data storage and energy, are focusing on a growing field known as biocomputing. This approach uses synthetic biology, such as miniature clusters of lab-grown cells called organoids, to create computer architecture. Biocomputing pioneers include Swiss company FinalSpark, which earlier this year debuted its "Neuroplatform"—a computer platform powered by human-brain organoids—that scientists can rent over the Internet for $500 a month.

"As far as I know, we are the only ones in the world doing this" on a publicly rentable platform, says FinalSpark co-founder Fred Jordan. Initially bankrolled with funds from its co-founders' previous start-up, FinalSpark seeks an environmentally sustainable way to support AI. "Our principal goal is artificial intelligence for 100,000 times less energy" than what's currently required to train state-of-the-art generative AI, Jordan says. Neuroplatform uses a series of processing units hosting four spherical brain organoids each. Every 0.5-millimeter-wide organoid is connected to eight electrodes that electrically stimulate the neurons within the living sphere; those electrodes also link the organoids to conventional computer networks. The neurons are selectively exposed to the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine to mimic the human brain's natural reward system. These twin setups—positive dopamine rewards and electrical stimulation—train the organoids' neurons, prompting them to form new pathways and connections much in the same way a living human brain appears to learn. If perfected, this training could eventually allow organoids to mimic silicon-based AI and serve as processing units with functions similar to today's CPUs (central processing units) and GPUs (graphics processing units), FinalSpark says.

For now, the organoids and their behavior are live streamed 24 hours a day for researchers (and anyone else) to observe. "The challenge is to find the appropriate way to get neurons to do what we want them to do," Jordan says.

RELATED: 12 game-changing moments in the history of artificial intelligence (AI)

Research teams at 34 universities have asked to use FinalSpark's biocomputers, and so far the company has provided access for scientists at the University of Michigan, the Free University of Berlin and seven other institutions. Each one's project focuses on a different aspect of biocomputing. The University of Michigan team, for example, is investigating the electrical and chemical prompts necessary to change organoid activity—in effect creating the building blocks of an organoid-specific computer language. Scientists at Lancaster University Leipzig in Germany, meanwhile, are trying to fit the organoids into different models of AI learning.

Sticking points remain for organoid computing's ability to compete with silicon on a large scale. For one thing, no standardized manufacturing system exists. And living brains die: FinalSpark's organoids only survive for an average of around 100 days (and that's considerable progress from the original experiment's lifespan, which was just a few hours). But Jordan notes that Neuroplatform has "streamlined" its in-house process for making organoids, and its facility currently houses between 2,000 and 3,000 of them.

FinalSpark is not alone in its pursuit of organic alternatives to silicon-based computing, and brain organoids are not the only possible way forward. "There are different flavors of biocomputing," says Ángel Goñi-Moreno, a researcher at Spain's National Center for Biotechnology. Goñi-Moreno studies cellular computing, or the use of modified living cells to create systems that can replicate "memory, logic gates and the other decision-making basics we know from conventional computer science," he says. His team is looking for tasks at which biocomputers outperform their silicon counterparts—a dynamic he calls "cellular supremacy." In particular, Goñi-Moreno believes that because cellular computers can react to their environmental conditions, they could facilitate bioremediation, or the restoration of damaged ecosystems. "That's a domain where conventional computers can do basically nothing," Goñi-Moreno says. "You can't just throw a computer into a lake and have it tell you the state of the environment." A submerged bacterial computer, however, would be able to give a nuanced reading of environmental conditions as the cells respond to chemical and other stimuli.

Where Goñi-Moreno is focused on bacteria, Andrew Adamatzky of the University of the West of England, founding editor in chief of the International Journal of Unconventional Computing, has been studying the computational possibilities of fungus. Mycelia, or networks of fungal strands, exhibit spiking electrical potentials similar to those found in neurons, Adamatzky says. He hopes to take advantage of these electrical properties to create a brainlike fungal computing system that is "potentially capable of learning, reservoir computing, pattern recognition, and more." Adamatzky's team has already successfully trained fungal networks to help computer systems perform certain mathematical functions. "Fungal computing offers several advantages over brain-organoid-based computing," Adamatzky says, "particularly in terms of ethical simplicity, ease of cultivation, environmental resilience, cost-effectiveness and integration with existing technologies."

Jordan is well aware of the considerations involved in using cultivated human neurons for nonmedical purposes. An ongoing bioethical debate concerns whether mini brains could gain consciousness, though there is as yet no evidence it has ever been created in a lab. Jordan says he is currently seeking philosophers and researchers with the "cultural background to help us answer these ethical questions."

Adamatzky acknowledges that brain organoids "might offer advanced functionalities due to their complex and neuronlike structures" despite his advocacy of fungal computing. Jordan, for his part, is confident in FinalSpark's choice for its biocomputers. Of all the cells to pick from, he says, "human neurons are the best at learning."

This article was first published at Scientific American. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved. Follow on TikTok and Instagram, X and Facebook.

Nuclear fusion technology could get a breakthrough from an unexpected place: mayonnaise.

In a new study, published in May in the journal Physical Review E, scientists plopped the creamy condiment into a churning wheel machine and set it whirling to see what conditions made it flow.

"We use mayonnaise because it behaves like a solid, but when subjected to a pressure gradient, it starts to flow," study lead author Arindam Banerjee, a mechanical engineer at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, said in a statement.

This process could help elucidate the physics that occur at ultrahigh temperatures and pressures inside nuclear fusion reactors — without having to create those extreme conditions.

Related: World's largest nuclear fusion reactor is finally completed. But it won't run for another 15 years.

Nuclear fusion forges helium from hydrogen at the hearts of stars. In theory, it could be the source of nearly limitless clean energy on Earth — if the reaction could produce more energy than it requires to run.

That's a tall order; star-powered fusion occurs at 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius), according to NASA. And a star's massive gravity forces hydrogen atoms together, overcoming their natural repulsion. On Earth, however, we don't have those crushing pressures, so human-made fusion reactors must run 10 times hotter than the sun.

To reach these mind-melting temperatures, scientists use multiple approaches, including one called inertial confinement.

In this process, physicists freeze pea-sized pellets of gas — typically a mix of heavy isotopes, or versions, of hydrogen — into metal capsules. Then, they blast the pellets with lasers, which heats the gas to 400 million F (222 million C) in a flash — and, ideally, turns it into a plasma where fusion can occur, according to the statement.

Unfortunately, the hydrogen gas wants to expand, causing the molten metal to explode before hydrogen has time to fuse. This explosion occurs when the metal capsule enters an unstable phase and starts to flow.

Banerjee's team realized that molten metal behaves a lot like mayonnaise at lower temperatures: It can be elastic, meaning it bounces back when you push on it, or plastic, meaning it doesn't bounce back, or flowing.

"If you put a stress on mayonnaise, it will start to deform, but if you remove the stress, it goes back to its original shape," he said. "So there's an elastic phase followed by a stable plastic phase. The next phase is when it starts flowing, and that's where the instability kicks in."

In the new study, the researchers placed mayonnaise in a machine that accelerated the egg-and-oil emulsion until it started to flow. Then, they characterized the conditions at which the condiment transitioned between plastic, elastic and unstable states.

"We found the conditions under which the elastic recovery was possible, and how it could be maximized to delay or completely suppress the instability," Banerjee said.

The study also found which conditions allowed for more energy yield.

Of course, mayonnaise and ultrahot metal capsules are different in many ways. So it remains to be seen whether the team's findings can be translated to a pellet of plasma many times hotter than the sun.

During the 2024 Summer Olympics, athletes from more than 200 countries will compete in over 300 events. As you watch athletes sprint, leap, swim and flip in pursuit of a gold medal, you might wonder: which Olympic event burns the most calories?

There are two ways to answer this question: looking at the total energy spent across a whole event or judging the biggest burst of energy required in the course of a given challenge.

Researchers usually define the energy cost of an activity as a measure of calories per kilogram of body weight per hour (kcal/kg/hour). So, if an exercise uses 2 kcal/kg/hour, you could expect an average human weighing about 185 pounds (84 kg) to burn 168 calories, if they worked out for a full hour.

There are individual differences between people; some will use less energy to perform the same activity, while others whose body weight is made up of more fat cells typically burn more. On average, an adult at rest will use 1 kcal/kg/hour, and any activity that requires more than 6 kcal/kg/hour is classified as "vigorous-intensive" in the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans.

Related: How calories are calculated: The science behind your food

Running demands more

Of all the sports at this year's Olympics, the running events will result in the most calories burned per kilogram of body weight per hour.

Accelerating is much more energetically demanding than running at a constant speed, so events such as the 100 meters — in which runners accelerate from 0 to 5 meters per second (16 feet per second) in under a second — will use a large number of calories in a short period. Calculations by Pietro di Prampero, a professor of physiology at the University of Udine in Italy, revealed that during the first 0.85 seconds of Usain Bolt's world-record 100-m sprint, he was burning 91.2 kcal/kg/hour.

"In terms of metabolic power, of course, the most demanding [of the running events] are the 100-meter sprints," di Prampero told Live Science. "But in terms of overall energy, if you run a marathon, the amount of energy spent is much more."

For every kilometer an athlete runs at a steady speed, they typically burn 1 kcal per kilogram of body weight. This figure is independent of the runner's speed, di Prampero said — so running a marathon burns 42 kcal/kg. The 2020 Tokyo men's marathon gold medalist, Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya, weighs about 115 pounds (52 kg) and burned 2,339 kcal by the time he reached the finish line. The race took him 2 hours, 8 minutes, which comes out to around 21 kcal/kg/hour.

Related: Best running shoes for supination 2024: Find the perfect fit for your feet

Calorific cost of other Olympic sports

According to the Compendium of Physical Activities, a comprehensive review that compiled data from hundreds of studies to estimate the calorific cost of activity, cycling events above 20 mph (32 km/h) burn 16.8 kcal/kg/hour. Rowing at racing speeds burns 15.5 kcal/kg/hour. Martial arts are thought to use 10.5 kcal/kg/hour, and competitive trampolining uses 10.3 kcal/kg/hour.

When it comes to swimming events, the energy demand varies depending on the stroke, the athlete's skill level and whether the event takes place in a pool or in open water.

"In elite swimmers, the most demanding stroke is breaststroke," said Tiago Barbosa, a professor of sport science at the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança in Portugal. "After that comes butterfly, then backstroke. The most economical is freestyle."

Barbosa's earlier research, published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine in 2006, calculated that the cost of swimming breaststroke at 1.6 meters per second — slightly slower than Adam Peaty of England swam to win the gold in the 100-m breaststroke at the 2020 Olympics — was around 30.4 kcal/kg/hour.

The open-water events may take more energy, due to the athletes' potential exposure to waves, wind and cooler temperatures. However, Barbosa said swimmers can also save more energy by drafting — positioning themselves behind other swimmers to reduce drag — much like cyclists do at the Tour de France.

However, both di Prampero and Barbosa stressed that these calorific figures can vary greatly among individuals.

"We must be honest — these are all estimates," di Prampero said.

"I said the average Olympic runner consumes about 1 kcal/kg per kilometer. But if you are a good runner, you may spend 0.95, and if you have good shoes, maybe 0.83," he said. "If the terrain is wet, the cost goes up … at the Olympic level, even a 0.01 difference could be the difference between the gold medal or not."

Ever wonder why some people build muscle more easily than others or why freckles come out in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works to community@livescience.com with the subject line "Health Desk Q," and you may see your question answered on the website!

New research suggests that extreme objects known as "kugelblitze" — black holes formed solely from light — are impossible in our universe, challenging Einstein's theory of general relativity. The discovery places significant constraints on cosmological models and demonstrates how quantum mechanics and general relativity can be reconciled to address complex scientific questions.

Black holes — massive objects with such a strong gravitational pull that not even light can escape their grasp — are among the most intriguing and bizarre objects in the universe. Typically, they form from the collapse of massive stars at the ends of their life cycles, when the pressure from thermonuclear reactions in their cores can no longer counteract the force of gravity.

However, more exotic hypotheses exist regarding black hole formation. One such theory involves the creation of a "kugelblitz," German for "ball lightning." (The plural form is "kugelblitze.")

"A kugelblitz is a hypothetical black hole that, instead of forming from the collapse of 'ordinary matter' (whose main constituents are protons, neutrons, and electrons), is formed from concentrating humongous amounts of electromagnetic radiation, such as light," study co-author José Polo-Gómez, a physicist at the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, told Live Science in an email.

"Even though light does not have mass, it does carry energy," Polo-Gómez said,  adding that, in Einstein's theory of general relativity, energy is responsible for creating curvatures in space-time that result in gravitational attractions. "Because of that, it is in principle possible for light to form black holes — if we concentrate enough of it in a small enough volume," he said.

Related: Tweak to Schrödinger's cat equation could unite Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics, study hints

These principles hold true under classical general relativity, which does not account for quantum phenomena. To explore the potential impact of quantum effects on kugelblitz formation, Polo-Gómez and his colleagues examined the influence of the Schwinger effect.

"When there is an incredibly intense electromagnetic energy — for example, due to huge concentrations of light — part of this energy transforms into matter in the form of electron-positron pairs," lead study author Álvaro Álvarez-Domínguez of the Institute of Particle and Cosmos Physics (IPARCOS) at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, told Live Science in an email. "This is a quantum effect called the Schwinger effect. It is also known as vacuum polarization."

In their study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters but has not been published yet, the team calculated the rate at which electron-positron pairs produced in an electromagnetic field would deplete energy. If this rate surpasses the replenishment rate of the electromagnetic field's energy in a given region, a kugelblitz cannot form.

The team found that, even under the most extreme circumstances, pure light could never reach the required energy threshold to form a black hole.

"What we prove is that kugelblitze are impossible to form by concentrating light, either artificially in the laboratory or in naturally occurring astrophysical scenarios," study co-author Luis J. Garay, also of IPARCOS, told Live Science. "For instance, even if we used the most intense lasers on Earth, we would still be more than 50 orders of magnitude away from the intensity required to create a kugelblitz."

This finding has profound theoretical implications, significantly constraining previously considered astrophysical and cosmological models that assume the existence of kugelblitze. It also dashes any hopes of experimentally studying black holes in laboratory settings by creating them through electromagnetic radiation.

Nonetheless, the study's positive outcome shows that quantum effects can be efficiently integrated into problems involving gravity, thus providing clear answers to actual scientific questions.

"From a theoretical viewpoint, this work showcases how quantum effects can play an important role in the understanding of the formation mechanisms and appearance of astrophysical objects," Polo-Gómez said.

Inspired by their findings, the researchers plan to continue exploring the influence of quantum effects on various gravitational phenomena, which have both practical and fundamental significance.

"Several of us are very interested in continuing the study of the gravitational properties of quantum matter, particularly in scenarios where this quantum matter violates traditional energy conditions," said Eduardo Martín-Martínez, also of the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute. "This type of quantum matter can, in principle, give rise to exotic space-times, resulting in effects such as repulsive gravity or producing exotic solutions like the Alcubierre warp drive or traversable wormholes."

Pregnancy places a lot of extra strain on the body, requiring more food than usual over the course of nine months to support the pregnancy and the growing baby. 

But exactly how many calories does it take to grow a baby?

It turns out that estimates range widely — from about 50,000 to nearly 85,000 extra calories over the course of an entire pregnancy. Those are additional calories on top of what that person would need if they weren't pregnant.

"I would say that, for most women, 50,000 calories is going to be a gross underestimate," said Herman Pontzer, a professor of evolutionary anthropology and global health at Duke University. "I think, for most, it's going to be more like 70,000 … or even more."   

Related: How calories are calculated: The science behind your food

Scientists have arrived at these numbers using different methods. For instance, a 2024 study published in the journal Science devised a formula for calculating the calorific cost of pregnancy for many species across the animal kingdom.

The team was led by Samuel Ginther, who was a doctoral student at Monash University at the time of the study. The researchers worked out the reproductive cost of 81 species, ranging from microscopic, aquatic animals to large mammals, including humans.

"We calculated that a pregnant person would require an additional 50,000 kcal [calories] over a 9-month period compared to a similar non-pregnant female over the same time period," Ginther told Live Science via email.

Of the 50,000 extra calories needed in pregnancy, the team estimated that just 4% go directly into growing the cells of the fetus. The majority are instead used to support the pregnant person's body as it changes throughout pregnancy, said Pontzer, who was not involved in the study.

"Fundamentally, energy expenditure is all about all of your cells doing their jobs all day," Pontzer said. "In pregnancy — when the body grows something around 12 kilos [26 pounds] in a normal pregnancy — all that extra tissue [is] all extra cells that weren't there before. And they've all got to do their jobs."

The energy demands of pregnancy change over the course of the nine months. The first trimester takes the least amount of added energy, according to a 2005 paper in the journal Public Health Nutrition. During this time, the weight gain for an average, healthy pregnant woman is around 0.6 ounce (18 grams) per day. This increases to 2.1 ounces (60 grams) per day during the second trimester and then decreases slightly to 1.9 ounces per day (54 grams) in the final trimester.

Related: Having a baby: Stages of pregnancy by trimester

The calories needed to support this extra tissue and grow a whole new human are likely higher than Ginther and colleagues' study suggests, Pontzer said.

"The real advancement in this new paper is that they've looked so broadly across the tree of life" — at reptiles, amphibians, fish and mammals, he said. "But we've known for a long time ­— thanks to groundbreaking work by Nancy Butte — that the energy costs of [human] pregnancy are upwards of 70,000 calories."

Butte, a professor of pediatrics and nutrition at Baylor College of Medicine, and her colleagues once published a meta-analysis of several studies that calculated the total energy cost of pregnancy. The figure came out to 77,675 calories. This would consist of an extra 90 calories per day in the first trimester, 287 calories per day in the second trimester and 466 calories per day in the third.

A review by a different group, published in 2019 in the journal Nutrients, looked over Butte's and others' work and concluded the needs of pregnancy ranged from 50 to 150 extra calories per day in the first trimester, 340 calories per day in the second and 452 calories per day in the third. Added up, that amounts to about 78,400 to 84,700 additional calories across the nine months. 

So, why are there discrepancies as to how many calories it takes to grow a baby?

"To give one number is going to be tough," Pontzer said. "A small woman is going to have probably a different energy cost than a big woman, just because we know that the energy cost of everything scales with size." Plus, the amount of energy needed also depends on how physically active a person is and other physiological traits, such as their metabolism.

But again, at least based on past research, Pontzer said, most pregnancies probably require well over 70,000 extra calories to sustain. 

Ever wonder why some people build muscle more easily than others or why freckles come out in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works to community@livescience.com with the subject line "Health Desk Q," and you may see your question answered on the website!

Russia's space agency Roscosmos has announced plans to work with China to build an automated nuclear reactor on the moon by 2035. The proposed reactor will help power a proposed lunar base that the two countries will jointly operate.  

Back in 2021, Roscosmos and the China National Space Administration (CNSA) revealed that they intended to build a shared base on the moon, named the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), which they claimed at the time would be "open to all interested countries and international partners." 

However, NASA astronauts are unlikely to be allowed to visit this base due to historically frosty relations with CNSA and a more recent split with Roscosmos, which will leave the International Space Station by 2025 in response to sanctions from the U.S. over Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

On Tuesday (March 5), Roscosmos announced that it will eventually attempt to build a nuclear reactor alongside CNSA, which would theoretically be able to power the ILRS. 

"Today we are seriously considering a project — somewhere at the turn of 2033-2035 — to deliver and install a power unit on the lunar surface together with our Chinese colleagues," Roscosmos director general Yury Borisov told state-owned Russian news site TASS.

Borisov added that the challenging construction job would likely be carried out autonomously "without the presence of humans" and that the necessary technological solutions to pull it off are "almost ready." 

Roscosmos is also looking to use massive nuclear-powered rockets to transfer cargo to the moon to build this base, but the agency has not yet figured out how to build these spacecraft safely, Reuters reported.

Related: Will future colonists on the moon and Mars develop new accents? 

A nuclear reactor, or similar source of reliable power, will likely be necessary to sustain future lunar bases because solar panels are unlikely to generate and store enough energy.

In September last year, U.K. scientists revealed plans for a compact nuclear reactor that can be powered by tiny seed-size fuel cells and is due to be tested by NASA for future missions.

It is currently unclear what size or shape the joint Russian and Chinese reactor will take.

To the moon

Roscosmos and CNSA, neither of which have put humans on the moon's surface, have contrasting track records when it comes to recent lunar exploration.

Last year, Russia's first moon mission in 47 years ended in disaster when the Luna-25 lander crashed into the lunar surface, leaving behind a 33-foot (10 meter) wide crater. 

However, China has had a presence on the moon since 2013, when the Chang'e 3 mission put a lander and rover on the lunar surface. The subsequent Chang'e 4 and Chang'e 5 missions, which occurred in 2019 and 2020 respectively, also successfully landed spacecraft on the moon. The most recent mission also successfully returned lunar samples to Earth — a feat that CNSA will attempt to repeat later this year.

Last week, CNSA also announced that it will start launching giant reusable rockets over the next two years as part of the agency’s plan to put boots on the moon by 2030.

However, NASA is still on track to return humans to the lunar surface before then, despite the first crewed Artemis mission being delayed until 2026.

A nuclear reactor in the U.K. has just broken a new fusion record. 

In a news conference today (Feb. 8), representatives from the Joint European Torus (JET) facility declared that the reactor's final tests yielded 69.26 megajoules of heat from just 0.21 milligrams of fuel — the equivalent of burning 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) of coal. This is more total energy — though not more net positive energy — than any other fusion reaction has produced thus far. 

Tests such as this could help unlock fusion as a viable source of clean, near-limitless energy, the researchers said.

JET first fired up in 1983 in Oxfordshire, England. Its doughnut-like shape, known as a tokamak, allows scientists to whip modified hydrogen atoms into hot plasma by accelerating them to breathtaking speeds using a magnetic field. This setup creates the necessary conditions for nuclear fusion — the combination of two light atomic nuclei into one heavier one, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the process.

Over the course of its 40 years of operation, JET has produced numerous fusion milestones, including becoming the first reactor to use a 50/50 mixture of deuterium (hydrogen with an extra neutron) and tritium (hydrogen with two extra neutrons) atoms — now considered a standard fusion fuel. 

"We can reliably create fusion plasmas using the same fuel mixture to be used by commercial fusion energy powerplants, showcasing the advanced expertise developed over time," Fernanda Rimini, JET's scientific operations leader, said in a statement. 

Related: Nuclear fusion reactor 'breakthrough' is significant, but light-years away from being useful

However, this record will be JET's last. The project was decommissioned in December 2023, shortly after the record-breaking test took place. Researchers have now begun the arduous process of taking the reactor apart, a task that is expected to last until 2040. But over that time, they hope to learn even more about what made JET tick, including how renegade plasma blasts affected the tokamak's internal structure. It will also help scientists develop safer strategies to dispose of radioactive waste, the team said.

JET's legacy will live on in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a massive tokamak in southern France scheduled to start up in 2025. The $22 billion dollar project will use a very similar fusion strategy, but at a much larger scale. 

"Throughout its lifecycle, JET has been remarkably helpful as a precursor to ITER," Pietro Barabaschi, ITER's director-general, said in the statement. "The results obtained here will directly and positively impact ITER, validating the way forward and enabling us to progress faster toward our performance goals once operation begins."

A massive hydrogen reservoir may be lurking deep beneath a chromium mine in Albania, a new study has found.

The reservoir sits within a portion of Earth's crust and mantle that once lay at the bottom of the ocean and was scraped off when the tectonic plate it rode on slid beneath another plate. The crumpled slab of crust and mantle was thrust onto land between 45 million and 15 million years ago and formed a 1,900-mile-long (3,000 kilometers) rocky belt, known as an ophiolite, that extends from present-day Turkey to Slovenia.

Ophiolites exist worldwide, and research has previously documented hydrogen gas leaking from boreholes and mines drilled into these formations. In the new study, scientists discovered the reservoir thanks to huge clouds of hydrogen gas wafting from pools of water inside the Bulqizë mine, which is located 25 miles (40 km) northeast of Tirana, Albania. Such hydrogen reservoirs could be tapped to provide carbon-free fuel, but the deep infrastructure needed to do so is lacking and the gas is inherently difficult to extract.

Related: Will the drive for EVs destroy Earth's last untouched ecosystem?

"We have seen plenty of hyper alkaline springs hosted in ophiolites worldwide where hydrogen is bubbling [out]," lead study author Laurent Truche, a professor of geochemistry at Grenoble Alpes University in France, told Live Science in an email. But "what we have observed deep in the mine is another dimension," Truche said, and "turns a draining pool inside a mine gallery into a breathtaking 30-square-meter [323 square feet] jacuzzi bubbling with almost pure hydrogen."

Truche and his colleagues explored the deepest levels of the Bulqizë chromium mine and recorded extreme quantities of hydrogen gas leaking from the rocks and bubbling through pools of water. Their measurements suggest that at least 220 tons (200 metric tons) of high-quality hydrogen escape from the mine every year, which is one of the largest natural hydrogen flow rates documented to date.

Hydrogen is a highly flammable gas. The high concentrations measured inside the Bulqizë mine are thought to have sparked three explosions since 2011, killing four miners and injuring many more. "Our study will help to understand the phenomenon and to improve safety," Truche said.

The discovery also sheds light on the geological conditions that seal large reserves of natural hydrogen underground. Hydrogen venting from the Bulqizë mine likely accumulated in tectonic fractures between two blocks of rock deep within the ophiolite, according to the new study, which was published Thursday (Feb. 8) in the journal Science. This fault zone is estimated to be 33 feet (10 meters) wide, up to 3,300 feet (1,000 m) long and up to 16,400 feet (5,000 m) deep, and it "can easily be observed in the deepest mine galleries," between 1,640 feet (500 m) and 3,300 feet deep, Truche said. 

"We still don't know how this fault is sealed, but it has no visible footprint at the surface," he added.

As much as 55,000 tons (50,000 metric tons) of hydrogen could lurk in the reservoir beneath the mine — enough to sustain the high flow rate for 238 years, according to the study.

Deposits of natural hydrogen are a promising source of carbon-free energy if they are extractable and sufficiently large. 

"What sets our discovery apart is the large flux of almost pure [hydrogen] gas we have observed," the authors wrote in the study. "In the context of energy transition, our findings could substantially affect the ongoing search for new energy resources."

Scientists recently fired up the world's smallest particle accelerator for the first time. The tiny technological triumph, which is around the size of a small coin, could open the door to a wide range of applications, including using the teensy particle accelerators inside human patients.

The new machine, known as a nanophotonic electron accelerator (NEA), consists of a small microchip that houses an even smaller vacuum tube made up of thousands of individual "pillars." Researchers can accelerate electrons by firing mini laser beams at these pillars.

The main acceleration tube is approximately 0.02 inch (0.5 millimeter) long, which is 54 million times shorter than the 16.8-mile-long (27 kilometers) ring that makes up CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland — the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, which has discovered a range of new particles including the Higgs boson (or God particle), ghostly neutrinos, the charm meson and the mysterious X particle. 

The inside of the tiny tunnel is only around 225 nanometers wide. For context, human hairs are 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers thick, according to the National Nanotechnology Institute.

Related: Why a physicist wants to build a particle collider on the moon

In a new study, published Oct. 18 in the journal Nature, researchers from the Friedrich–Alexander University of Erlangen–Nuremberg (FAU) in Germany used the tiny contraption to accelerate electrons from an energy value of 28.4 kiloelectron volts to 40.7 keV, which is an increase of around 43%.

It is the first time that a nanophotonic electron accelerator, which was first proposed in 2015, has been successfully fired, the researchers wrote in a statement. (Researchers from Stanford University have already repeated the feat with their mini accelerator, but their results are still under review).

"For the first time, we really can speak about a particle accelerator on a [micro]chip," study co-author Roy Shiloh, a physicist at FAU, said in the statement.

The LHC uses more than 9,000 magnets to create a magnetic field that accelerates particles to around 99.9% of the speed of light. The NEA also creates a magnetic field, but it works by firing light beams at the pillars in the vacuum tube; this amplifies the energy in just the right way, but the resulting energy field is much weaker.

Related: Black holes could become massive particle accelerators

The electrons accelerated by the NEA only have around a millionth of the energy that particles accelerated by the LHC have. However, the researchers believe they can improve the NEA's design by using alternative materials or stacking multiple tubes next to one another, which could further accelerate the particles. Still, they will never reach anywhere near the same energy levels as the big colliders.

That may be no bad thing, given the main goal of creating these accelerators is to utilize the energy given off by the accelerated electrons in targeted medical treatments that can replace more damaging forms of radiotherapy, which is used to kill cancer cells.

"The dream application would be to place a particle accelerator on an endoscope in order to be able to administer radiotherapy directly at the affected area within the body," study lead author Tomáš Chlouba, a physicist at FAU, wrote in the statement. But this is still a long way off, he added.

To prevent a climate catastrophe, the world must dramatically slash its carbon emissions. But creating enough batteries to power the electric vehicles (EVs) needed for a carbon-free future will require a massive scale-up in our supply of minerals such as copper, cobalt and manganese. 

Countries are scrambling to mine these precious materials from the earth, digging everywhere from the rainforests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Indonesia. However, these efforts have been plagued by environmental problems and human rights issues. 

So some companies have turned their eyes elsewhere: the seafloor. 

Miles below the ocean's surface, billions of rocky lumps laden with manganese, nickel, cobalt, copper and other precious minerals line the seafloor. In some areas, cobalt is also concentrated in thick metallic crusts flanking underwater mountains. 

Related: What is renewable energy?

Several companies and countries are gearing up to harvest these so-called deep-sea polymetallic nodules and extract the treasures within them. Currently, seabed mining in international waters is legally murky, and companies have not yet begun commercial exploitation operations. But delegate nations of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) — a U.N.-backed intergovernmental body — are currently meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, for the next two weeks (July 10 to July 28) to develop regulations that could pave the way for such mining. 

This practice may have serious consequences for the world's oceans, experts told Live Science. So how bad are those environmental impacts? And is it possible for us to meet our climate goals without mining the deep sea?

Deep-sea devastation 

Emerging evidence suggests deep-sea mining could damage seafloor ecosystems.

One key area targeted by mining companies is a stretch of ocean from Hawaii to Mexico. Despite its frigid temperatures and low food availability, this deep-sea habitat, known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), harbors a staggering number of species, ranging from glowing sea cucumbers to toothy anglerfish. Scientists recently cataloged more than 5,500 deep-sea species in the CCZ, roughly 90% of which were unknown to science. 

Most seabed mining will require large machines to collect nodules, bring them to the surface and then discharge the unnecessary sediment back into the ocean. This method could have catastrophic consequences for the animals living there, researchers wrote in a letter to the journal Nature Geoscience in 2017. 

"They effectively have to excavate and grind up the seafloor in order to get their minerals," Douglas McCauley, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Live Science. "So anything that's living in that habitat will be destroyed." This includes animals that attach to and live on the nodules themselves, such as sea sponges and black corals.

Because the practice has not yet begun at an industrial scale, marine scientists have mostly relied on computer models and small-scale trials to predict the impacts of deep-sea mining. However, in 1989, a team of scientists attempted to mimic the effects of seabed mining by plowing an area of the seafloor in Peru measuring roughly 3.9 square miles (10.1 square kilometers) at around 2.6 miles (4.2 kilometers) deep. Many of the species in this area had still not returned more than 25 years later, and tracks from the plow were still visible, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Scientific Reports. 

Related: 10 bizarre deep sea creatures found in 2022

Negative impacts likely won't be isolated to the original mining site; machinery can cause noise pollution that stretches for hundreds of miles across the ocean, computer models suggest. This noise could disrupt animals' ability to navigate, locate prey or find a mate. 

But perhaps one of the most destructive byproducts of seabed mining is the plumes of sediment the undersea vehicles leave in their wake, which could act "like undersea dust storms that could smother life out there," McCauley said. These sediment plumes could harm tuna habitats, which are changing as ocean temperatures warm and will increasingly overlap with areas in the mineral-rich CCZ, according to a study co-authored by McCauley and published July 11 in the journal npj Ocean Sustainability. 

A few companies are working on technology to shrink these plumes. For example, Norway-based minerals company Loke recently acquired UK Seabed Resources Ltd., a deep-sea mining firm with two exploration contracts that allow the company to start searching for minerals in the CCZ, though not yet commercially mine them. Loke aims to start deep-sea mining operations by 2030, Walter Sognnes, the company's CEO, told Live Science.  

"What we are trying to do is minimize the impact and maximize the understanding of that impact," Sognnes said.

Loke is developing mining vehicles that will generate plumes only when moving across the seafloor, and not from dumping excess sediment into the ocean after retrieving the nodules, Sognnes said. However, the technology is still theoretical. 

 Some researchers are skeptical that there is a "sustainable" way to mine the deep sea. 

"I think there's no way to do this without having locally major environmental damage causing huge damage on scales of tens of thousands of square kilometers," Craig Smith, a deep-sea ecologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told Live Science. "It's just not possible."

Can we meet EV mineral demand without deep-sea mining?

If we are to meet the climate goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries must increase their mineral output for EVs 30-fold by 2040, according to a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). 

This urgent need for materials raises a question: If we don't harvest the seafloor, can we get minerals used in EVs elsewhere? The answer is most likely yes, but accessing those land-based mineral reserves in a sustainable way may be tough. 

In 2022, Earth had roughly 25 million tons (23 million metric tons) of terrestrial cobalt resources, which meets demand through 2040, assuming all land-based reserves are exploited, research shows. There is also roughly 300 million tons (272 million metric tons) of nickel in the world's resources, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, enough to support the ramping up of EV production, CNBC reported. However, these resources, often hidden deep within dense forests, are not always easily reachable or economically viable to mine. Operations to create new mines drive massive amounts of deforestation, which can reduce biodiversity and release climate-warming emissions into the atmosphere. 

"You could get all the minerals you need for all the world's electric vehicles or whatever from land-based deposits, but the lowest-environmental-impact way to do it could actually be to use some deep-sea deposits in a responsible way with good regulation," Seaver Wang, co-director of climate and energy at The Breakthrough Institute, a California-based environmental research center, told Live Science. However, he added that firmer regulations and guidelines from the ISA should be in place before any deep-sea mining operations begin. 

Emerging battery technologies could help reduce pressure on the minerals market, experts say. Currently, the most widely used batteries in EVs are called NMC (which use lithium, nickel, manganese and cobalt), but car manufacturers are hungry for cheaper technology that doesn't require as many of these minerals. Those may include sodium-ion batteries or LFP batteries made with lithium, as well as iron (ferrous) and phosphate — materials that are more widely available and accessible than cobalt and manganese. In May, Ford announced plans for a new factory in Michigan that is set to begin producing LFP batteries by 2026. However, these batteries currently have lower energy densities, which could limit the range of an electric vehicle, according to the IEA. 

"A substantial transition to EVs can be done without deep sea mining," Kenneth Gillingham, an energy economist at Yale University who studies EVs, told Live Science, though he added that seabed mining could potentially "take off some of the pressure" on the critical metals market. 

Related: Wind and solar power overtake coal for the first time ever in the US

Despite the abundance of critical mineral resources that deep-sea mining could provide, some car manufacturers — including BMW, Volvo and Renault — and nearly 20 countries have publicly supported a moratorium on the practice so scientists have more time to research its potential environmental impacts. Additionally, more than 750 scientists and policy experts have signed an official statement calling for a hold on deep-sea mining activities. 

Though the rules surrounding deep-sea mining are not yet finalized, as of July 9, the ISA is required to receive seabed mining applications due to an obscure provision in the current treaty. 

This doesn't necessarily mean deep-sea mining will occur anytime soon, because the ISA is under no obligation to approve those applications and the law is still murky. A growing number of experts say the key to determining whether to mine the deep sea is more time — to research, to create new technologies and to weigh the positives of seabed mining alongside its pitfalls. 

"Understanding of benefits and costs of deep-sea mining requires an extremely thoughtful assessment that involves many uncertainties that are not resolved at this point," Sergey Paltsev, an energy economist at MIT, told Live Science in an email. 

A photographer recently snapped images of vibrant green streaks of light hanging apparently motionless in the star-filled sky above a U.S. mountain range. The eerie light show may look like auroras, but it's actually an even rarer phenomenon.

Aaron Watson captured the stunning display near the West Elk Mountains in Colorado. The streaky emerald lights emerged just before midnight on June 21 and lasted for around 2 hours, during which they slowly shifted across the sky, Watson told Live Science in an email. Similar but less-intense versions of these lights were also spotted in other parts of Colorado, according to Spaceweather.com.

At first, Watson believed the lights belonged to noctilucent, or night shining, clouds, which were forecast to become more frequent in June and July this year. But as the vibrant colors emerged, this seemed unlikely. He also speculated they could be a slow-moving auroral display or a related phenomena, such as STEVE or a stable auroral arc that was set off by a solar storm bashing into Earth.

However, there was no solar storm at this time. Instead, the lights are the result of a phenomenon known as "airglow," which is triggered in the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere by less-extreme forms of solar radiation. Airglow is rarely seen from the ground, but it could become a more common sight in the coming months and years as solar activity ramps up, Spaceweather.com said.

Related: 10 signs the sun is gearing up for its explosive peak — the solar maximum

Experts recently revealed to Live Science that the upcoming peak of solar activity, which was due to arrive in 2025 and be relatively weak compared with historic past peaks, may actually arrive as early as the end of 2023 and be more active than previously expected. The sight of such vibrant airglow further supports this hypothesis. 

A study published March 2021 in the journal  JGR Space Physics, revealed that airglow has historically been most visible during previous solar maximums — the period of the roughly 11-year solar cycle where solar activity peaks and the sun releases more radiation and solar storms. Tracking changes in airglow can therefore help track solar cycle progression, according to NASA. (Auroras also become more common during the solar maximum.)

Airglow and auroras are both triggered by solar radiation hitting Earth, but the mechanisms behind them are very different: Auroras form when powerful streams of solar radiation, known as solar wind, or fast-moving clouds of magnetized plasma, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), smash into Earth's magnetic field. This temporarily weakens Earth's defensive shield, enabling solar radiation to penetrate deep into the atmosphere and excite air molecules so they emit bright, dancing colors.  

But airglow is created by gradual solar radiation, which ionizes, or strips electrons from, gas molecules during the day. At night, these ionized molecules react with gases carrying an extra electron to regain their lost particles. These reactions release a lot of energy, which is given off as light similar to those emitted by auroras. But it causes a more gradual and often fainter light show.  

Airglow forms 50 to 300 miles (80 to 480 kilometers) above Earth's surface in a region of the atmosphere known as the ionosphere. At higher altitudes, airglow takes on a red color, which is produced by excited nitrogen atoms. But the green lights in the new image are a result of excited oxygen atoms and are most prominent between 56 and 62 miles (90 and 100 km) above the ground, according to Spaceweather.com.

Airglow is not the only sign from the upper atmosphere that solar maximum is fast approaching. The thermosphere, the second last layer of the atmosphere that overlaps with the ionosphere, is also warming faster than it has in almost 20 years as it soaks up energy from increasingly frequent solar storms.