Chinese researchers have revealed a new technology that could soon enable drones to charge mid-flight using high-powered lasers.

The scientists built a prototype of the system using a model of a drone and attached a receiver that works similarly to a solar cell. Fixed to the underside of the wing, the receiver successfully converted the energy from the laser beam into electricity to power the aircraft’s propellers.

The breakthrough was made by researchers at the Civil Aviation University of China and Tsinghua University, with details outlined in a new study published on 29 July in the journal Matter & Light.

"Previous studies largely focused on the materials or the device itself," study senior author Jianhua Han, a researcher at the Civil Aviation University of China, said in a statement. "We wanted to think beyond the laboratory, to how the system could actually be integrated into an aircraft, cooled during operation, and made compatible with flight. It isn’t just a materials science problem; it’s an engineering one."

Wirelessly charging drones

The receiver is what's known as a perovskite laser cell-thermoelectric (PLC-TE) tandem device optimized to turn laser light into electricity.

Perovskite is a highly efficient material used in cutting-edge solar cells, noteworthy for its crystal structure that allows it to capture more wavelengths of the light spectrum than silicon. For this reason, it’s prized as a future solar material, with some research indicating it could even be used to convert ambient indoor light into usable electricity.

When hit with a green laser, the receiver converted 38.49% of the light into electricity — well above the 34% peak results for perovskite-silicon tandem cells as recorded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

In initial testing, the researchers discovered an unwelcome side effect of using the laser: the drone was being heated to extreme temperatures, reducing its overall efficiency.

"When we tested the device under a high-power laser, the thermal camera showed temperatures of 80 to 90 degrees Celsius [176 to 194 degrees Fahrenheit]," said Han. "That was much higher than we expected and made us realise that heat buildup was a far more serious problem than we had imagined."

To combat this, the researchers introduced nanocrystals made from antimony triselenide — an abundant semiconductor material — into the PLC-TE design. This plays the role of a thermal barrier, preventing the device from releasing too much heat.

In addition to their cooling innovation, the constant airflow generated by the drone’s propeller helped further regulate the temperature of the receiver’s cool side.

Overcoming battery life barriers

"Imagine a future where drones inspecting forests, monitoring disasters, or delivering packages no longer need to land frequently to replace batteries,” said Han. "As drones take on longer missions, battery life has become one of the biggest barriers."

The researchers specifically identified reconnaissance, logistics, and disaster relief as key areas where drones powered by lasers could one day be used. But they also said more needs to be done to develop real-time tracking systems that precisely target the PLC-TE on in-flight drones before the system could be used in the wild.

Going forward, the researchers will test how the device functions on a real lightweight drone in outdoor conditions.

The promise of indefinite flight has made wireless power tests a focus for militaries around the world. If achieved, reconnaissance and weapons-carrying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) could operate in radically different environments than those they are currently restricted to, with regular refuelling requirements.

For example, the most commonly used hand-launched unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), the AeroVironment RQ-11 Raven, can fly for a maximum flight time of 60 to 90 minutes before needing to charge.

In June 2025, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) successfully beamed 800 watts of power over a distance of 5.3 miles (8.6 kilometers), as part of its Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay (POWER) program.

Private companies such as PowerLight Technologies, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defense, have said they could deliver kilowatts of energy to in-flight drones operating at altitudes of up to 5,000 feet (1,500 meters).

The massive hardware demands of artificial intelligence (AI) applications are stretching the physical and structural limitations of semiconductors. But researchers have engineered a three-dimensional silicon chip that they propose as the solution.

In a new study published May 27 in the journal Nature, scientists found a way to cram more computing power into a chip by stacking silicon circuits in multiple layers in a way that doesn't impact performance.

Stacking chips vertically, known as 3D integration, is more efficient than traditional 2D chips, where silicon circuits are spread across a single surface. This is because stacking shortens the distance that data has to travel and reduces the power required for data transmission.

The researchers' 3D chip uses ultrathin silicon membranes and low-temperature manufacturing techniques to overcome the challenges of current chip architectures.

"Our method is not only easier to implement with lower cost, but it has several advantages over previous approaches to stack silicon wafers," Qing Cao, first author of the study and a materials science and engineering professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said in a statement.

Extending Moore's law

Since the 1960s, ensuring that electronics can handle more demanding applications has meant making transistors smaller so more can be packed onto a single chip. But, as Cao pointed out, doubling the number of transistors every couple of years — a principle known as Moore's law — is becoming less feasible.

"If you look at the actual size of transistors, they're not getting smaller, especially in terms of their contacted gate pitch," Cao said in the statement — defined as the combined width of one transistor gate and the space needed to separate it from the next.

"This is because we're becoming limited by the intrinsic material properties of silicon and the fundamental rules of quantum mechanics. If we're going to keep up the trend of increasing processing power of our microprocessors, we have to start thinking beyond just squeezing more devices on a single surface."

The researchers think vertical integration across multiple layers is the best way to guarantee that engineers can continue to adhere to Moore's law, because this approach creates room for more transistors on a chip.

"Today it takes six microelectronic devices called transistors on a single plane to store one bit of information," Cao explained, suggesting that just like in a densely populated city, the only way to solve overcrowding is to build upward. "You get the same functionality, but the spatial footprint is reduced while making communication between layers faster and more efficient."

Getting around the heat problem

Stacking is nothing new, of course, but vertical integration — building layers directly on top of one another — can create thermally dense packages. In the study, the researchers noted that the fabrication of high-quality silicon chips demands temperatures up to 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius).

However, once the first chip layer has been completed, the metal wiring introduced to connect further layers can be destroyed by such high temperatures. As a result, the "thermal budget" — the maximum amount of heat that can be endured before degradation starts to occur — for any additional layers is 752 F (400 C), said Cao. This can result in performance and reliability issues.

When creating 3D stacked silicon chips, manufacturers have sought to avoid this problem by using alternatives to single-crystalline silicon for the upper layers, according to the researchers. These materials include amorphous and nanocrystalline metal oxides, carbon nanotubes and polycrystalline silicon, but they can lead to performance and reliability issues, the scientists said in the study.

To overcome this challenge, Cao and his team adopted an approach called "monolithic integration" — a process in which all chip components are fabricated on a single piece of substrate, as opposed to making them separately and then bonding them together later.

To build each chip, the researchers created ultrathin silicon nanomembranes that they then transferred, using a roll laminator, onto a substrate containing the bottom layer.

The maximum temperature required to generate a strong bond using this method was just 392 F (200 C) — five times less than the heat normally required. The membranes they transferred were also just 10 nanometers thick or less — about the size of a protein — compared with the approximately 500-to-700-micrometer (500,000 to 700,000 nanometers) thickness of a typical wafer. Because they are thin, these membranes are mechanically flexible to conform to the underlying surface, Cao added.

The result of this process was a 3D chip with three layers, each containing 625 transistors. This pales in comparison to the billions of transistors that can be crammed onto chips already on the market, but the researchers believe their technology boasts power efficiency benefits. The electrical current that can flow through the chip has proved to be at least three to four times greater than that of monolithic chips made from alternative materials.

The big question is whether their 3D silicon chip can make the leap from the laboratory to commercial applications. While the research demonstrates the potential of a chip comprising three stacked layers, the scientists suggested that plenty more layers can be added in future iterations.

Can you match these ancient devices to their pictures? Find out with our computing quiz!

Researchers in China have announced a radical sodium metal battery (SMB) design that can fully charge in just four minutes and will retain its capacity for years of use.

SMBs are a form of ultrafast-charging, stable batteries that scientists say could one day be a cheap alternative to today's lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, which rely on geographically concentrated metals and easily catch fire. SMBs also differ from sodium-ion (Na-ion) batteries in that they use a metallic sodium anode rather than a graphite or hard carbon anode.

However, SMBs remain largely theoretical because they are prone to a type of degradation known as dendrite formation. This is when the sodium ions passing through the electrode deposit onto the highly reactive, pure-metal sodium anode in spiky, stalagmite-like structures. Over time, this forms a bridge between the cathode and the anode, short-circuiting the battery.

Dendrite formation is especially common in sodium batteries because sodium is a highly reactive metal. When charge runs through a Li-ion, Na-ion, or sodium metal battery, the anode always reacts with the electrolyte to form an oxide layer known as the SEI. This is typically 10 to 50 nanometers thick — about as wide as a small virus — but generally harmless. But with sodium, the SEI often cracks, forming bumps that attract sodium ions, which pile into dendrites.

Now, researchers say they have solved this issue by using a tough, quasi-solid gel electrolyte — dubbed Sn-FB QSE — which strengthens the battery against punctures and provides a semisolid internal structure that prevents dendrites from forming. They outlined their findings in a study published May 21 in the journal Nano-Micro Letters.

To confirm the longevity of this approach, the scientists charged and discharged the battery for over 6,000 hours without dendrites short-circuiting the battery. They also noted that when they charged the battery from zero to 100% capacity in just four minutes, it retained electrical charge, measured in milliampere-hours per gram (mAh g^–1), of 80.1. This is the equivalent of around half that retained in Li-ion batteries.

When charged at a slightly slower rate of zero to 100% in 20 minutes, the battery retained 90% of its charge capacity over 2,000 cycles — matching the theoretical limits for Li-ion batteries, the scientists said in the study. This slower speed lowered the cost and improved the safety.

This is notable because the scientists achieved this in the new battery while still charging it quicker than Li-ion batteries can be charged. This is relevant because charging speed remains a sticking point for battery deployment in electric vehicles (EVs). The fastest charging EV today is the BYD Denza, which the Chinese automaker says can go from 10-70% in just five minutes. But this requires highly specialised, 1MW proprietary chargers.

Most EVs charge much slower — Tesla representatives say its Model 3 can recharge from 10-70% in approximately 15 minutes using Tesla’s own 250kW flash chargers, but representatives from the EV routing platform Zapmap say the same vehicle will take 90 minutes to charge to 80% on 50kW chargers.

Indeed, most batteries used for modern technologies, such as smartphones and EVs, are Li-ion. However, Li-ion batteries are expensive to produce because they contain the hard-to-obtain metals lithium and cobalt, and they are prone to catching fire.

Increasingly, battery manufacturers are looking to bring Na-ion batteries to commercial scale because they are cheaper and safer. However, they are heavier and larger than Li-on batteries.

SMBs are the focus of intense research because they theoretically combine the best of both types of batteries. Because SMBs use a sodium anode, rather Na-ion batteries that use graphite or hard carbon anode, they are lighter and cheaper to produce and therefore much more comparable to Li-ion in terms of size and weight. They are also safer because they operate using sodium ions, which are bulky and cannot flow to breaches in a battery wall fast enough to cause thermal runaway. This is the self-sustaining chain reaction that causes batteries to ignite when damaged.

If the issues of dendrite formation and stability at lower temperatures can be resolved, replicated and scaled, SMBs could reshape the economics of battery deployment over the next decade, the scientists said.

SMBs could be excellent choices for EVs in public transport or within commuter cars, the scientists belive, because although they have lower ranges than Na-ion and Li-ion vehicles do, they charge faster. However, they won't be available for some time, either in vehicles or smaller devices like consumer electronics.

That's because devices like smartphones are subject to harsh temperature changes that affect the internal chemistry of batteries that rely on gel electrolytes. The research must first be replicated before manufacturers feel comfortable using pure sodium metal in place of well-understood graphite configurations.

Engineers have designed a waterproof "diving suit" for cyborg cockroaches that enables the hybrid insects to survive and roam underwater for up to three hours. This function expands the capabilities of cyborg insects and could one day be deployed in disaster zones, according to the team.

A built-in oxygen generator and silicone tubes deliver the gas directly to a cockroach's breathing holes, known as spiracles. The design is adapted for use in low-oxygen conditions as well as submerged environments, the researchers said in a new study published June 29 in the journal Nature Communications.

"Our approach combines a soft waterproof shell with a simple yet reliable chemical oxygen generator," study co-author Shinjiro Umezu, a professor in the School of Creative Science and Engineering at Waseda University in Japan, said in a statement. "This allows the insect to retain its natural mobility while being protected from an environment that it cannot normally survive in."

Cyborg insects are living insects that have been fitted with electronic controllers that guide their movements. Researchers have previously used them in search-and-rescue operations to access and investigate hard-to-reach areas; for example, they were used in rescue efforts after the devastating magnitude 7.7 earthquake in Myanmar in March 2025 that killed at least 3,700 people and injured 4,800 more. The advantage of cyborg insects over tiny robots is that the former employ insects' muscles to move, whereas the latter rely on high-power batteries that consume energy and can run out of steam.

The cyborg insects deployed in Myanmar were developed in the laboratory of Hirotaka Sato, senior author of the new study and a professor in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.

Sato has spent more than a decade pioneering cyborg insect technology. He and colleagues hope the new diving suit will extend cyborg insects' operational range to include flooded and partially submerged areas in disaster zones.

The suit consists of a flexible shell, four silicone tubes that attach to the spiracles and a transparent, 3D-printed oxygen tank. To make the tank produce oxygen, the researchers sprinkled manganese dioxide onto a highly absorbent sponge inside the tank. They then injected a small amount of diluted hydrogen peroxide, which breaks down slowly in the presence of manganese dioxide to produce oxygen. Finally, the team sealed the tank with ultraviolet adhesive to prevent leaks.

"The key engineering challenge was to build a system that was small, light and flexible enough for the insect to wear, while still producing enough oxygen for long-duration underwater movement," Umezu said.

The silicone tubes send oxygen straight into the thoracic spiracles, while the abdominal spiracles, which are lower down the insects' bodies, take in the oxygen contained in the suit.

"Our new insect diving suit works like the oxygen tank used by human divers," Sato said in the statement. The silicone tubes can be attached and removed without pain or harm to the insect, the researchers added.

The researchers tested the suit on a cyborg Madagascar hissing cockroach (Gromphadorhina portentosa), which they placed in a water tank and later sent into a plastic tube that simulated submerged and low-oxygen environments.

The suit enabled the cockroaches to roam underwater for up to three hours, raising the prospect that cyborg insects, including locusts and beetles, could one day be used to inspect flooded pipes, drains, tunnels and other hard-to-access places.

Next steps include improving the diving suit to potentially include sensors and a navigation system; and testing the design in simulated disaster environments, according to the statement.

A breakthrough in photonic chips could make large, costly, ultrafast lasers dramatically smaller, leading to portable and affordable imaging, diagnostic and information-processing devices, researchers say.

By using a decades-old overlooked laser architecture, scientists managed to fit an ultrafast laser onto a tiny photonic chip — a chip that uses light, rather than electricity, for computing operations.

In a new study published June 3 in the journal Nature, the team demonstrated that a tiny laser on the photonic chip could deliver 1.05 nanojoules of energy in 147-femtosecond (147 quadrillionths of a second) bursts — thereby competing with the output of laboratory-class ultrafast lasers.

Ultrafast lasers are used in a variety of applications, from precision manufacturing and eye surgery to biological imaging and atomic clocks, but the systems needed to power them tend to take up whole tabletops in labs or factories. Yet the powerful output of these laser pulses made them difficult to miniaturise onto photonic chips.

"For more than twenty years, a high-pulse-energy femtosecond laser on chip was widely regarded as a holy grail of integrated photonics," Tobias Kippenberg, a photonics professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology(EPFL), said in a statement.

"Our result shows that it is not only possible, but that it can be achieved with a surprisingly elegant architecture that the integrated-photonics community had overlooked."

Forward-thinking breakthrough comes from looking back

Photonic chips manipulate light by using microscopic structures called waveguides — usually in the form of optical fibers or etched cavities — to carry information. They aren't particularly novel, and can be found in fiber-optic communications, medical sensors and lidar systems.

But photonic chips have previously struggled when handling high-powered, ultrafast lasers. That's because they need to contain light to extremely small waveguides, leading the light to interact strongly with itself and destabilizing the laser pulses.

To tackle this problem, the researchers looked at a laser architecture called the Mamyshev oscillator, created in 1998 by Pavel V. Mamyshev, a physicist and engineer at Bell Labs.

This oscillator, which has received little attention in the world of photonic chips, works by placing a nonlinear waveguide between two optical filters. This causes a high-intensity laser pulse to expand into a broader range of colors that can then pass through both filters while weaker light, which can cause laser destabilization, is blocked out. This technique essentially means that a high-intensity laser pulse can be maintained.

Because the Mamyshev oscillator doesn't require extra components to manufacture on a chip, it presents an attractive design for use on photonic chips. And although the laser cavity needed to direct an ultrafast laser is 16.5 inches (42 centimeters) long, it can be folded to occupy around the same area as a match head. This can't be done with conventional fiber-optic-based lasers, often used in photonic chips.

That takes care of the size, but the cost of ultrafast laser systems is another challenge. But because photonic chips can be fabricated using silicon wafers in the same fashion as computer chips, more than 1,000 laser cavities could potentially be produced in a single batch, the researchers said. As such, photonic chips with ultrafast laser capabilities could be produced at scale, in turn reducing manufacturing costs and even expanding their use.

Photonic chips capable of handling ultrafast lasers could, in the future, lead to portable tools for tasks like detecting pollutants or performing advanced medical diagnostics in the field, the researchers noted in the study. The technology also opens the door to smaller atomic clocks that can benefit navigation and future communications.

Researchers in Japan have created a device that promises to boost computer processing speeds, without generating massive amounts of additional heat.

Two of the limiting factors in high-performance computing, especially for the processors used in data centers, are the costly energy inputs required and the massive amount of waste heat generated. Generally, the faster a processor performs, the more heat it generates.

This principle applies to the largest and smallest machines; most people are familiar with the sound of fans whirring to cool down components when a computer is performing a particularly complex function. Cloud data centers, meanwhile, might have tens of thousands of servers, each generating massive amounts of heat from their processors.

But a new device, called a "non-volatile switching element," is capable of rapid processing without the problematic heat generation that's typically associated with fast processing, scientists have discovered.

The new device could process a bit — the smallest unit of information, represented as a "1" or a "0" — in just 40 picoseconds, or 40 trillionths of a second. For comparison, conventional chips struggle to process a bit in less than a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second.

In the new study, published May 14 in the journal Science, the scientists demonstrated that ultralow-power switching in the picosecond range was possible.

Tapping into the power of light

The researchers built this nonvolatile switching element device from ultrathin layers of tantalum (Ta) and Mn₃Sn atop a silica base. They chose tantalum, a refractory metal that can store and release electricity, and Mn3Sn because it is antiferromagnetic, meaning it has stable magnetic properties and is resistant to interference from external magnetic fields.

Then, they used an ultrafast pulse generator to control rapid pulses of light ‪—‬ as quick as 60 picoseconds per pulse ‪—‬ within the normal communication wavelength band. Each pulse of light passed through a high-speed photodetector called a uni-traveling-carrier photodiode (UTD-PD).

When the nonvolatile switching element device received pulses from the UTD-PD, the spins of the electrons in the material changed and the scientists recorded a minuscule magnetic force.

In the laboratory trials, the nonvolatile switching element operated consistently and reliably, despite performing over a billion switches, thereby proving the device's inherent stability. What's more, the process didn't require a continuous flow of electricity for the magnetic information to be maintained.

Most importantly, the processing generated minimal additional heat compared with that generated by a conventional computing processor. The nonvolatile switching element device could therefore bypass the challenge of high-speed processing by operating in a way that did not generate massive amounts of heat.

Minimizing waste heat

Waste heat is currently a major barrier to scaling up data centers' processing power, the scientists noted in the study ‪—‬ and this device could remove that limitation. Due to the low power requirements and low thermal generation, the nonvolatile switching element could dramatically reduce the power demands of processors.

However, manufacturing enough of these devices to make a difference may pose further challenges. Tantalum is a rare metal that is already in high demand, so there may be supply issues to overcome. The device would also need to be tested outside laboratory conditions, where external environmental factors could hinder the results.

Following the successful laboratory demonstration, a prototype chip could be ready by 2030, the scientists said in the study.

The researchers think a further reduction in the thickness of the Mn₃Sn layer will reduce power consumption even more. The next challenge, they added, will be to develop a commercially viable bulk manufacturing process capable of building the device at scale.

If you have ever tried to repair something, realized that it was beyond your financial or technical means, and ended up buying a new one, you are not alone. Repairing electronics and household appliances has not been a real option in the United States for decades now, particularly for items that have proprietary software in them.

Absurd situations have proliferated. It can cost about the same to buy a new printer as it does to replace the ink cartridge. The U.S. Department of Defense cannot repair the weapons systems it purchases because the intellectual property rights remain with the manufacturer. John Deere, the farming equipment company, doesn't allow farmers to access the software needed to repair their own combines and tractors because, while the purchase covers the physical machinery, it does not cover the software.

One consequence, in addition to cost and frustration for consumers, is environmental harm. The U.S. is the world's second producer of electronic waste after China, to the tune of about 43 lbs (19.5 kg) of electronic waste annually per person. Only 25% of this e-waste is recycled.

The right-to-repair movement emerged in response, calling for people to be able to repair what they purchase, or have third parties do the repair work, without unnecessary financial, legal or technical barriers. Right to repair seems to be a rare area of bipartisanship in Congress. The Warrior Right to Repair Act — introduced in 2025 by a Democrat —and the Repair Act — introduced by a Republican — are two ongoing legislative initiatives to create a federal legal framework that would make it easy and cheap for American users to repair their devices. Both bills are fiercely opposed by industry groups.

As a scholar of American culture, I found through my research that the origins of the legal and technical obstacles to product repairs lie in debates in the 1980s over new media and copyright guardrails.

Hollywood and VCRs

The rapid rise and popularity of video cassette recorders, or VCRs, in the late 1970s transformed films and TV shows from transient experiences into tangible consumer goods. As I show in my book, "Videotape," despite the potential for extra revenue, Hollywood was alarmed by the fact that users were now able to copy films on videotape, and tried to stop the technology. Today's repair bans are part of that story.

The first U.S. copyright provisions were embedded in the 1790 Constitution. Over time, the law was amended to include new technologies, but at the core of future legal arrangements remained the initial intent: to protect the financial rights of creators while giving enough access to information for society as a whole to progress.

Until the second half of the 20th century, the American doctrine of fair use, which allows the unlicensed use of protected works under specific conditions, allowed judges to prevent copyright law from negatively affecting public interest. Organizations such as public libraries, book clubs, universities and news organizations benefited from this legal approach. The concept was codified into American law in the Copyright Act of 1976.

When the film studios took Sony to court to stop the production and sale of video recorders in 1976, they argued that Sony's product encouraged copyright infringement. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that taping TV content for personal use did not violate copyright law, expanding the understanding of fair use.

The industry then focused on finding a technological solution to the piracy problem and on securing stricter legal protections for its products.

They identified the digital versatile disc, or DVD, as a safer alternative to the VHS tape. Initially, the DVD was a read-only format. It took a few more years of engineering before affordable recording was possible. Even then, the process was far more complicated for users than videotape recording. In 1997, barely one year after the video disc was launched, all of the Motion Picture Association of America member studios joined the DVD Forum, collectively adopted the new format and started to phase out films released on videotape.

Copyright and virtual locks

Then came digital rights management. Collectively, the term refers to the battery of technological tools that the industry developed in order to control user access to content. These include encryption software and various forms of authentication or enforcement software that limit which types of digital activities users can perform. For instance, some mechanisms block the option to download or share a digital file.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1998, provided the broad legal framework that allowed these technological locks to expand far beyond entertainment, including to software. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act reflected a new alignment in interests between the entertainment and software industries. It increased existing penalties for copyright infringement online and criminalized any technology used to bypass technological locks. The law was adopted although at the time — and since then — critics warned that it could stifle innovation and increase costs for consumers.

Since 1998, more and more consumer products, from toys to dishwashers, use microchips and proprietary software protected by copyright. Because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, third party repairers cannot alter or bypass the proprietary software. If they did so, they would be liable for infringing the manufacturer's intellectual property rights, as is the case for John Deere farm equipment. Some electronics are even designed to make tampering with the product impossible.

Manufacturers maintain that only they or authorized personnel can and should repair their products. These repairs are often quite costly. When getting a product repaired becomes almost as expensive as buying a new one, many consumers will choose to buy and throw repairable items away.

Rising resentment over repair bans

Technology tends to outpace existing legal arrangements. With over 80% of Americans supporting the right to repair, it remains to be seen when or if American law will catch up with the unexpected consequences of a law meant to protect the intellectual rights of the creative industries, but which is now hurting consumers' pocket books.

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

An energy company has successfully installed the world's largest single-unit floating offshore wind turbine off the coast of southern China.

The 16-megawatt system, known as Three Gorges Pilot, was completed in waters too deep for a traditional fixed-bottom foundation near Yangjiang in Guangdong province. Company representatives published a statement detailing the installation on May 3.

Floating wind turbines are designed to operate where depths make conventional offshore wind farms, which need to be anchored to the seafloor, impractical. Instead, the turbine sits atop a massive, floating platform that can be anchored in place, dramatically expanding the amount of ocean area available for wind power development.

A new engineering feat

Built by China Three Gorges (CTG) Corp., Three Gorges Pilot is a 16-megawatt turbine mounted atop a semisubmersible platform. The rotor spans 827 feet (252 meters), with the blade tip rising more than 886 feet (270 m) above the water.

The Three Gorges design follows on the heels of a turbine deployed last year by China Huaneng Group and Dongfang Electric Corp. Its primary improvements are at the structural and system engineering levels.

The new platform is designed to survive inclement conditions in the deep ocean, including waves higher than 66 feet (20 m) and wind speeds up to 164 mph (264 km/h) ‪—‬ the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane.

It utilizes a sophisticated mooring system that combines suction anchors, anchor chains and high-strength polyester lines, along with ballast and monitoring systems, to keep the platform stable and prevent undue drift, company representatives said in a statement.

The design also includes several features intended to help absorb and distribute the force of the wind and water, thereby increasing the platform's durability and extending its operational lifespan.

Generating more energy

Three Gorges engineers incorporated a 66-kilovolt dynamic subsea cable. It's a specialized underwater power cable designed to carry high-voltage electricity while moving and flexing with the rest of the submersible platform.

Adopting a wave-shaped design, it's engineered with high-flexibility conductors, reinforced armor layers for tensile strength and fatigue-resistant insulation and sheathing.

Most of the turbine's assembly was completed on land, at Tieshan Port in southern China. It was then towed offshore and connected in its final location for testing. At peak operational efficiency, the turbine is expected to generate about 44.65 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually.

For context, an average U.S. home consumes roughly 10,500 KWh of electricity per year, based on figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration — meaning the turbine could power around 4,200 homes annually.

The installation is notable not just for its scale but for the integration challenges engineers managed to tackle: large rotor loading, platform stability, dynamic mooring and offshore grid connection.

Floating turbines pose massive engineering challenges, as they are forced to endure constant motion from waves and currents without degrading drivetrain performance or blade clearance while also surviving extreme marine weather over long service lives.

For regions with a limited shallow continental shelf, projects like the Three Gorges Pilot could open up commercial-scale floating wind turbines for much deeper waters than fixed-bottom turbines can reach or survive.

Researchers in China have pioneered a formula for a nontoxic "aqueous battery" that they say could last 10 times longer than today's best devices. What's more, the water battery achieves this epic lifespan without degrading and can be disposed of safely in the environment, the team reported in a new study.

For the new method, researchers used synthesized covalent organic polymers (COPs). These tough, organic molecules, such as nitrogen and carbon, are bound together in a tight structure with clear openings and are used as an anode for magnesium and calcium ions.

Organic polymers like this have little use because they are generally short-lived in aqueous batteries; they break down quickly in water-based electrolytes found inside this variant of battery, which can be either extremely acidic or extremely alkaline. The electrolyte is essential to moving ions between the anode and the cathode, which is why aqueous batteries are a nonflammable and more affordable alternative to traditional batteries.

In the study, published Feb. 18 in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers found a specific compound (hexaketone-tetraaminodibenzo-p-dioxin) that combines high-density carbonyl — which is ideal for attracting positive ions — with a rigid tetraaminodibenzo-p-dioxin molecule that keeps the hexaketone in its flat, honeycomb-like structure.

The neutral electrolytes used in the research, with a pH of 7.0, conduct the ions to a high efficiency. Combined with the carefully-tuned structure, without corroding this COP.

The researchers said the polymers could last 120,000 charge cycles — more than 10 times the life of a typical lithium-ion battery (Li-ion) used for grid storage, according to data by Energy Sustainability Directory. Grid batteries completed an average of 1.1 cycles per day in 2024. At this rate, the aqueous battery could last approximately 300 years before needing to be replaced.

The researchers also said the electrolytes used in the new battery are so safe that they can be used as tofu brine, i.e. non-toxic and easy to dispose of directly into the environment.

Benefits of aqueous batteries

Aqueous batteries are particularly favored for grid-scale energy storage such as large battery energy-storage systems due to their nonflammable properties and low up-front cost.

But they also come with downsides. Aqueous batteries do not store as much energy as conventional Li-ion batteries or sodium-ion (Na-ion) devices do because water-based electrodes limit the maximum voltage.

Aqueous batteries also break down over time, as the extreme pH of the electrolyte forms hydrogen and oxygen gas, corroding the metal elements of the battery. This effect, known as electrolyte decomposition, can also cause explosions in extreme cases. This limitation — a trade-off between safety and energy capacity — is usually overcome by building larger aqueous battery storage systems.

Additionally, the aqueous solution used in the batteries tends to be toxic and must be disposed of with care. This presents a potential environmental risk in the case of an accident that could expose the batteries to the open elements, and it increases the costs associated with the safe upkeep of aqueous battery energy-storage systems.

In a 2023 study published in the journal Nature, scientists cited high cost, depletion and environmental toxicity as particular downsides of aqueous batteries.

Depletion in this context refers to the gradual reduction in battery capacity and efficiency over time –- a familiar irritation for anyone who's held onto the same smartphone for more than a few years.

The latest breakthrough aims to address these shortcomings with a chemical composition that is both nontoxic and highly efficient in the long term, resulting in a much longer battery life and fewer complications associated with battery disposal.

Researchers have created the world's first miniature, proof-of-concept quantum battery. If the technology can be replicated, it could transform the field of energy storage forever and open up new possibilities for lightweight, remote electrification, experts say.

The research team outlined their design for the quantum battery in a study published March 13 in the journal Light: Science & Applications. They say it can be used for long-term battery storage, as well as high-density battery applications such as heavy electric vehicles.

In the future, quantum batteries could charge far faster than traditional batteries, as well as demonstrate far higher energy density and durability, said James Hutchinson, co-author of the study and an associate professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Melbourne.

In a standard lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery, ions move between the cathode and the anode through an electrolyte. But inside a quantum battery, energy is stored as electromagnetic excitation among coherent molecules — molecules that share non-random internal states such as their vibrational energy or electron states. This allows them to maintain a fixed relationship with one another.

Quantum batteries rely on the weird laws of quantum mechanics. In this case, the researchers relied on quantum coherence — an effect in which a mass of local particles exists in multiple states at once. These particles, though in a "superposition" of states, act in predictable ways relative to one another. Collected in the battery, the coherent particles undergo quantum entanglement, which means they are not simply aligned with one another but functionally the same, forming one larger system.

This allows all molecules within the battery to charge at a constant speed, no matter its size. The more molecules involved, the more efficiently energy is absorbed throughout the system, meaning charging times actually decrease in real terms as the battery size increases.

"Similar to conventional batteries, quantum batteries charge, store and discharge energy,", explained Hutchinson in the statement. "But while everyday batteries rely on chemical reactions, quantum batteries leverage properties of quantum mechanics. The advantage of quantum is that the system absorbs light in a single, giant 'super absorption' event and this charges the battery faster."

Composition of the quantum battery

To build the battery, the researchers relied on the Dicke model in quantum optics, which states that when light and matter are coupled beyond a set value, they can become superradiant — where a group of emitters emit light collectively in a short, intense pulse.

In practical terms, the battery is made up of a series of organic semiconductor layers (where the coupling occurs) sandwiched between silver mirrors, creating a microcavity — a microscopic structure that confines light to a small volume, allowing it to reflect multiple times.

This allows the coherent group of molecules or atoms to emit light in a unified pulse — a necessary function for the discharging of the quantum battery — as well as to absorb light at a rate equal to the number of coherent molecules squared. This is known as superabsorption. The microcavity is essential for coupling and superabsorption, as it provides the right confined environment to achieve the set ratio between light and matter set out in the Dicke model.

Beneath and above the organic semiconductors, hole blocking and electron transport layers ensure electrons can flow toward the cathode and electrodes when necessary so the system can actually function as a battery.

In tests at the University of Melbourne's Ultrafast and Microspectroscopy Laboratories, the researchers fired a laser pulse with a bandwidth of 31 nanometers for a femtosecond (one-quadrillionth of a second), which prompted an excited state in the molecules for tens of nanoseconds (several hundred millionths of a second).

This means the battery is capable of holding a charge for 1 million times longer than the time it takes to charge it.

On this scale, a battery that took one minute to charge could remain charged for "a couple of years," first researcher James Quach, science leader at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, told The Guardian.

Going forward, the researchers aim to scale up the battery in such a manner while retaining its charge. This is a key hurdle, as the energy stored in quantum batteries is susceptible to environmental noise, which can disrupt or eliminate quantum behavior in a process known as decoherence.

If this obstacle can be overcome, the implications of a practical quantum battery could be profound. For instance, remote charging via lasers could open up more opportunities for batteries in drones or aircraft because they could be charged in midair.

Andrew White, who leads the Quantum Technology Laboratory at the University of Queensland, told The Guardian that an initial application could be to power quantum computers at a very low energy cost.

PORNAINEN, Finland ‪—‬ Engineers will soon begin testing a new "sand battery" that will convert energy stored as heat back into power that can be fed into the electricity grid. However, they say challenges lie ahead, with investment cost potentially putting customers off.

Polar Night Energy's existing sand battery model stores renewable electricity by using power to heat up sand and sand-like materials to temperatures up to 752 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius). That heat is then extracted to deliver hot water, steam or hot air.

The new power-to-heat-to-power sand battery will advance this design by operating at even higher temperatures to improve its efficiency, with the exact temperature range under investigation as part of this pilot project.

The new sand battery is "basically totally different" from the existing power-to-heat version, Tommi Eronen, co-founder and CEO of Polar Night Energy, told Live Science here at the site of the existing sand battery in Pornainen. Although he could not give specifics, he said the shape is one key difference between the two batteries; the power-to-heat-to-power sand battery has a horizontal configuration rather than being a vertical silo like the power-to-heat version.

The new sand battery's efficiency will depend on its size and how it is integrated into preexisting systems. However, its expected efficiency is about 30% to 35% — comparable to that of combustion-based power plants, Polar Night Energy representatives wrote in a statement. For reference, the average efficiency of fossil-fuel-based combustion power plants in the U.S. was 39% in 2023.

By converting this heat back to power, the new battery will "help balance the grid, cut emissions, reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and create a pathway to large-scale, affordable energy storage," representatives added in a separate statement.

But the new battery will output both heat and electricity to increase the efficiency of the system to around 90%, Eronen said. This sand battery could be used by any industry that requires both heat and electricity, such as utility companies, he added.

The new sand battery is currently being piloted in the Finnish town and municipality of Valkeakoski, around 90 miles (150 kilometers) north of Helsinki. Construction commenced in October 2025, and testing will begin within weeks, with the pilot phase lasting roughly two and a half years in total. However, Polar Night Energy is already drawing up designs for a commercial product.

During the pilot project, engineers will trial different technological solutions that could enable electricity production in the future, Liisa Naskali, Polar Night Energy's chief operating officer, told Live Science in Pornainen. This will include developing new materials. For example, they will "develop and test new materials and designs capable of withstanding higher operating temperatures," representatives wrote in a statement.

The main barrier to this new sand battery is its cost. "The one challenge when selling this to the customers is that the investment price is so high," Naskali added. "Almost nobody has had the courage to invest in our product because we have these wood-chip boilers [currently], and wood chip is quite cheap."

Although she said that a power-to-heat-to-power sand battery is achievable, the question now is how to find an economically viable and technologically efficient solution. If it were straightforward, someone would have done it by now, she pointed out. "It's doable, but at what price?"

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.

Satellite images have revealed that dozens of dams across the U.S. — including the biggest one in Texas — may be at risk of collapse due to the ground shifting beneath them. Inspections do not typically account for these movements, suggesting many dams in the country are in worse condition than previously understood.

The new findings raise the prospect that thousands of dams we haven't been monitoring closely due to high costs and staff shortages could be damaged and at risk of failure. But how big is the problem, and is it worth using satellite data to provide early warnings?

Satellites could provide a simple way to monitor dams, potentially revealing places where ground movements are destabilizing their structure, experts told Live Science. However, the new findings also highlight another looming problem: Changing climate conditions could push several of the aging dams in the U.S. to fail, endangering tens of thousands of lives, experts added.

"Identifying issues at dams is critical in preventing failures," John Roche, a dam regulator in Maryland and the president of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO), who did not participate in the new research, told Live Science in an email. "Faced with the threat of increased stress from a changing climate, the lack of timely rehabilitation of dams will lead to increased public safety risks, negative economic impacts, and environmental hazards to citizens of the country."

Shifting ground

In a presentation to the American Geophysical Union in December 2025, scientists used 10 years of radar images from the Sentinel-1 satellite to identify dams that have shifted due to sinking or elevating ground. Depending on the material of the dam, this can lead to cracks forming, especially if different parts of the structure are moving in opposite directions or at varying rates.

"This technology helps us to find potential issues, and then inform the people who are in charge," lead researcher Mohammad Khorrami, a postdoctoral geotechnical engineer at Virginia Tech and The United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, told Live Science.

The results are based on 41 high-hazard hydroelectric dams that are higher than 50 feet (15 meters), and whose condition is "poor" or "unsatisfactory" under the National Inventory of Dams' classification. These are dams with known defects that compromise the safety of operations and require repairs.

The results are preliminary and have not been peer reviewed. Nevertheless, they show previously unknown weaknesses in dams across 13 U.S. states and Puerto Rico — including Roanoke Rapids Dam in North Carolina and Livingston Dam, the biggest dam in Texas.

Some of these high-risk dams are shifting considerably. For example, the northern portion of Livingston Dam — which feeds two water purification plants supplying more than 3 million people in Houston — is sinking at a rate of about 0.3 inches (8 millimeters) per year, while the southern portion is simultaneously rising by the same amount.

"That doesn't mean that part of the dam is collapsing," Khorrami said. But such elevation differences warrant further investigation, because they might turn out to be a problem, he added. Given that these dams are decades old, potentially faulty and affect both people downstream and energy supplies, deformations in the structure could be disastrous.

A tragic incident in Libya in 2023 suggests land elevation changes are not something to overlook. On Sept. 11, two dams collapsed following extreme rainfall from Storm Daniel. The failures unleashed 1 billion cubic feet (30 million cubic meters) — or 10,000 Olympic swimming pools — of water upon the city of Derna, destroying buildings and bridges, and killing up to 24,000 people.

Deformations in the dams resulting from land elevation changes likely contributed to the collapses, a 2025 study found. "The results of satellite imagery showed a constant and persistent deformation on both these dams during the last decade," Khorrami said. "So those dams were already vulnerable."

Khorrami and his colleagues are finalizing the results of their study. The next step will be to produce an interactive map or database that policymakers can use to assess the safety of U.S. dams.

"It's not a replacement for inspections," Khorrami said. "We're providing another tool to help find early warning signs if there is any issue, or potential issue, with the dam."

Aging infrastructure, changing climate

But ground shifts are just one factor that can compromise dams. The U.S. has almost 92,600 dams — more than 16,700 of which have a "high-hazard potential," meaning that if they collapsed, they could cause loss of human life and significant property destruction, according to ASDSO. Most were designed more than 50 years ago, and around 2,500 show signs of damage that would collectively take billions to fix.

Not all of these are behemoths like the Hoover Dam; in fact, thousands are small watershed dams designed to prevent flooding, provide drinking water and preserve wildlife habitats.

When they were built in the 1960s and 1970s, these dams posed very little risk to people because few lived nearby. But several decades on, communities have mushroomed around them, meaning a failure could be devastating.

What's more, most of these dams were designed to withstand the environmental conditions that existed when they were built, but global warming and land-use changes have altered the picture.

Some rivers are dwindling due to drought, while others have higher water levels and flows than they did 50 to 60 years ago due to increases in rainfall and urbanization, which reduces the amount of water stored in the soil, Ebrahim Ahmadisharaf, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Florida State University, who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.

Weather is also becoming more extreme and unpredictable, raising the risk of sudden floods, Ahmadisharaf said. In a 2025 study, he and his colleagues found that the likelihood of dam overtopping — when water is so high, it exceeds the capacity of spillways and gushes over the dam — has increased at 33 dams over the past 50 years.

The dams with the highest overtopping probabilities in that study were big dams with relatively large populations living in cities and small towns downstream — including Whitney Dam in Texas, Milford Dam in Kansas and Whiskeytown Dam in California. The population centers that could be impacted include Waco, Texas, with a population of 150,000, and Junction City, Kansas, with 22,000 residents.

"Overtopping is a possible failure mechanism of a dam," Ahmadisharaf explained. "It can lead to catastrophic flooding downstream, and then structural failure. The larger the dam and the shorter the distance to the infrastructure and people downstream, the more dangerous [overtopping is]."

Money problems

One of the biggest hurdles in the way of making dams in the U.S. safer is funding — and the older dams get, the bigger the bill grows.

"Operation, maintenance, and rehabilitation of dams can range in cost from the low thousands to millions of dollars, and responsibility for these expenses lies with owners, many of whom cannot afford these costs," Roche said. "To rehabilitate just the most critical dams was estimated at $37.4 billion, a cost that continues to rise as maintenance, repair, and rehabilitation are delayed."

Rolling out satellite monitoring for dams would increase the financial burden — but it may be worth the cost if it helps prioritize fixes and prevent failures, Roche said. According to a forensic report about the Oroville Dam spillway incident in 2017, which caused more than 180,000 evacuations but no deaths, traditional inspections of dams do not always identify important structural issues.

With only preliminary results available so far, it is hard to tell whether using satellite data to prioritize dam repairs is useful, Roche said. But in theory, "deformation of dam structures may be indicative of a problem or worsening condition," he said.

David Bowles, a dam safety risk expert and professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at Utah State University, is more skeptical. "There are many ways a dam can breach," Bowles told Live Science in an email. "Foundation settlement is not a major root cause of dam breach in my experience, but it could be a factor particularly if it is not being monitored and managed."

There might also be a role for satellites in assessing dam overtopping risks, Ahmadisharaf said. Satellite radar images could provide better estimates of water levels and flooding, which in turn could help disseminate warnings earlier.

Overall, satellites could provide a broader overview than what we currently have of risks at dams, Ahmadisharaf said. "We can't monitor everywhere," he said, "but satellites provide this opportunity."

Newly developed sodium-ion (Na-ion) batteries could offer much faster charging speeds, higher energy density and improvements in safety compared with conventional lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, scientists say.

Using Na-ion batteries, an alternative to the Li-ion batteries found in the majority of today's devices, researchers at the Tokyo University of Science used a new carbon-based electrolyte to improve Na-ion energy density and charge speeds.

Scientists have been investigating Na-ion batteries as an alternative to Li-ion batteries because of their improved stability and low cost, but several bottlenecks and limitations have blocked the technology's advancement.

All batteries contain an anode and a cathode, the two electrodes that determine how current flows into and out of the device. In Li-ion batteries, the cathode is made primarily of graphite, as it's an excellent material for storing lithium ions to be discharged later.

But Na-ion batteries use hard carbon (HC) — a porous combination of thousands of "turbostratic basic structural units," essentially a complex crystalline structure, that excels at storing sodium ions. This is, in theory, a very fast-charging material.

Previous research into HC found it difficult to prove that this theoretical charging rate is practically possible, however, because ions entering the dense electrolyte at high speed experience a slowdown similar to a traffic jam. But in a new study published Dec. 15, 2025, in the journal Chemical Science, the scientists set out to overcome this hurdle.

Limiting the risks of Li-ion batteries

The researchers combined small concentrations of HC with aluminum oxide, a chemically inactive material, into a combined electrode. This allowed ions to flow freely into the HC particles with no "traffic'" issues.

With the problem overcome, the researchers then proved that sodium ions could enter HC at similar rates to lithium ions entering graphite in a Li-ion battery.

The researchers also found that the bottleneck for the entire process is the rate at which ions fill the "pores" within HC, where "pores" describe the process in which ions form pseudo-metallic clusters inside the nanoscopic pores across the surface of HC.

Through careful analysis, the researchers found that sodium ions require less energy to form these clusters. The finding indicates that, under the right conditions, Na-ion batteries — also called SIBs — can achieve faster charge rates than Li-ion batteries can.

"A key point of focus for developing improved HC materials for fast-chargeable SIBs is to attain faster kinetics of the pore-filling process so that they can be accessed at high charging rates," lead study author Shinichi Komaba, a professor in the Department of Applied Chemistry at the Tokyo University of Science, explained in a statement. "Also, our results suggest that sodium insertion is less sensitive to temperature, based on the consideration of smaller activation energy than lithiation."

In the real world, the results could help Na-ion batteries become more widely adopted for uses that require incredibly fast charging or discharging rates. For example, grid-scale battery energy storage systems would benefit from the capability to rapidly discharge energy on demand. It's also of paramount importance for batteries to remain stable when they're used at scale for storing energy produced by renewable sources.

Na-ion batteries are safer than Li-ion batteries, as noted in a 2025 study by researchers at the Islamic University of Technology, Idaho State University, and University of Waterloo. This is because the stable sodium ions they contain are less prone to the chain reaction that causes Li-ion batteries to burn, or even explode, when damaged.

The U.K. National Fire Chiefs Council has stated that battery energy storage systems that use Li-ion batteries pose a "significant fire risk," particularly because once they're on fire, these batteries cannot be easily extinguished.

Thermal runaway, the self-sustaining process that causes Li-ion batteries to ignite, can even sustain itself without oxygen. The British Safety Council has noted that after they ignite, Li-ion batteries in some electric vehicles may burn for hours or even days.

If produced at scale, Na-ion batteries like those tested in the study could avoid these risks altogether.

"Our results quantitatively demonstrate that the charging speed of an SIB using an HC anode can attain faster rates than that of an LIB [lithium-ion battery]," Komaba said in the statement.

Japan has deployed a system that fires laser beams with 100 kilowatts of energy — powerful enough to disable small drones. It was installed on board a 6,200-ton (6.3 million kg) warship.

The weapon combines 10 lasers (each 10 kW in power) into a single 100 kW beam, giving it enough focused power to burn through metal surfaces. It is a fiber laser, meaning the beam is generated by light being amplified and focused as it travels through a solid-state optical fiber doped with rare earth elements. Engineers designed this system specifically to shoot down drones, mortar rounds and other lightweight airborne threats.

On Dec. 2, Japan’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency (ATLA) confirmed in a statement that the laser system was installed on the JS Asuka test ship after arriving at one of Japan Marine United’s shipyards. It was seen packed into two 40-foot (12-meter) domed modules.

The system will soon be sent to sea for its first trials under real maritime conditions. These are due to start after February 27, 2026, according to @AGChatch, a YouTube account that monitors Japanese naval technology.

The laser weapon has been in development since 2018, and a prototype was confirmed to have been delivered to ATLA by the manufacturer, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, in February 2023. Officials delivered a briefing upon its docking, saying that "provided sufficient power, the system can continue to engage targets without running out of ammunition," according to The Asia Live.

They added that it boasts "unlimited magazine depth," so the only limitation on its use is the amount of electricity available, and that its cost-per-shot is substantially lower than conventional air-defense systems. They also confirmed that the weapon was successful against mortar rounds and unmanned aerial vehicles in ground-based tests earlier this year.

A step forward for laser weaponry

ATLA’s next goal is to carry out successful sea trials, where the laser will face tougher conditions like wind and moisture. It will have to keep its aim steady on a pitching deck while handling atmospheric scattering and reflections.

But there are more roadblocks for laser weapons like Japan’s to overcome before they can reach the battlefield. Directed‑energy systems — those that damage targets with highly-focused energy instead of a solid projectile — often need lots of time to recharge between shots and demand substantial cooling and electrical power. Even in ideal conditions, fiber lasers typically only reach about 25% to 35% efficiency, and their energy requirements are especially challenging to accommodate on a ship.

According to The Asia Live, ATLA officials said that operational deployment is still years away, but this set of trials will help them evaluate whether an even more powerful laser could be used to intercept missiles in the future.

Japan now joins the U.S., France, Germany, and the U.K. on the list of nations confirmed to be developing a directed‑energy weapon. China is also suspected to be among them, after a photo emerged on social media of what appeared to be a laser on a Chinese amphibious transport dock in 2024.

Nevertheless, the only publicly scheduled deployment of a sea-based laser system is on vessels equipped with "Aegis" — an advanced naval defense platform ordered by Japan’s Ministry of Defense, according to Naval News. These are expected to enter service after 2032.

Almost two years ago, the U.K. government announced that its system, dubbed "DragonFire," had passed its first field test by shooting down several drones over the Hebrides off the coast of Scotland. Furthermore, in late 2024, Chinese scientists claimed to have created a new type of microwave weapon that could concentrate high-powered electromagnetic waves onto a target.

Researchers at MIT have developed a device that collects moisture from the air and turns it into drinking water within minutes. The team hopes that the technology could eventually be used to provide clean water to communities where natural sources are scarce.

Atmospheric water harvesting (AWH) systems work by drawing moisture from the air and condensing it into liquid water. This typically involves cooling humid air or using sponge-like materials called "sorbents" that absorb water vapor, which is then released and condensed into droplets.

The challenge is that AWH devices typically rely on the sun to evaporate water from the sorbent, which can take several hours or even days. This limits their usefulness in dry, resource-stressed environments including regions where there is no salt water to desalinate.

MIT's new device, however, uses ultrasonic waves (ultrasound) to shake moisture loose from the sorbent. The released moisture then drains through small nozzles at the base of the device, where it can be collected and used.

According to the researchers, their ultrasonic prototype is 45 times more efficient at extracting captured water compared to evaporation alone. They detailed their findings in a paper published Nov. 18 in the journal Nature Communications.

"People have been looking for ways to harvest water from the atmosphere, which could be a big source of water particularly for desert regions and places where there is not even saltwater to desalinate," study co-author Svetlana Boriskina, a principal research scientist at MIT, said in a statement. "Now we have a way to recover water quickly and efficiently."

Drinking water — from days to minutes

MIT's approach uses ultrasound — sound waves that travel at frequencies above 20 kilohertz, beyond the range of human hearing — to liberate moisture from the sorbent.

The heart of the AWH device is a flat ceramic ring that vibrates when voltage is applied. Researchers found that high-frequency pulses were ideal for breaking the weak bonds between the absorbed water and the material surface.

"It's like the water is dancing with the waves, and this targeted disturbance creates momentum that releases the water molecules, and we can see them shake out in droplets," lead study author and MIT graduate student, Ikra Iftekhar Shuvo, said in the statement.

The researchers tested the device by placing quarter-sized samples of sorbent material in a humidity chamber set to different levels. When the samples were saturated, they were placed on the ultrasonic actuator and vibrated at high frequency. In each case, the device shook the samples dry in just a few minutes.

A potential challenge is that the new device needs a power source, unlike AWH systems that use sunlight alone. The researchers suggest that their device could be paired with a small solar cell that also acts as a sensor to detect when the sorbent is full. This could trigger a release cycle that would allow the system to collect and release water multiple times a day.

The team envisions a compact household setup that combines a fast-absorbing material with an ultrasonic actuator, each about the size of a window, that vibrates to release the trapped water.

"The beauty of this device is that it’s completely complementary and can be an add-on to almost any sorbent material," said Boriskina. "It's all about how much water you can extract per day. With ultrasound, we can recover water quickly, and cycle again and again. That can add up to a lot per day."

Caltech engineers have developed a multimodal robot system — a humanoid robot with a transforming drone that launches off its back.

Sitting on the back of the humanoid robot, a Unitree G1 machine, the drone, called M4, can transform — switching between driving and flight modes. We’re not talking Optimus Prime or Megatron here; instead, the drone-expelling bot is more like Soundwave, a Decepticon that housed different, mini transformers, like drones, in its chest.

The system is the culmination of a three-year collaboration between Caltech's Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST) and the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

The humanoid can walk (although we have seen smoother movers) and it can tackle stairs and navigate its way to wherever it has sent the drone, though at a much slower pace.

"Right now, robots can fly, robots can drive, and robots can walk. Those are all great in certain scenarios," Aaron Ames, director of CAST and a professor of aerospace and engineering at Caltech, said in a statement. "But how do we take those different locomotion modalities and put them together into a single package, so we can excel from the benefits of all these while mitigating the downfalls that each of them have?"

The challenge here lay in how the team brought different robots together so that they could become one system but still offer different functionalities. The drone was built by a CAST team led by Mory Gharib, while Ames and his lab configured the humanoid robot.

M4 is capable of reconfiguring its body (transforming) into several different types of motion — it can assess the environment it needs to enter and automatically select the most effective combinations of motion to maneuver. M4 can roll on four wheels, turn its wheels into rotors and fly, stand meerkat-style on two wheels, "walk" by using its wheels like feet, use two rotors to help it roll up steep slopes on two wheels, and also simply tumble towards its destination.

M4’s ability to repurpose its appendages as wheels, legs, or thrusters is a key feature. When M4 needs to fly, all four wheels fold up, and the propellers lift the robot off the ground — or off the back of the humanoid robot, which bends forward when deploying M4.

The overarching goal of the collaboration is to make such autonomous systems safer and more reliable. If we are going to have robots all around us, Ames suggested, more work needs to be focused on making them reliable.

"We're thinking about safety-critical control, making sure we can trust our systems, making sure they're secure," Ames said in the statement. "We have multiple projects that extend beyond this one that study all these different facets of autonomy, and these problems are really big. By having these different projects and facets of our collaboration, we are able to take on these much bigger problems and really move autonomy forward in a substantial and concerted way."

NASA and Lockheed Martin’s experimental X-59 aircraft has taken to the skies for the first time, making history as the first supersonic aircraft designed to make a soft "thump" instead of thunderous sonic booms.

The X-59’s flight is a major step towards commercial supersonic travel, which has been banned in the United States since 1973.

The test flight was planned to last about one hour, taking off from Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California, and landing at NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California on Oct. 28. The plane reached a maximum speed of about 240 miles per hour (386 kilometers per hour) and flew at about 12,000 feet (3,658 meters) off the ground. It did not reach supersonic speeds for this test, which focused on checking critical systems.

According to Lockheed Martin’s specifications, the X-59 has a top speed of Mach 1.4, or 925 mph (1,489 km/h), which is almost twice as fast as a Boeing 747. It’s designed to fly at an altitude of 55,000 feet (16,764 m). The aircraft has a wingspan of 30 feet (9.1 m), is 14 feet (4.3 m) high, and a whopping 100 feet (30.5 m) long, giving it a strong resemblance to a swordfish.

From the side, the airplane’s shockingly long nose appears to narrow to a point, but it’s actually shaped like a chisel. The nose’s shape is designed to change the shape of the shockwaves generated by supersonic flight, making the aircraft much quieter than the supersonic jets used today. These are banned from flying over populated areas in the United States because of their loud sonic booms.

Sonic booms are caused by shockwaves from rapidly compressed air, similar to thunder. As an aircraft flies, it pushes upon the air in front of it, creating pressure waves. When an aircraft goes supersonic, the pressure waves can’t move out of the way fast enough, so they combine into a single large shockwave, resulting in a sonic boom.

A controversial six-month test over Oklahoma City in 1964 showed that sonic booms from supersonic aircraft flying too close to the ground can break windows, cause minor damage to buildings, and startle people. At the end of the study, more than 1 in 4 people surveyed said that they could not learn to live with the sonic booms.

To lessen the impact of the booms, the X-59 design separates the usual shockwave into multiple smaller shockwaves, resulting in "thumps" that are about the same volume as a car door slamming.

The shockwaves that cause sonic booms can be seen with schlieren imaging, a type of specialized photography invented in 1864 by August Toepler, a German physicist. It relies on how changing air pressure warps light passing through it. Imaging the shockwaves helps us understand if the aircraft’s aerodynamics match what was modeled using computers and small model planes in wind tunnels.

The X-59 is planned to go supersonic in future test flights, and if all goes to plan, will be used to test public reaction to its supersonic "thumps” — paving the way for commercial supersonic flight to return to the US, albeit much quieter this time.

The winds were blowing at 40 mph (64 km/h) across the Tacoma Narrows strait when "Galloping Gertie" began to bounce.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which connected Tacoma, Washington, with the Kitsap Peninsula, had opened to great fanfare just a few months earlier, in July 1940. The elegant and flexible structure — at the time, the third-longest suspension bridge in the world — had been designed by world-renowned bridge engineer Leon Moisseiff, who also helped design the Golden Gate Bridge.

Yet, from the beginning, workers noticed the bridge's oscillation in the wind, nicknaming it "Galloping Gertie."

"We knew from the night of the day the bridge opened that something was wrong. On that night, the bridge began to gallop," said F. Bert Farquharson, an engineer at the University of Washington who had been hired by the Toll Authority to figure out the source of the oscillation, according to the Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT).

When Farquharson's team contacted Moisseiff, he acknowledged that two of his other bridges also oscillated, but with much lower amplitude.

Farquharson's team commissioned a 1:200 scale model that was 54 feet (16.5 meters) long, as well as an 8-foot-long (2.4 m) 1:20 scale version of one of the bridge sections to try to pinpoint the problem. They also used a wind tunnel in an attempt to replicate the issue.

Meanwhile, the Toll Authority immediately began trying to remedy the problem. Soon after the bridge's opening, engineers installed four hydraulic jacks to act as shock absorbers, but Gertie kept galloping. In October, the team affixed temporary cables to tie the bridge to the ground across the bridge's span. Although the tie-down cables reduced oscillations at the bridge's ends, the center still moved up and down. In any case, one cable snapped during high winds on Nov. 1, and the bridge began galloping again.

On Nov. 2, Farquharson's team finished their modeling, which revealed that the bridge began twisting when winds gusted up from the sides. The team suggested either cutting holes in the girders or blocking the wind with deflectors. They began making fixes. In 10 days, some of those deflectors would have given the bridge enough stability to be safe, they argued, and the full bridge retrofit would have been completed in 45 days.

But they never got a chance to see if those fixes would work. On the morning of Nov. 7, Leonard Coatsworth, a copy editor at the Tacoma News Tribune, was driving to the family's summer cottage on the peninsula with Tubby, his daughter's three-legged cocker spaniel, when the bridge began to undulate up and down and tilt side to side. He called his newspaper, which sent along reporter Bert Brintnall and staffer Howard Clifford as a photographer.

Prior to this, Coatsworth said, he'd experienced the bridge moving up and down, but the tilting was new.

"Before I realized it, the tilt from side to side became so violent I lost control of the car and thought for a moment it would leap the high curb and plunge across the sidewalk of the bridge and into the railing," Coatsworth wrote in an account the same day for the Tacoma News Tribune.

He abandoned the car part way across the bridge.

Clifford, for his part, was the last man off the bridge.

"The roadway was bouncing up and down, falling beneath me and literally leaving me running in air. It would then bounce back, forcing me to my knees. I continued for what seemed like ages, but probably was only a couple of minutes and finally reached stable ground. Bert [Brintnall] was waiting there for me, leaving me to be the last person off the bridge," Clifford said in a later story for the newspaper.

There was a loud noise, like a shot, when the 57 foot (17.5 m) cable snapped, and at 11:02 a.m., the center of the bridge fell into the water. Clifford and Brintnall and a cameraman captured the bridge's fall.

Tubby the dog did not make it, but he was the only casualty of the day.

The catastrophic collapse seriously tarnished the reputation of Moisseiff, who died of a heart attack just three years later.

But the bridge collapse also provided unprecedented engineering insights.

A team eventually determined that the collapse was caused by torsional flutter. After a cable midspan slipped, it separated into two unequal lengths. This, in turn, allowed the bridge to start twisting. Twisting changed the angle of the wind relative to the bridge's main plate girders so that it absorbed more energy, thus raising the amplitude of the motion. At some point, the twisting synchronized with the wind vortex, and the twisting became self-sustaining.

"In other words, the forces acting on the bridge were no longer caused by wind. The bridge deck's own motion produced the forces. Engineers call this "self-excited" motion," according to the WSDOT.

In all, the bridge was too long, its deck was too light, and its roadway was too skinny to provide sufficient resistance to aerodynamic forces, a report on the failure concluded.

As a result of the collapse, all engineers must test a 3D-scale version of any bridge in a wind tunnel before building begins. The failure also meant that "deflection theory" — a notion that only vertical motion in suspension bridges was relevant — was amended to include other modes of motion. And after a great windstorm threatened the Golden Gate Bridge in 1951, the iconic Bay Area landmark was strengthened to improve its "torsional stability."

Scientists in China have developed a new way of harvesting solar power by applying a translucent coating over a window to direct energy from ambient light to the edge of the glass — where it can be captured and stored.

With rising global energy demands, there is a need for new technologies that can incorporate energy capture into their architecture. The cost of solar installations has dramatically decreased since 2010, resulting in over four million installations in America. This trend is predicted to continue, but what if we could improve solar utilization by using the windows of buildings as well? That's what scientists aimed to address in a study published July 28 in the journal PhotoniX.

Solar power-generating windows are already available, which use amorphous silicon cells, gallium arsenide, organic photovoltaics or other methodologies to capture solar power. However, they are expensive and inefficient, capturing only up to 20% of the sunlight. Furthermore, the tinting effect of current solar windows causes light entering the room to be dimmed, which may be appreciated in the summer, but isn't as desirable during winter. Light distortion is also a challenge, especially if it masks a pleasant view.

Scientists from Nanjing University in China have instead developed a cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) — a colorless liquid that can reflect light due to its helical structure. CLCs are typically used in thermometers and color displays.

Multiple layers of CLCs can be used to redirect light to create a colorless and unidirectional solar concentrator (CUSC). The CUSC can then direct light using CLCs to the edge of the glass, where the light energy is captured by integrated silicon-photovoltaic cells.

Engineers applied this coating through an intensive cleaning process, where they directed high-frequency sound-waves onto the glass to remove all impurities from it.

In tests, five CLC layers were applied to a 1 inch (2.5 centimeter) diameter glass. This CUSC prototype was able to power a 10mW fan outside in Nanjing, China, during the summer.

It is projected that this technology would be most effectively deployed in cities near the equator, which typically experience more sunshine throughout the year compared to cities closer to the poles. It is unclear what effect, if any, this new technology would have on the natural heating of rooms by sunlight.

The authors mention in the study the proliferation of super high-rise buildings. However, such architecture is limited to larger cities, and there are signs that high-rise buildings are becoming less popular. In 2021, China banned new buildings over 1,640 feet (500 meters) tall and now imposes restrictions on buildings over 820 feet (250 m) — with even stricter limits in force in smaller cities.

It is estimated that a typical 6.5 feet (2 m) wide window with CUSC could multiply the solar energy gathered by 50. However, further testing would be required to establish how performance scales up with windows typically fitted into modern homes, or the expansive panels found in commercial buildings. There are unanswered questions, such as how the CUSC will guard against rain, hail or snow, bird droppings (which are acidic) — and window cleaning. No mention is made in the study of any protective layer to shield the CUSC. Any such layer, if added, may of course create new challenges if it impedes energy capture.

Regardless, the CUSC is a significant step forward in solar energy capture for buildings and could form an important part of the global renewable energy market if the technology is further developed.

A small municipality in southern Finland recently installed the world's largest "sand battery" to supply the town's heating.

The new sand battery, designed by Polar Night Energy, is effectively a giant sandpit encased in a roughly 43 foot tall by 49 foot wide (13 by 15 meter) steel container.

The sand is heated using closed-loop heat transfer pipes and this heat is trapped by two layers of steel sandwiching an insulation layer. The energy is then extracted by blowing cool air through the pipes, capturing the heat to generate hot water, steam or hot air.

Renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, differ from traditional energy sources, like oil and coal, because they do not contribute to the carbon footprint — making them essential for reaching net zero by 2050.

But solar and wind power is not constantly available, with supply waxing and waning over the course of each year. This makes it critical to find ways of storing renewable energy for use during periods of shortfall in the energy supply.

"The main challenge to large-scale implementation of renewable energy is energy storage," Matteo Chiesa, a professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering at the Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi who was not involved in the project, told Live Science.

Related: How to store renewable energy

By channelling excess energy from the grid and locally produced solar and wind energy to heat up sand to a whopping 842 degrees Fahrenheit (450 degrees Celsius), this new sand battery can store heat energy for potentially months on end, Polar Night Energy representatives say.

With a heating power of 1 megawatts — meaning it can provide 1 million joules of energy per second — it can output temperatures of 140-752 degrees F (60-400 degrees C).

"It’s proving successful in Finland," Chiesa said, adding that there’s strong potential for it to succeed elsewhere.

Heating using the power of sand

Using sand and sand-like materials to retain heat is an age-old phenomenon, with brick ovens being popular worldwide. This is because sand — which is most commonly made up of a combination of silicon and oxygen — is readily available globally. It can be heated to extremely high temperatures before it melts, and retains its heat for a long time.

Sand batteries are not batteries in a conventional sense as they do not directly produce electricity. Instead, they are thermal energy storage systems, meaning they are charged up using renewable energy, which is then stored as heat energy for use when energy demand exceeds supply.

Chiesa said that the Polar Night Energy design is "very robust," but the current configuration would be too expensive to translate over to household contexts, which face similar energy storage challenges.

"Every single time you add metal, you add costs," he said. "Ideally, we should design the sand battery’s porosity so that air can be distributed evenly throughout all pores without relying on expensive materials."

Chiesa also noted that Polar Night Energy does not currently provide seasonal storage, instead using its system to store energy for shorter durations — primarily to balance fluctuations in wind power generation.

Thermal energy storage systems like this are well-suited for storing renewable energy seasonally because it takes so long for sand to lose its heat.

"A battery that enables you to store summer solar energy and use it during winter — when heating demand is highest — is a powerful solution for seasonal energy needs," Chiesa said.

Editor's Note: This story was updated on Friday, Sept. 12 at 12:19 p.m. EDT to correct the size of the plant, the temperatures it reaches and the power it outputs.

Scientists have incorporated key computing components into a single, flexible fiber that you can run through your washing machine. The researchers hope to one day weave together many of these fibers into a cohesive "fiber computing" network — in other words, items of clothing with smart capabilities.

Smart textiles, also known as smart fabrics or e-textiles, are materials containing electronic components that enhance the features of wearable devices and other products. These could potentially be used to create materials with in-built computing components that can be used in clothing or in woven displays, among other uses.

One of the earliest modern applications of this was the creation of LilyPad in 2007 — a series of sewable electronic components designed to be used in interactive clothing, toys or sculptures.

One of the most significant limitations of smart textiles is that the computing capabilities of individual fibers are severely limited and that they are not embedded with any individual components.

Because these fibers lack components, basic tasks like interpreting biosignals in real time are difficult — and it's hard to pick up on signals for subsequent data processing.

But in a new study published June 6 in the journal Nano-Micro Letters, scientists fitted sensing, communication, computation and storage into a single fiber strand.

Related: New fabric can heat up more than 50 degrees to keep people warm in ultracold weather

Each elastic fiber also has 60% stretchability and can be put through the washing machine — meaning it could be used to weave practical garments.

The new fiber also enables smart clothing or devices to have better accuracy due to sensing from multiple points and real-time interactions between the computer and the human, the scientists said in the study.

The future of clothing

Each fiber developed in the study incorporated eight devices, including four sensors — a photodetector, a temperature sensor, an accelerometer and a photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor, which measures changes in light absorption by the skin — as well as a microcontroller, two communication modules and power management devices, the scientists said in the study. Together, these components achieved data acquisition, processing, storage and result transmission.

To monitor how effective the new system was, the scientist integrated four smart fibers into a garment's sleeve and pant legs and asked one person wearing the garment to perform a series of body weight exercises, including squats, lunges and planks.

Each fiber runs an individually trained neural network — a collection of machine learning algorithms designed to mimic the way the human brain processes information. This enabled the fibers to recognize various actions in real time, including squatting, planking, arm rotation and others.

A single fiber achieved 67% accuracy in recognizing specific movements, while all four fibers working together boosted accuracy to 95%.

"This remarkable improvement underscores the immense potential of multi-fibre collaborative sensing and distributed reasoning, presenting a transformative approach for intelligent wearable systems that seamlessly integrate localized computation with networked decision-making to deliver robust, high-fidelity performance," the scientists said in the study.

The scientists said these results highlighted the potential performance of a network of fibers working together, but they acknowledged that there are still challenges in optimizing communication speeds, reducing energy consumption and increasing bandwidth.

To scale up a network of these fiber-based computers, the scientists would also need to improve the efficiency of information exchange between the individual nodes, they noted.

Future research, they added, could focus on building higher-throughput, lower-latency communication protocols that are specifically tailored for these types of fiber computers.

Scientists in China have created rainbow, glow-in-the-dark succulents by injecting colorful "afterglow" particles into the leaves that absorb, and then gradually release, light.

The luminescent succulents shone for up to two hours, outperforming similar, material-engineered plants, according to a new study. The invention paves the way for sustainable, plant-based lighting to illuminate outdoor and indoor spaces, researchers said.

"Imagine glowing trees replacing streetlights," study lead author Shuting Liu, a researcher at South China Agricultural University, said in a statement. "The particles diffused in just seconds, and the entire succulent leaf glowed."

Researchers have made glow-in-the-dark plants before, both with genetic engineering and material engineering. Genetic engineering approaches harness bioluminescent genes that already exist in certain plants, such as phytoplankton — but these genes have a limited, mostly green, color range, according to the study. Material engineering techniques involve injecting light-emitting particles into plant leaves to make them glow, but these methods have so far only generated dim light.

For strong luminescence, light-emitting particles have to be small enough to diffuse through a plant's tissues, but also big enough to emit a visible glow. Previous experiments using nanoparticles derived from firefly luciferase, the enzyme that creates bioluminescence in fireflies, produced only a faint glow that dropped sharply after 30 minutes.

For the new study, Liu and her colleagues used light-emitting phosphor particles that were roughly the width of a human red blood cell (6 to 8 micrometers). The micron-sized particles were large enough to produce a strong glow while traveling through the plants freely, Liu said. "Smaller, nano-sized particles move easily within the plant but are dimmer," she said.

Related: Scientists invent photosynthetic 'living' material that sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere

The researchers published their findings Wednesday (Aug. 27) in the journal Matter.

Micron-sized particles worked for succulents but not for other plants tested in the study, including bok choy (Brassica rapa chinensis) and golden pothos (Epipremnum aureum). The researchers used Echeveria "Mebina" succulents, which have blue-green leaves with red tips. Unlike bok choy and golden pothos, these succulents have relatively large gaps between their cells, meaning that micron-sized particles can travel through the plant, according to the study.

The researchers injected phosphor particles into the leaves of Echeveria "Mebina" and charged the plants in sunlight or indoor LED light for a few minutes, obtaining the same afterglow effect in both experiments. Green particles produced the longest glow, with the plants emitting light for up to 2 hours and rivaling a small night lamp at their brightest, according to the study.

The team produced the world's first multicolored luminescent plants by injecting blue, green, red and blue-violet phosphor particles into the leaves of some succulents. The scientists also built a plant wall of 56 succulents that produced enough light to see nearby objects and read text in the dark, according to the statement.

"I just find it incredible that an entirely human-made, micro-scale material can come together so seamlessly with the natural structure of a plant," Liu said. "The way they integrate is almost magical."

Luminescent succulents could one day be a low-carbon lighting solution, according to the study. The researchers hope to produce the same effect in other plants, which could be exposed to sunlight and charged up like batteries to provide decorative and practical lighting.

"The process is straightforward and cost-effective and achieves luminescence within 10 min, paving the way for practical applications in plant-based lighting," the researchers wrote in the study.

A US military space-plane, the X-37B orbital test vehicle, is due to embark on its eighth flight into space on August 21, 2025. Much of what the X-37B does in space is secret. But it serves partly as a platform for cutting-edge experiments.

One of these experiments is a potential alternative to GPS that makes use of quantum science as a tool for navigation: a quantum inertial sensor.

Satellite-based systems like GPS are ubiquitous in our daily lives, from smartphone maps to aviation and logistics. But GPS isn't available everywhere. This technology could revolutionize how spacecraft, airplanes, ships and submarines navigate in environments where GPS is unavailable or compromised.

In space, especially beyond Earth's orbit, GPS signals become unreliable or simply vanish. The same applies underwater, where submarines cannot access GPS at all. And even on Earth, GPS signals can be jammed (blocked), spoofed (making a GPS receiver think it is in a different location) or disabled — for instance, during a conflict.

This makes navigation without GPS a critical challenge. In such scenarios, having navigation systems that function independently of any external signals becomes essential.

Traditional inertial navigation systems (INS), which use accelerometers and gyroscopes to measure a vehicle's acceleration and rotation, do provide independent navigation, as they can estimate position by tracking how the vehicle moves over time. Think of sitting in a car with your eyes closed: you can still feel turns, stops and accelerations, which your brain integrates to guess where you are over time.

Related: 10 things we know about the secret X-37B space plane

Eventually though, without visual cues, small errors will accumulate and you will entirely lose your positioning. The same goes with classical inertial navigation systems: as small measurement errors accumulate, they gradually drift off course, and need corrections from GPS or other external signals.

Where quantum helps

If you think of quantum physics, what may come to your mind is a strange world where particles behave like waves and Schrödinger's cat is both dead and alive. These thought experiments genuinely describe how tiny particles like atoms behave.

At very low temperatures, atoms obey the rules of quantum mechanics: they behave like waves and can exist in multiple states simultaneously — two properties that lie at the heart of quantum inertial sensors.

The quantum inertial sensor aboard the X‑37B uses a technique called atom interferometry, where atoms are cooled to the temperature of near absolute zero, so they behave like waves. Using fine-tuned lasers, each atom is split into what's called a superposition state, similar to Schrödinger's cat, so that it simultaneously travels along two paths, which are then recombined.

Since the atom behaves like a wave in quantum mechanics, these two paths interfere with each other, creating a pattern similar to overlapping ripples on water. Encoded in this pattern is detailed information about how the atom's environment has affected its journey. In particular, the tiniest shifts in motion, like sensor rotations or accelerations, leave detectable marks on these atomic "waves".

Compared to classical inertial navigation systems, quantum sensors offer orders of magnitude greater sensitivity. Because atoms are identical and do not change, unlike mechanical components or electronics, they are far less prone to drift or bias. The result is long duration and high accuracy navigation without the need for external references.

The upcoming X‑37B mission will be the first time this level of quantum inertial navigation is tested in space. Previous missions, such as NASA's Cold Atom Laboratory and German Space Agency's MAIUS-1, have flown atom interferometers in orbit or suborbital flights and successfully demonstrated the physics behind atom interferometry in space, though not specifically for navigation purposes.

By contrast, the X‑37B experiment is designed as a compact, high-performance, resilient inertial navigation unit for real world, long-duration missions. It moves atom interferometry out of the realms of pure science and into a practical application for aerospace. This is a big leap.

This has important implications for both military and civilian spaceflight. For the US Space Force, it represents a step towards greater operational resilience, particularly in scenarios where GPS might be denied. For future space exploration, such as to the Moon, Mars or even deep space, where autonomy is key, a quantum navigation system could serve not only as a reliable backup but even as a primary system when signals from Earth are unavailable.

Quantum navigation is just one part of the current, broader wave of quantum technologies moving from lab research into real-world applications. While quantum computing and quantum communication often steal headlines, systems like quantum clocks and quantum sensors are likely to be the first to see widespread use.

Countries including the US, China and the UK are investing heavily in quantum inertial sensing, with recent airborne and submarine tests showing strong promise. In 2024, Boeing and AOSense conducted the world's first in-flight quantum inertial navigation test aboard a crewed aircraft.

This demonstrated continuous GPS-free navigation for approximately four hours. That same year, the UK conducted its first publicly acknowledged quantum navigation flight test on a commercial aircraft.

This summer, the X‑37B mission will bring these advances into space. Because of its military nature, the test could remain quiet and unpublicized. But if it succeeds, it could be remembered as the moment space navigation took a quantum leap forward.

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

Chinese engineers have created a prototype floating wind turbine that they say has broken power generation records — potentially ushering in a new generation of renewable power generation.

The turbine is the result of research by Chinese energy giant China Huaneng Group and power generator Dongfang Electric Corporation, both of which are state-owned enterprises.

Each turbine would be capable of generating 17 megawatts (MW) of clean electricity, or 68 million kilowatt hours (kWh) over the course of a year. This is enough to power approximately 6,300 US households per US Energy Administration data.

To generate this power, the nacelle — the central component within a wind turbine that contains the actual generator — sits atop a 489-foot-tall (152-meter)tower, with blades that add up to a diameter of 860 feet (262 m).

Each "sweep," or 360-degree rotation, of the blades encompasses an area of 53,000 square meters, or almost eight soccer fields’ worth.

Increasing the amount of electricity a single turbine can generate is important in encouraging greater adoption of wind power, as it reduces the overall number of turbines that have to be installed in each wind farm. This drives down the cost and reduces the time before turbines begin generating power.

Of course, the further out to sea turbines are, the more extreme wind conditions they may be forced to withstand. China Huaneng Group has stated that the test turbine can endure waves in excess of 78 feet (24 m) high, as well as typhoon-speed winds – those in excess of 64 knots (73 miles per hour).

The manufacturers will test the turbine off the coast of Yangjiang, China, in the coming months.

Floating wind expands the playing field

Although offshore wind farms are more expensive to build and produce more expensive energy per unit than their onshore counterparts, putting wind turbines out at sea exposes them to more constant and intense winds — all the better for massive energy production with less downtime.

Most offshore wind turbines are "fixed bottom" devices, meaning they are moored to the ocean floor. This is a cost-effective way to set up wind farms in shallow waters — such as the North Sea, which has an average depth of just 295 feet ( 90 m).

Current fixed offshore wind turbines like the GE Vernova Haliade-X turbines used in the UK’s Dogger Bank Wind Farm are rated at 13 MW, while Dongfang Electric publicly tested a 26 MW fixed bottom turbine in June 2025. The highest-rated turbines in U.S. waters are 12 MW Siemens Gamesa 11.0-200 DD, which are part of the South Fork Wind Farm and produce 11 MW each.

But much of the world’s oceans are unsuitable for fixed bottom turbines, with a global average depth of 3,682 m (12,080 feet), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The deepest offshore wind turbine foundation was installed as part of SSE’s Seagreen Wind Farm, in 58.6 m waters off the coast of Scotland.

But this is exceptionally deep for offshore wind, with the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP) rating all waters deeper than 50 m as unsuitable for fixed bottom turbines.

Meanwhile, the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) has estimated that 80% of the world’s offshore wind generation potential is in water deeper than 195 feet (60 m), too deep for fixed bottom turbines.

As the use of floating wind turbines expands, energy companies and nation states could massively increase the amount of energy produced from wind by putting turbines in deeper waters.

For example, countries like Japan, which has been unable to use much of its deep territorial waters for wind power, could use floating turbines as a source of renewable energy. Japan has set an ambitious target to achieve 30-45 GW of wind energy production by 2040, with floating wind turbines expected to play a major role.

Microchips power almost every modern device — phones, laptops and even fridges. But behind the scenes, making them is a complex process. But researchers say they have found a way to tap into the power of quantum computing to make it simpler.

Scientists in Australia have developed a quantum machine learning technique — a blend of artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing principles — that could change how microchips are made.

They outlined their findings in a new study published June 23 in the journal Advanced Science. In it, the researchers demonstrated for the first time how quantum machine learning algorithms can significantly improve the challenging process of modeling the electrical resistance inside a chip — a key factor that affects how efficiently it performs.

Quantum machine learning is a hybrid approach that combines classical data with quantum computing methods. In classical computing, data is stored in bits encoded as a 0 or 1. Quantum computers use qubits and, thanks to principles like superposition and entanglement, qubits can exist in multiple states simultaneously — so two qubits can be 00, 01, 10 and 11 simultaneously.

This allows quantum computing systems to process complex mathematical relationships much faster than classical systems — with parallel processing scaling up exponentially the more qubits you add to a system

Quantum machine learning takes classical data and encodes it in quantum states. The quantum computer can then uncover patterns in the data that would be hard for classical systems to detect. A classical system then takes over to interpret the results or apply them.

Related: 'Quantum AI' algorithms already outpace the fastest supercomputers, study says

Inside the chip-making process

Semiconductor fabrication is a complex, multistep process that requires painstaking precision — and each step must be performed with extreme accuracy. Even the smallest misalignment can cause a chip to fail.

This firstly involves stacking and sculpting often hundreds of microscopic layers onto a silicon wafer — a thin, circular slice of silicon that forms the chip’s foundation.

Deposition layers thin films of material onto the wafer. Photoresist coating applies a light-sensitive material that enables precise patterning — the process of creating the tiny, complex shapes that define a chip’s circuitry.

In lithography, light transfers those patterns onto the wafer’s surface. Etching then removes selected areas of material to carve out circuit structures. Ion implantation adjusts the electrical properties of each layer by embedding charged particles. Finally, the chip is packaged, which means it is encased and connected so it can be integrated into a device.

That's where quantum computing principles come into play. In the study, the researchers focused on modeling Ohmic contact resistance — a particularly difficult challenge in chipmaking. This is a measure of how easily electricity flows between the metal and semiconductor layers of a chip; the lower this is, the faster and more energy-efficient performance can be.

This step comes after the materials are layered and patterned onto the wafer, and it plays a critical role in determining how well the finished chip will function. But modeling it accurately has been a problem.

Engineers typically rely on classical machine learning algorithms, which learn patterns from data to make predictions, for this kind of calculation. While this works well with large, clean datasets, semiconductor experiments often produce small, noisy datasets with nonlinear patterns, which is where machine learning can fall short. To address this, the researchers turned to quantum machine learning.

A new kind of algorithm

The team worked with data from 159 experimental samples of gallium nitride high-electron-mobility transistors (GaN HEMTs) — semiconductors known for their speed and efficiency, commonly used in electronics and 5G devices.

First, they identified which fabrication variables had the biggest impact on Ohmic contact resistance, narrowing down the dataset to the most relevant inputs. Then they developed a new machine learning architecture called the Quantum Kernel-Aligned Regressor (QKAR).

QKAR converts classical data into quantum states, enabling the quantum system to then identify complex relationships in the data. A classical algorithm then learns from those insights, creating a predictive model to guide chip fabrication. They tested the model on five new samples that was not included in the training data.

The new model was tested on these samples against seven leading classical models, including deep learning and gradient boosting methods and it outperformed them all. QKAR achieved a significantly better result than is achieved using traditional models (0.338 ohm per millimeter) — although specific figures were not included in the study.

Importantly, however, it was designed to be compatible with real-world hardware, meaning it could be deployed on quantum machines as they become more reliable.

"These findings demonstrate the potential of [quantum machine learning] QML for effectively handling high-dimensional, small-sample regression tasks in semiconductor domains," the scientists wrote in the study. They added that the method could soon be applied to real-world chip production, particularly as quantum hardware continues to evolve.

The vision sounds irresistible: step onto a train in New York, and emerge 54 minutes later in London, having traveled through a tunnel beneath the Atlantic Ocean. This kind of travel is described in some recent proposals. But is a trans-Atlantic tunnel really possible or the stuff of science fiction?

The short answer: It's probably not possible with current technology.

First of all, the 54-minute journey would require vacuum trains traveling at 5,000 mph (8,000 km/h) — technology that doesn't exist yet. With conventional rail speeds, the trip would take around 15 hours, making it slower than an 8-hour flight.

Currently, the world's longest undersea section of a tunnel belongs to the Channel Tunnel, which has a 23.5-mile (37.9 kilometers) underwater section connecting England and France. Construction on the tunnel, nicknamed the Chunnel, took six years, 13,000 workers, and 4.65 billion pounds in 1994 (12 billion pounds, or $16 billion today).

Depending on where you build the tunnel, it can cost much more — both in time and money. The Hudson Tunnel Project, for example, is an effort to construct a 9-mile (14 km) rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey that's predicted to take 12 years and cost $16 billion.

"It's one project, but it's really 10 different projects within one, each of which is almost a mega project in and of itself," Steve Sigmund, chief of public outreach for the Gateway Development Commission, the organization behind the Hudson Tunnel Project, told Live Science.

A trans-Atlantic tunnel, of course, would be considerably longer.

Related: How did the Concorde fly so fast?

The most popular dream of a trans-Atlantic tunnel would be between London and New York, which would stretch around 3,400 miles (5,500 km). For a tunnel like that, "there's going to be several challenges," Bill Grose, a tunnel expert and Institution of Civil Engineers fellow, told Live Science.

The first challenge would be the logistics of building it. " One would have to solve how to ventilate a tunnel like that, how to supply power to a tunnel boring machine, and how you would get the workers to site," Grose said.

The time it would take to transport workers from one end of the tunnel to the halfway point would be impractical, Grose said, so the project would require a fully autonomous tunnel boring machine — a device that hasn't been invented yet on a scale that could burrow an underwater tunnel for human vehicles.

And that's before you account for the power demands. For even a 6-mile-long (10 km) tunnel, a typical tunnel boring machine requires about the same amount of power as that of a small town, Grose said.

Plus, tunnel boring machines are slow. For a tunnel that spans the shortest distance across the Atlantic — Gambia to Brazil, around 1,600 miles (2,575 km) — "that would probably take something like 500 years at the current speed of the tunnel boring machine," Grose said. "You'd really want something that works 50 times faster than modern technology."

There's also the challenge of water pressure. "You have to be really careful about the amount of pressure that exists, both in terms of digging the boring machines in the tunnel themselves, but also … making sure people are safe," Sigmund said. "And that's just 1 mile across the Hudson. So multiply that by a thousand, [and] you're going to run into some very serious issues." Things like leaks, gushing water and tunnel collapse have led to financial losses and death in past undersea tunnel projects.

The world record for water pressure faced by a tunnel boring machine is 15 bars, or 15 times atmospheric pressure at sea level, around 500 feet (150 meters) below the water's surface. At its deepest, the Atlantic Ocean is more than 27,000 feet (8,000 m) deep, which is 800 bars of pressure.

"So you can imagine that while you would make every endeavor to get so deep that you didn't encounter any water, if you did, it would be mega catastrophic," Grose said.

Finally, there's the problem of funding such an enormous project. "Construction, materials, time, labor, people planning — that's really the major pieces of it," Sigmund said, describing what drives tunnel costs even for relatively short projects.

Given the enormous cost and catastrophic risk of a single leak, funding such a project would be nearly impossible.

"At the moment, I would say that the challenges are fairly insurmountable," Grose said. "There are some things that need to be invented."

Supersonic commercial travel could soon be coming to the U.S. following a new executive order lifting a 52-year ban on overland commercial supersonic flights.

While supersonic flights could cross the Atlantic, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) banned overland commercial supersonic flights in 1973 in response to public pressure over noise concerns. The new executive order, issued on June 6, lifts that ban and lays out a timeline for the introduction of noise-based certification rules for supersonic flights.

This move could cut travel time between New York and Los Angeles almost in half, from six to just 3.5 hours.

Before the ban, the U.S., France, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union all pursued commercial applications for supersonic aviation technology. But each country’s supersonic aircraft created deafening, window-shattering sounds at ground level.

Related: Boom Supersonic's XB-1 smashes the sound barrier — becoming the 1st civil aircraft to go supersonic in US history

The Soviet Union's Tu-144 design, meanwhile, depended heavily on loud afterburners for the aircraft to reach Mach 1 (767 mph, or 1,235 km/h) — or faster than the speed of sound.

Today, companies like Boom Supersonic create "boomless cruise" where an aircraft can fly above 30,000 feet (9,100 meters), reach Mach 1 and produce no ground-level sounds — a phenomenon known as Mach cutoff. Boom's aircraft achieved this milestone in January 2025, when it completed a test flight that successfully propelled sonic booms upward, causing them to dissipate before reaching the ground.

Boom faces competition from Lockheed Martin and its research partner NASA in the form of their X-59 supersonic demonstrator jet. The X-59's design places the airplane's engines on top of the fuselage, helping to limit the shock waves, and the resulting noise, that reach ground level.

The regulatory timeline for this technology can be considered aggressive. The new directive calls for a repeal of prohibitions on supersonic flight by Dec. 3, establish noise certification standards by Dec. 6, 2026, and implementation of final rules by June 6, 2027.

By comparison, rulemaking for usage of commercial drones went from government mandate to final implementation in four years.

MIT researchers have created a high-tech "bubble wrap" capable of collecting safe drinking water directly from the air — even in Death Valley, the driest desert in North America.

The new water harvester is a major step towards providing safe, accessible drinking water to people across the globe — and works wherever you may find water vapor in the air, scientists said in a new study published June 11 in the journal Nature Water.

The water harvester is made from hydrogel (a highly water-absorbent material) that is enclosed between two layers of glass — much like a window. At night, the device absorbs water vapor from the atmosphere. During the day, the water condenses on the glass thanks to a coating that keeps the glass cool. The liquid water then drips down the glass and is collected in a system of tubes.

The hydrogel is formed into a special shape, a series of domes resembling a sheet of bubble wrap that swells up when absorbing water vapor. The domes increase the material’s surface area, which increases the amount of water it can hold.

Researchers tested the new device for a week in Death Valley, a unique desert valley spanning across parts of California and Nevada. It’s the hottest place in the world and the driest place in North America.

Related: 2 billion people could face chaotic and 'irreversible' shift in rainfall patterns if warming continues

It produced about a quarter to two-thirds of a cup of water every day (57-161.5 milliliters). In more humid areas, the device should produce even more water. This design is a lot more effective than some previous attempts to collect drinking water from air, all without needing electricity to power it, MIT representatives said in a statement.

The researchers also solved another long-standing problem with the quality of water collected using hydrogel designs. Lithium salts, added to the hydrogel to increase water absorption, normally leak into the water in similar designs, rendering the water unsafe to drink without further processing. This new design includes a salt stabilizer called glycerol which reduces the leakage below 0.06 ppm, the US Geological Survey’s estimate for how much lithium salt can be present in groundwater before it might be unsafe to drink.

While one panel might not produce enough water to sustain an entire household, they don’t take up much space — which means multiple panels could be set up for a single household. The researchers estimate that using eight 3 foot by 6 foot (1 m by 2 m) panels could be enough to supply households anywhere that there isn’t easy access to safe drinking water. Compared to the costs of bottled water in the US, the device could pay for itself in less than a month and last at least one year.

“We imagine that you could one day deploy an array of these panels, and the footprint is very small because they are all vertical,” Xuanhe Zhao, one of the paper’s authors and a professor of both MIT’s mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering departments, said in the statement. “Now people can build it even larger, or make it into parallel panels, to supply drinking water to people and achieve real impact.”

The team plans to test the panels in additional resource-limited environments to learn more about the device’s performance under different conditions.

Scientists in Switzerland have created a new "living" material that contains blue-green algae and could one day be used in buildings to fight climate change, they say.

Thanks to the blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, the new material is photosynthetic. This means it can chemically convert carbon dioxide (CO₂), sunlight and water into oxygen and sugars, which promote growth.

In the presence of certain nutrients, the material can also convert CO₂ into solid carbonate minerals, such as limestone, the researchers said in a new study, published April 23 in the journal Nature Communications. Over time, these minerals build a robust lattice inside the material that strengthens it and stores carbon in a more stable form than photosynthesis does.

"The material can store carbon not only in biomass, but also in the form of minerals — a special property of these cyanobacteria," study co-author Mark Tibbitt, an associate professor of macromolecular engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, said in a statement. "As a building material, it could help to store CO₂ directly in buildings in the future."

Without the ability to sequester carbon in mineral form, the new material would be floppy and jelly-like. But by producing a mineral skeleton with CO₂ and nutrients, the material gradually enhances its own mechanical strength, making it a good candidate for construction, according to the study.

The researchers suggest the material could one day be used as a coating on building facades to suck CO₂ directly out of the atmosphere. In the study, the material continuously sequestered CO₂ for 400 consecutive days, storing approximately 26 milligrams of CO₂ per gram of material in the form of carbonate precipitates. This rate is highly efficient and significantly higher than other forms of biological CO₂ sequestration, the researchers said.

Related: New wonder material designed by AI is as light as foam but as strong as steel

The material's increasingly vibrant green color is evidence that it stores CO₂ in the form of biomass. But cyanobacteria can only grow so much, and the rate at which carbon was stored inside the bacterial cells leveled out after about 30 days, according to the study. This means that carbon sequestration in the form of biomass decreases beyond this timeframe, but it doesn't stop.

The base of the new material is a 3D printable hydrogel — a gel with a high water content made of cross-linked molecules. The researchers selected a porous hydrogel and grew cyanobacteria inside it, ensuring that enough light, water and CO₂ could penetrate the gel to reach the bacteria. The scientists then tested different shapes of hydrogel to determine the best geometry for cyanobacteria survival.

"Cyanobacteria are among the oldest life forms in the world," study co-author Yifan Cui, a doctoral student in macromolecular engineering at ETH Zurich, said in the statement. "They are highly efficient at photosynthesis and can utilize even the weakest light to produce biomass from CO₂ and water."

In the study, the researchers bathed the hydrogels in artificial seawater to supply the necessary nutrients for mineral precipitation. Further research is needed to determine how those nutrients, which include calcium and magnesium, could be injected into the material if it was coating a building.

In the meantime, the researchers are dreaming up different shapes that the material could take. At an architecture exhibition in Venice, the team presented their material in the form of two tree trunk-like objects that could each absorb up to 40 pounds (18 kilograms) of CO₂ per year — or as much as a 20-year-old pine tree, according to the statement.

It might be possible to genetically engineer cyanobacteria to increase their photosynthetic rates before embedding them in the material, the researchers noted in the study.

"We see our living material as a low-energy and environmentally friendly approach that can bind CO₂ from the atmosphere and complement existing chemical processes for carbon sequestration," Tibbitt said.

As news reports broadcast images of planes flipping upside down, performing emergency landings or colliding into unforeseen obstacles, many people may be nervous about air travel. Some may wonder, is there a seat on the plane that will maximize my safety? What's the safest seat on a plane?

First, it's important to note that air travel is one of the safest modes of transportation. "The fatality rate is way, way lower than driving a car," said Cheng-Lung Wu, an associate professor in the School of Aviation at the University of New South Wales in Australia. In the United States, your odds of dying in commercial air travel is 1 in 13.7 million for each flight, according to a 2024 study in the Journal of Air Transport Management. The vast majority of passenger plane crashes, around 94%, also have a 100% survival rate, according to data between 2001 and 2017 from the National Transportation Safety Board.

However, there have been no robust scientific studies investigating which seats on an airplane are the safest, Wu said. But based on past plane crashes and knowledge of airplane design, it's possible to infer the safest seat in the event of an accident.

"It all depends on the crash dynamics," said Daniel Kwasi Adjekum, an aviation safety researcher at the University of North Dakota. Of course, if the plane is completely obliterated, you're doomed no matter where you sit.

But say a crash happens with low energy and a low angle of impact, for instance if the plane loses control upon landing, and it goes off the runway. "Then it really matters where you are seated to be able to survive structurally," Adjekum said.

In these instances, the plane may break into two sections upon hitting the ground, and much of the kinetic energy would be in the front section of the plane, making it barrel forward. In this case, the back of the plane would be safer. Indeed, a 2015 analysis of Federal Aviation Administration data by Time magazine found that the back third of the plane had the lowest fatality rate.

Related: Can a commercial airplane do a barrel roll?

Wu also noted another spot that may offer more protection: seats next to or close to the plane's wings. This part of the plane has a lot of structural reinforcement, so it can withstand more force. These seats are close to the emergency exits, Wu said, which means you can evacuate more quickly (unless you are seated in the emergency exit row and need to help others evacuate the plane).

But a danger lurks underneath this middle part of the plane: the fuel tanks. Although planes are supposed to empty their fuel tanks before landing, these capsules may still emit smoke or catch fire in a crash. In these scenarios, it's even more important to evacuate the plane quickly, within 90 seconds, Adjekum said. That means leaving your luggage behind, and not panicking, filming the accident or performing other actions that could slow you down.

"You have to listen to the instruction from the cabin crew," Adjekum said. "I think that's the most important thing." Planes are generally well engineered to minimize risk, he added. Parts of the plane can break off to protect the main cabin, seats are very securely attached, and seat belts are designed to minimize crash forces for a sitting passenger.

Beyond wearing seat belts and following safety instructions, be aware of your surroundings. "Know where you sit," Wu said. Locate the nearest emergency exit, and count the rows to the exit in case smoke obscures your view.

So, the next time you're on a plane, take note of your environment, listen closely to the safety video, and stay tuned for instructions in the event of an incident.

China is set to deploy the largest drone carrier in the world by the end of June. Nicknamed the "drone mothership," the aircraft promises to provide China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with more capability to deploy swarms of drones for combat, surveillance, emergency rescue missions, and other purposes.

The Jiu Tian drone carrier, an 11-ton (10 tonnes) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), can carry up to 100 smaller UAVs weighing an additional 6.6 tons (6 tonnes) up to 4,350 miles (7,000 km), according to a report published in the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

The aircraft was introduced in November at the international Zhuhai Air Show, China’s biggest aerospace trade show, and has the potential to launch kamikaze drones (also called loitering munitions) — UAVs that are designed to wait until their target is found, then intercept and crash into them, often while armed with explosives.

Kamikaze drones are becoming more common in warfare — Russia has used them extensively in its invasion of Ukraine to target power stations, population centers, and military equipment. Ukraine has combated their use by shooting down the drones before they can strike, setting up advanced air defense systems from allies, and building makeshift cages from chain link fencing and tree branches around likely targets.

Unlike kamikaze drones already in use, China’s drone "mothership" is designed to launch entire swarms of coordinating drones that might be able to overwhelm some existing air defense systems, according to the South China Morning Post.

"The big thing that really keeps me up at night is swarms," Col. Andrew Konicki, the head of the US Marine Corps Systems Command’s ground-based air defense said at a military exposition for US Marines on April 30.

Individual drones are often viewed as expendable, but when working together, they can accomplish a lot — especially when coordinated using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to navigate obstacles and respond to some attempts to interfere with their operations. Also, drone swarms are often cheaper to build and maintain than the defence systems used to shoot them down, depending on the level of technology and size of the swarm.

However, questions remain over how practical the Jiu Tian would be in some scenarios, and there isn’t a lot of information about the carrier’s technical specifications.

"China's display of advanced weapons systems can generate hype in ways that can align with deterrent and propaganda objectives, even when the actual capabilities remain unconfirmed," Elsa Kania, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Live Science in an email. Her research centers on China’s military strategy, defense innovation, and emerging technologies.

"For instance, given its size, there are reasons to question the survivability of the Jiutian in highly contested environments, even equipped with electronic warfare capabilities.The Chinese defense industry is also a leading exporter of unmanned systems, which has accelerated the global diffusion of these capabilities. The displaying of and deliberate disclosures about advanced unmanned systems can also serve advertising purposes sometimes in that regard."

Jiu Tian's drone swarms also have many applications beyond combat, including resource monitoring, disaster relief, and emergency response operations thanks to its modular payload design. Swarms could make it a lot easier to assess damage from natural disasters, look for survivors, and help rescuers navigate dangerous terrain.

The aircraft's first mission is expected to begin before the end of June and will consist of operational tests before it joins the rest of the PLA's UAV fleet.

President Donald Trump announced a plan to build a missile defense system, called the Golden Dome, on May 20, 2025. The system is intended to protect the United States from ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles, and missiles launched from space.

Trump is calling for the current budget to allocate US$25 billion to launch the initiative, which the government projected will cost $175 billion. He said Golden Dome will be fully operational before the end of his term in three years and will provide close to 100% protection.

The Conversation U.S. asked Iain Boyd, an aerospace engineer and director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado Boulder, about the Golden Dome plan and the feasibility of Trump's claims. Boyd receives funding for research unrelated to Golden Dome from defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

Related: How do intercontinental ballistic missiles work?

How will Golden Dome differ from Iron Dome?

Similar to Iron Dome, Golden Dome will consist of sensors and interceptor missiles but will be deployed over a much wider geographical region and for defense against a broader variety of threats in comparison with Iron Dome.

A second-generation Golden Dome system in the future would likely use directed energy weapons such as high-energy lasers and high-power microwaves to destroy missiles. This approach would significantly increase the number of shots that defenders can take against ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles.

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

Scientists say they've created a battery that can stretch and bend without losing power. The discovery paves the way for wearable technology, smart medical devices, and robots with human-like movements.

"The texture is a bit like toothpaste," senior author Aiman Rahmanudin, an assistant professor at Linköping University in Sweden, said in a statement. "The material can, for instance, be used in a 3D printer to shape the battery as you please. This opens up for a new type of technology."

Traditional batteries face a tradeoff between size/flexibility and power. The scientists at Linköping University's Laboratory of Organic Electronics solved that problem by using materials that can hold and conduct negative and positive charges to power devices regardless of their energy demands. The findings were published April 11 in the journal Science Advances.

"Batteries are the largest component of all electronics," Rahmanudin said. "Today they are solid and quite bulky. But with a soft and conformable battery, there are no design limitations. It can be integrated into electronics in a completely different way and adapted to the user."

Related: Amazingly simple discovery extends Li-ion battery lifespan by 50% — meaning you don't have to replace your gadgets as often

Separating battery capacity from battery size with organic materials

To produce their design, the researchers reimagined the active ingredients, d the connective portions and the terminals that make up a battery. The active ingredients of cathodes (positive charges) and anodes (negative charges) are made of modified lignin, an organic material. The connections or positive and negative terminals of the battery are still metallic but they're made of nanographite and silver nanowires that are small enough to remain flexible with the rest of the battery.

The result is a battery that behaves somewhat like a water balloon — retaining its overall shape and holding a large amount of material while remaining flexible, the scientists said in the study.

"The study from Linköping University demonstrates a groundbreaking approach to battery design," Pragathi Darapaneni, a senior product development engineer at Schaeffler Asia, told Live Science in an email. "By utilizing fluid electrodes, the researchers have created a battery that maintains functionality while being deformable. This could lead to significant advancements in the design of wearable and implantable devices.​"

Potential applications of this discovery include insulin pumps, pacemakers and hearing aids, along with e-textiles containing electronics in clothing that conform to the user's body, and soft robotics that enable robots to bend and flex smoothly.

The researchers said in the study that they've based their soft battery on conductive plastics (conjugated polymers) and lignin, a byproduct of the paper production. The battery can be recharged and discharged over 500 times and still maintain its performance. It can also be stretched to double the length and still work just as well."

While the researchers state the battery isn't perfect, since the concept is proven at 0.9 volts and most batteries charge at minimum 1.5 volts, they are looking for chemical compounds to expand the voltage capabilities.

"While promising, fluid batteries must be evaluated for potential risks, ensuring that the materials used are non-toxic and safe for prolonged contact with human skin," Darapeni wrote about the study.

Nearly two millennia after the height of the Roman Empire, some of its structures are still standing. These marvels have stood the test of time, including the Pantheon in Rome; the Roman aqueducts in Segovia, Spain; and the Roman baths in England.

The longevity of these structures can be attributed largely to Roman concrete. But what makes Roman concrete so special? What is it about this material that has allowed structures to stand for thousands of years?

Researchers still puzzle over exactly how Roman concrete was made, but they have a few clues, including many of its ingredients and that it is self-healing when it rains.

How is concrete made

First, it's important to understand how concrete, in general, is made. Modern concrete begins with cement, which is a fine powder that turns into a paste when mixed with water. A key ingredient in cement is the sedimentary rock limestone, which is largely made of calcium carbonate, a compound also found in the natural world, including in egg and seashells. Limestone gets mixed with other materials, like clay, and then gets heated in a kiln at 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (1,482 degrees Celsius) to produce a material called clinker. Grinding clinker, as well as some additives, into a fine powder produces cement.

Related: When was steel invented?

Today's most commonly used cement is called Portland cement. Depending on their environment, structures made of Portland cement have a lifespan of 75 to 100 years, according to Somayeh Nassiri, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis. Concrete has clearly changed since its use during Roman times, but the truth is it has been changing ever since its invention.

The use of concrete-like materials dates as far back as 6500 B.C. Stone Age Syrians accidentally developed the inorganic building compound known as lime through use of their fire pits, which likely heated surrounding rocks in a primitive version of the modern process known as calcination. Meanwhile, the Maya in Mesoamerica around 1100 B.C., developed concrete precursors using quicklime, which results from limestone heated to high temperatures, releasing carbon dioxide and changing its calcium carbonate to calcium oxide, Nassiri said.

But Roman concrete was a unique mixture, and it did wonders. "Concrete built the empire," Kevin Dicus, an associate professor of classics at the University of Oregon, told Live Science. According to Dicus, the Romans employed their concrete as far back as the third century B.C.

Roman concrete

The secrets behind Roman concrete come from both its ingredients and the methods for mixing them. One "game changer," according to Dicus, was pozzolan, or ash. The Romans used ash from the volcanic beds of the Italian city Pozzuoli and shipped it all over the empire. Today, pozzolan includes pumice and fly ash, which is a byproduct of coal combustion. The silica and alumina in the ash react with lime and water in a pozzolanic reaction at ambient temperatures, resulting in a stronger, longer lasting concrete. Pozzolan is also used to make hydraulic cement, which can harden underwater.

Another key ingredient is lime clasts, or small chunks of quicklime, Dicus said. These clasts give Roman concrete its self-healing capability. Concrete weathers and weakens over time, but water can infiltrate its cracks and reach the clasts. When they react with the water, the clasts create crystals called calcites that fill in the cracks. In this way, Roman concrete can heal itself. For example, the 2,000-year-old Tomb of Caecilia Metella near Rome displays cracks filled with calcites, which suggests that at some point since its construction water activated the clasts within its concrete.

A team of researchers at MIT illustrated the clasts' effect in a 2023 study published in the journal Science Advances. They analyzed Roman concrete with scanning electron microscopes and X-rays to see what made it strong and understand how it was made, while the Romans seemed to intuit this marvel of engineering. "Was this just some happy accident, or did they actually know what they were doing?" Dicus pondered.

The Romans also utilized a method known as hot mixing, which involves combining quicklime with pozzolan, water and other ingredients and then heating them up. The MIT team found that this method helps unlock the lime clasts' self-healing abilities, and can result in faster setting than cement made with a quicklime-water solution called slaked lime, which Dicus said is the norm today.

Researchers are still digging into Roman concrete. "We're still discovering some of the methods they used in mixing it and preparing the materials," Nassiri said.

In its current mixing process, Portland cement doesn't permit the formation of lime clasts, Dicus explained. The clinker produced in the kiln is ground into a fine powder, destroying all potential clasts. In contrast, when the Romans likely hot mixed quicklime, ash, and water, the clasts remained "as small inclusions in the cement," he said.

Whether the Romans understood the full brilliance of their cement recipe, its greatness shines through its longevity. Even today, there's nothing quite like touching a Roman wall. "This is 2,000 years old, and it is just as hard as the day it was poured," Dicus said.

Roman emperor quiz: Test your knowledge on the rulers of the ancient empire

For the first time ever, scientists in China have refueled an experimental nuclear reactor without shutting it down — a significant advance in weaning the world off fossil fuels and onto more efficient, low-carbon energy sources

The breakthrough, achieved using a prototype molten-salt design which runs on liquid thorium instead of uranium, means that China "now leads the global frontier" in nuclear innovation, the project's lead scientist, Xu Hongjie, said during an April 8 meeting at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Thorium reactors were first developed in the 1950s in the U.S., before it went all-in on uranium, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Following this decision, this early research was later declassified, and the Chinese researchers made use of it for the current project.

"The US left its research publicly available, waiting for the right successor. We were that successor," Xu said at the meeting, as reported by the South China Morning Post, which cites Guangming Daily. Drawing on Aesop's classic fable, he added: "Rabbits sometimes make mistakes or grow lazy. That's when the tortoise seizes its chance."

The secret facility housing the reactor, which came online in June 2024, is reportedly hidden away in the Gobi Desert in the north of the country near the Mongolian border. It can sustainably generate two megawatts (2MW) of energy — enough to power up to 2,000 households and about twice the minimum of standard utility-scale generators, which, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), "have a nameplate generation capacity of at least 1 MW".

An abandoned technology, an abundant fuel

Thorium reactors are a type of molten salt reactor (MSR) that — as the name suggests — dissolve a fuel source into a molten salt, which can act as both a coolant and part of the fuel mix.

Once funneled inside the reactor chamber, this mixture is heated to temperatures above 1,112 Fahrenheit (600 degrees Celsius) and bombarded with high-energy neutrons, causing the thorium to form uranium-233 atoms that split and release energy via nuclear fission.

Molten salt nuclear reactors are considered significantly safer than their solid fuel counterparts as they can't suffer a meltdown — their already molten fuel simply cools and solidifies when exposed to air. This means that disasters such as those that happened at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 wouldn't be possible with a thorium reactor. The reactors also produce significantly less nuclear waste than standard uranium reactors. In fact, waste from solid fuel uranium reactors can be fed as fuel into molten salt reactors.

While uranium can be used in MSRs, scientists generally prefer thorium because it is easier to mine and three-times more abundant than uranium.

China has long targeted getting a fully-fledged thorium-powered power station online. The country contributes roughly 27% of the world's global carbon emissions, and Chinese President Xi Jinping intends to make it carbon-neutral by 2060.

Thorium is a particularly attractive way to meet this target for China because it recently discovered vast amounts of the element in its territory. A national geographical survey found the country has, by some estimates, enough of the material to satisfy its energy needs for 60,000 years, the South China Morning Post reported.

Molten-salt reactor concepts were first devised in 1946 as part of a plan by the United States Army Air Forces (the predecessor to the U.S. Air Force) to create a nuclear-powered supersonic jet.

But the experiments had too many snags, including the molten salt corroding the reactor metal, leading to their abandonment in 1954. Several groups have attempted to make viable thorium reactors since then, but the element's weak radioactivity made it difficult to build fission reactions up to sustainable levels.

It isn't yet clear how China, which has been working on thorium molten salt reactors since the 1970s, solved these technical problems. But Xu attributes it to consistent application.

"In the nuclear game, there are no quick wins," he said at the meeting. "You need to have strategic stamina, focusing on doing just one thing for 20, 30 years."

The most advanced fighter jets in the world are known as "fifth generation". They contain technologies developed in the first part of the 21st century. Examples of fifth generation fighter jets include America's F-35 Lightning II and F-22 Raptor, China's Chengdu J-20 and Russia's Sukhoi SU-57.

Now, however, nations are moving ahead with the sixth generation of combat jets. In the past few months, China has flown its J36 and J50 prototype jets. Meanwhile, the US has selected Boeing to build a new fighter aircraft called the F-47.

As with previous generations, the sixth will incorporate major advances in aircraft design, onboard electronics (avionics) and weapon systems.

Related: Boom Supersonic's XB-1 smashes the sound barrier — becoming the 1st civil aircraft to go supersonic in US history

But how will the new generation of jets stand out from the previous one? Future combat jets will not see dramatic increases in maximum speed, nor in flight performance. Instead, the true innovations will be in how these systems operate and achieve dominance in aerial combat.

Like the fifth generation, the sixth will be dominated by stealth technology. This helps fighter jets to reduce their chances of being detected by infrared and radar sensors, to the point that when their signatures are eventually picked up, the opponent has no time to act.

Stealth is achieved through particular shapes of airframe (such as diamond shapes) and coatings on the aircraft — called radar absorbing materials. The airframe is the fundamental structural framework of an aircraft, encompassing the fuselage, wings, tail assembly and landing gear.

The diamond-like shapes that already characterise fifth generation jets are likely to remain in the upcoming generation of fighter, but they will evolve.

A common feature we're likely to see is the reduction or complete removal of vertical tails at the back of the aircraft and their control surfaces. In current aircraft, these tails provide directional stability and control in flight, allowing the aircraft to maintain its course and maneuver.

However, sixth generation jets could achieve this control with the help of thrust vectoring — the ability to manipulate the direction of engines and therefore the direction of thrust (the force that moves the jet through the air).

The role of vertical tails could also be partially replaced by devices called fluidic actuators. These apply forces to the the wing by blowing high speed and high pressure air on different parts of it.

The removal of the vertical tails would contribute to the fighter's stealth. The new generation of fighters is also likely to see the use of novel radar absorbing materials with advanced capabilities.

We'll see the introduction of what are known as adaptive cycle engines on sixth generation fighters. These engines will feature what's known as a three stream design, which refers to the airstreams blowing through the engine. Current jets have two airstreams: one that passes through the core of the engine, and another that bypasses the core.

The development of a third stream provides an extra source of air flow to increase the engine's fuel efficiency and performance. This will allow both the capability to cruise efficiently at supersonic speed and deliver a high thrust during combat.

It is likely that China and the US will build two separate fighters with different airframes. One will have a bigger airframe, designed for use in an area like the Pacific Ocean region. Here, the ability to fly further and carry a heavier payload will be key, because of the distances involved. Airframes designed for this region will therefore be larger.

Another fighter jet carrying a smaller airframe will be designed for use in areas such as Europe where agility and maneuverability will be more important.

The next wave of jets will have a system in the cockpit that gathers lots of information from other aircraft, ground surveillance stations and satellites. It would then integrate this data to give an enhanced situational awareness to the pilot. This system would also able to actively jam enemy sensors.

Another key feature will be the deployment of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (Ucavs), a form of drone aircraft. The piloted fighter jet would be able to control a variety of Ucavs, ranging from loyal wingmen to cheaper, unpiloted fighter jets that will assist the mission, including protecting the piloted fighter.

This will all be the responsibility of something called the advanced digital cockpit, a software-driven system that will use virtual reality and allow the pilot to effectively become a battle manager. Artificial intelligence (AI) will be a key feature of the support systems for the drones. This will allow them to be controlled with complete autonomy. The pilot will assign the main task — such as, "attack that enemy jet in that sector" — and the system will carry out the mission without any further input.

Another advancement will be the weapon systems, with the adoption of missiles that not only will be capable of traveling at hypersonic speeds, but will also incorporate stealth features. This will further reduce the reaction times of enemy forces. Directed energy weapons systems, such as laser weapons, could potentially appear in later stages, as this technology is under study.

Under America's sixth generation fighter program, the US Navy is working on a separate jet called the F/A-XX, complementing the F-47.

The UK, Italy and Japan are also working on a jet project known as the global combat air program (GCAP). This will replace the Eurofighter Typhoon in service with the UK and Italy and the Mitsubishi F-2 in service with Japan.

Germany, Spain and France are working on a fighter program called the future combat air system (FCAS). This could supersede Germany and Spain's Typhoons and France's Rafale.

The path for sixth generation fighter jets seems to have already been traced, but uncertainties remain. The feasibility of some of the characteristics described and development times and costs are not yet well defined. This interval of time was more than ten years for fifth generation fighter jets — and the sixth is going to be far more complex in terms of requirements and capability.

A new generation of fighter jet is expected to remain on active duty for something like 30 years. But warfare across the world evolves rapidly. It is unclear whether the design requirements we are fixing today remain relevant over the coming years.

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

Scientists have created a stretchable, flexible, self-healing hydrogel battery that's free of the toxic components and moisture-related problems that have previously stood in the way of such products. The researchers demonstrated its robustness by cutting, stabbing and aggressively twisting it.

Conventional soft lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries have suffered from performance degradation that arises from moisture penetration. They also pose potential safety risks from toxic, flammable electrolytes, the scientists said.

To address these challenges, the researchers developed an electrolyte with a fluorine-free lithium salt. They outlined their findings in a study published April 9 in the journal Science Advances.

Hydrogel batteries use water-based electrolytes, which are nonflammable and less prone to leakage or explosions than are Li-ion batteries. The prototype stretchable Li-ion battery utilizes hydrogel as both electrolyte and separator. Because they are fluorine-free, they are also safer for the environment and less toxic to humans, the scientists said in the study.

Enduring 'torture'

The team tested the prototype batteries in a range of situations they described as "torture". The devices were attacked with sharp blades, cut, stabbed, twisted, and exposed to extreme heat and humidity.

The battery retained or maintained stable operation and demonstrated stable ambient operation for more than 500 charge-discharge cycles over one month.

Related: 'Springy' solid-state battery is twice the width of a white blood cell and could drastically increase EV range

The hydrogel maintained a 19% water content at 50% relative humidity, allowing for effective battery operation without rigid packaging. In contrast, standard Li-ion batteries often require rigid, hermetic packaging to provide enough protection for them to function reliably.

The self-healing hydrogel, electrolyte and elastomer package enabled the battery to regain about 90% of its original capacity, even after sustaining a cut.

The hydrogel batteries' water-based electrolytes rely on polymeric structures, which reduce material density but, consequently, limit charge-holding capacity. Li-ion can reach 200 to 300 watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg), whereas hydrogel batteries range from 50 to 150 Wh/kg.

Traditional batteries are more suitable for high-energy applications, like electric vehicles and large-scale power storage. Hydrogel batteries, on the other hand, are better for next-generation flexible electronics. These include products such as flexible fitness trackers, biosensors and health monitors embedded into clothing, as well as smart garments with built-in heating elements or LED displays. Their self-healing characteristics mean that operations can be continued without interruption or need for replacement.

Space exploration would also benefit from the improved resilience of a battery capable of flexibility and self-healing, as would underwater robots, which have the additional need for water resistance and salt tolerance.

Thousands of gallons of ill-aimed pee could be spared from lavatory floors thanks to a new urinal design, scientists say.

Around 1 million liters (264,172 gallons) of urine are spilled onto the floor and walls of public restrooms each day in the U.S. thanks to current urinal shapes, creating hygiene issues and unpleasant smells.

But now, in a new study published Tuesday (April 8) in the journal PNAS Nexus, scientists have proposed a new urinal design that could significantly reduce this spillage — improving the hygiene of public bathrooms and reducing cleaning costs.

Urinals have not changed much since they started becoming popular in 19th-century Europe, as part of growing public health reforms in fast-growing cities. There are now around 56 million public restrooms across the U.S. alone, the scientists said in the study.

"Urinals are a staple of public spaces yet their designs have remained essentially stagnant for over a century,” the researchers wrote in the study. "The use of urinals often results in significant splatter (splashback) as urine splashes upon impact with the urinal generating droplets which travel back onto the floor and user."

This splashback is a breeding ground for bacteria, resulting in bad smells in public restrooms and the potential for the spread of diseases.

Related: The Physics of Peeing, and How to Avoid Splash-Back

"The surfaces of urinals have significantly higher concentrations of bacteria than traditional toilets, with surrounding floors having the highest level," the researchers added.

This high level of spillage of urine requires frequent cleaning, which uses a large volume of water, is unpleasant work for custodial staff and is very expensive.

Some bathrooms attempt to reduce splashback using urinal screens, mats, or even stickers to tell people where to aim their urine. The use of such stickers at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport was found to reduce splashback by between 50 and 80% and lower cleaning costs by 8%.

New urinal designs are making a splash

To resolve these problems, the team created a fluid physics model of how a stream of liquid splashes when it hits a surface like the back of a urinal, and experimentally tested these models by spraying liquid at surfaces at various angles.

They mimicked a stream of urine by creating a "pseudo-urethra nozzle," which had the same internal geometry as a human urethra, and used dyed liquid to better determine where splashback was occurring.

They found that when the urine stream hit the surface at less than 30 degrees, the level of splashback was reduced to only 1.4% of the levels seen in a traditional urinal design.

They used these models to design two new urinal shapes, which they dubbed Cornucopia and Nautilus. The Cornucopia somewhat resembles a public trash can, while the Nautilus wouldn't look out of place in an avant-garde furniture store.

The researchers' Cornucopia and Nautilus designs both achieved a significant reduction in urine splashing, with the Cornucopia performing best. However, the Nautilus was considered the most ideal design due to its height, which would allow shorter people — including children or those in wheelchairs — to more easily use it. Its larger gape would also be easier to clean, and would be more accepting of poor aim, and therefore would also be appropriate for use on boats or airplanes.

The researchers suggest that if Nautilus was to replace the 56 million urinals across the U.S., around 1 million liters of urine would be prevented from being splashed onto the floor every day. Assuming that the volume of water needed to clean up spilled urine is about 10 times that of the volume of urine, about 10 million liters (2,199,692 gallons) of fresh water could be saved every day, the scientists said.

The widespread adoption of these urinal designs "would result in considerable conservation of human resources, cost, cleaning chemicals, and water usage, rendering large-scale impacts on modern society by improving sustainability, hygiene, and accessibility," the researchers wrote.

A close look at air flow around high-speed shapes reveals surprising turbulence, according to a new study. The findings, published March 7 in the journal Physical Review Fluids, could inform the design of future high-speed vehicles.

In the study, researchers used three-dimensional simulations to reveal unexpected disturbances around fast-moving cones.

At hypersonic speeds — above Mach 5, or more than 5 times the speed of sound (3,836 mph or 6,174 kilometers per hour) — the flow of air around a vehicle's surface becomes complex and bumpy. Most simulations assume that the flow is symmetrical around the whole cone, but until recently, studies of the transition from streamlined to turbulent were only possible in two dimensions so we couldn't be sure that there weren't any asymmetries in flow around a three-dimensional structure.

The findings could help engineers design stronger, faster vehicles able to withstand the extreme temperatures, pressures and vibrations felt during hypersonic flight.

"Transitioning flows are 3D and unsteady in nature, regardless of the flow geometry," study co-author Irmak Taylan Karpuzcu, an aerospace engineer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said in a statement.

"Experiments were conducted in 3D in the early 2000s [but they] didn't provide enough data to determine any 3D effects or unsteadiness because there weren't enough sensors all around the cone-shaped model. It wasn't wrong. It was just all that was possible then."

Going supersonic

Using the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, Karpuzcu and aerospace engineer Deborah Levin simulated how air flow around a cone-shaped object — often used as a simplified model for hypersonic vehicles — changes in three dimensions at high speed.

They studied both a single cone and a double cone, which helps scientists study how multiple shock waves interact with each other.

"Normally, you would expect the flow around the cone to be concentric ribbons, but we noticed breaks in the flow within shock layers both in the single and double cone shapes," Karpuzcu said.

These breaks were particularly prevalent around the tip of the cone. At high speeds, the shock wave lies closer to the cone, squeezing air molecules into unstable layers and amplifying instabilities in the airflow. The team confirmed their findings by running a program that tracks each simulated air molecule and captures how collisions between the molecules affect air flow.

The disturbances also seem to develop at high speeds. "As you increase the Mach number, the shock gets closer to the surface and promotes these instabilities. It would be too expensive to run the simulation at every speed, but we did run it at Mach 6 and did not see a break in the flow," Karpuzcu said.

The breaks could affect design considerations for hypersonic vehicles, which could be used for shipping, weapons and transportation, Karpuzcu said, as engineers will need to account for the newly observed discontinuities.

A new type of flat, razor-thin telescope lens could transform deep-space stargazing by making it possible to mount lightweight but powerful telescopes onto aircraft and satellites, scientists say.

Refractor telescopes normally use curved lenses to magnify distant objects through a process called refraction. Similar to a magnifying glass, the curved lens of a telescope bends light and directs it to a focal point, making objects appear larger.

However, traditional lenses quickly become impractical for space telescopes studying stars or galaxies millions of light years away. This is because the further away an object is, the more magnification is required to bring it into focus, and therefore the thicker and heavier the lens needs to be.

That's why scientists have explored flat lenses, which should in theory be lighter and less bulky. The challenge with them, however, is that light interacts with them differently than with curved lenses.

Visible light is a type of electromagnetic radiation, which is transmitted in waves or particles at different wavelengths and frequencies. When light passes through a flat lens, it diffracts, scattering wavelengths in multiple directions and resulting in a blurry, unfocused image.

But a new "multilevel diffractive lens" (MDL) developed by scientists features a multi-level structure consisting of "microscopically small concentric rings." These effectively channel different wavelengths of light towards the same focal point to create a sharp, color-accurate image.

Related: Could we turn the sun into a gigantic telescope?

The new 100-millimeter (3.9-inch) diameter lens, which has a 200 mm (7.8 in) focal length, is just 2.4 micrometers thick. Optimized for the 400 to 800 nm wavelength range for visible light, this lens is much lighter than a conventional curved lens and eliminates color distortions.

The scientists published their findings Feb. 3 in the journal Applied Physics Letters. The study was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA and the Office of Naval Research.

"Our demonstration is a stepping stone towards creating very large aperture lightweight flat lenses with the capability of capturing full-color images for use in air- and space-based telescopes," lead study author Apratim Majumder, assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Utah, said in a statement.

Ahead of the curve

Scientists have designed flat lenses in the past, most notably the fresnel zone plate (FZP), which features concentric ridges etched across the surface. However, the ridges of FZPs break light into separate wavelengths and diffract them at different angles, resulting in color distortions.

The MDL is unique in that its concentric rings exist at varying depths within the lens itself. As light passes through, the microscopic indentations adjust how different wavelengths diffract, preventing them from spreading apart as they normally would. This controlled diffraction brings all wavelengths of light into focus at the same time, resulting in a sharper, color-accurate image.

As well as avoiding the color distortions of FZPs, the researchers said the new flat lens offered the same light-bending power as traditional curved lenses. In the study, they used the MDL to capture images of the sun and moon. Lunar images they took revealed key geological features, while they also used it in solar imaging to capture visible sunspots.

"Simulating the performance of these lenses over a very large bandwidth, from visible to near-infrared, involved solving complex computational problems involving very large datasets," Majumder said in the statement. "Once we optimized the design of the lens’ microstructures, the manufacturing process required very stringent process control and environmental stability."

The researchers said the technology had applications in astronomy, astrophotography and other "long-range imaging tasks" including "airborne and space-based imaging applications." What's more, production may not be far off.

"Our computational techniques suggested we could design multi-level diffractive flat lenses with large apertures that could focus light across the visible spectrum and we have the resources in the Utah Nanofab to actually make them," study co-author Rajesh Menon, professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of Utah, said in the statement.

NASA and Boom Supersonic just released an incredible photo capturing a shockwave emanating from the dark silhouette of the supersonic XB-1 aircraft while it traveled in front of the sun during a Feb. 10 test flight during which it broke the sound barrier three times.

"This image makes the invisible visible — the first American made civil supersonic jet breaking the sound barrier," Blake Scholl, Boom Supersonic founder and CEO, said in a statement.

The photo was no accident. It required ideal conditions and perfect timing. Chief test pilot Tristan "Geppetto" Brandenburg cut a path to a precise spot over the Mojave Desert while NASA snapped the shot.

"Thanks to Geppetto's exceptional flying and our partnership with NASA, we were able to capture this iconic image," Scholl continued.

The photo is a Schlieren image. Developed in 1864 by German physicist August Toepler to study supersonic motion, Schlieren photography is used in today's aeronautical engineering. The method can reveal how light bends around differences in air pressure during supersonic flight.

The XB-1 team made software using NASA data to guide the pilot on a path where the aircraft could eclipse the sun. When the XB-1 entered the right spot, NASA got the photograph using ground telescopes with special filters that detect air distortions. That's why the shockwaves around the aircraft are visible in the photograph.

NASA also gathered sound data from the test flight. Boom Supersonic analyzed the data and found that no audible sonic boom reached the ground. This is notable, because supersonic flights that make sonic booms over populated areas in the U.S. are prohibited.

Boom Supersonic plans to make a supersonic airplane with a sonic boom that won't disturb people on the ground. This airplane would reduce cross-country flight times. "We confirmed that XB-1 made no audible sonic boom," Scholl said in the same statement, "which paves the way for coast to coast flights up to 50% faster."

The Feb. 10 test flight was the final one for XB-1. Now Boom Supersonic will take what they learned from the tests and start building a supersonic airliner called Overture.

Last year, Boom Supersonic finished building its super factory in Greensboro, North Carolina which will eventually pump out 66 Overture aircraft per year, starting with half that initially. United Airlines, American Airlines, and Japan Airlines already have orders and pre-orders in for the supersonic airliner.

Originally posted on Space.com.

The first nuclear weapon test, code-named "Trinity," took place in the New Mexico desert at 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945. This test was a proof of concept for the secret nuclear science taking place at Los Alamos as a part of the Manhattan Project during World War II and would lead to the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, just a few weeks later.

Since those detonations, the development of nuclear weapons has accelerated. Countries around the world have built their own nuclear stockpiles, including over 5,000 nuclear warheads held by the U.S.

Yet, even though the basic components of this technology are no longer secret, nuclear weapon development remains a scientific and engineering challenge. But why are nuclear weapons still so difficult to produce?

A big part of the difficulty comes from deriving the chemical elements used inside these weapons to create an explosion, Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told Live Science in an email.

"That basic idea of a nuclear explosion is that nuclear [fissile] materials are stimulated to release their enormous energy," he said. "To produce fissile material of sufficient purity and sufficient quantity is a challenge [and] this production requires considerable industrial capacity."

Related: How many nuclear bombs have been used?

The enormous release of energy is called a nuclear fission reaction. When this reaction occurs, a chain reaction starts where the atoms are split apart to release energy. This is the same kind of reaction that makes nuclear energy possible.

Uranium and plutonium enrichment

The fissile material inside a nuclear bomb is primarily isotopes of uranium and plutonium, which are radioactive elements, Matthew Zerphy, a professor of practice in nuclear engineering at Penn State, told Live Science. Natural uranium consists of different isotopes, including a large amount of uranium-238 (U-238) and a smaller amount of uranium-235 (U-235), which is more readily fissionable. To access this more fissionable isotope, uranium ore is mined and then goes through several processes for "enrichment" in which the U-235 concentration is increased so that it can be used for nuclear weapons.

"One way to enrich uranium is to turn it into a gas and spin it very rapidly in centrifuges," Zerphy said. "Because of the difference in mass between U-235 and U-238, the isotopes are split, and you can separate out U-235."

For weapons-grade uranium, this separation continues up to concentrations of over 90% U-235, Zerphy said. The most challenging part of this process, which can take weeks to months, is the chemical transformation of the element itself, which requires intensive energy and specialized equipment. One chemical hazard during this process is the possible release of uranium hexafluoride (UF₆), a highly toxic substance that, if inhaled, can damage the kidneys, liver, lungs, brain, skin and eyes.

The process to produce weapons-grade plutonium is even trickier, he said, because this element does not occur naturally like uranium does. Instead, plutonium is a byproduct of nuclear reactors using uranium fuel, which means to produce plutonium, scientists need to handle radioactive, spent nuclear fuel and process the material through "intense" chemical processing. The processing of this material can also pose a safety risk if a critical mass is collected accidentally, Zerphy said, which is the smallest amount of fissile material needed to sustain a self-sustaining fission reaction.

"You'd be very careful to not have that happen while you're in the process of making these components to make sure that things aren't inadvertently brought together and entering some kind of criticality," he said, which could lead to an accidental explosion.

Related: Why did the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima leave shadows of people etched on sidewalks?

Although the scientific principles of bringing these components together is well understood, creating and controlling this reaction in a fraction of a second can still be difficult.

"The weapons are designed such that when they are detonated a 'supercritical' mass of fissile material is created very quickly … in a very small space," Zerphy said. "This causes an exponential increase in the number of fissions spreading throughout the material almost instantaneously."

This quick spread of atomic fission is a big part of what makes a nuclear reaction so destructive, he said.

In the case of thermonuclear weapons, which were developed after World War II and use a combination of both nuclear fission and fusion to create an even stronger explosion, a standard fission reaction then has to spark a secondary and stronger fusion reaction. This fusion reaction is the same kind of power found at the center of the sun.

Nuclear weapons testing

Once these weapons are created, scientists and engineers need to be sure the weapons will work as needed, should they ever be used. When nuclear weapons were first developed, scientists would test the weapons themselves at test sites (which devastated the environment of the "deserted" areas where they were tested, as well as people and animals that lived nearby). In contrast, modern weapon testing relies on computer models. This is part of the work done by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

"NNSA … develop[s] tools for qualifying weapon components and certifying weapons, ensuring their survivability and effectiveness in various scenarios," an NNSA spokesperson told Live Science in an email. "This involves advanced simulations using supercomputing systems, materials science, and precision engineering to ensure weapons function as intended."

Ultimately, the complexity and challenges of building these weapons may explain why so few nuclear superpowers exist in the world today.

Editor's note: This article was updated at 12:54 p.m. ET on March 20 to note that nuclear weapons have nuclear reactions, not chemical ones, as was previously stated in the top image caption. It was updated again at 7:05 p.m. ET on March 31 to clarify how natural uranium is enriched to increase U-235 concentrations.

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

Scientists in China have created a satellite with laser-imaging technology powerful enough to capture human facial details from more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) away.

This breakthrough represents a performance increase of 100 times or more compared to leading spy cameras and traditional telescopes, according to a report on the new technology in the South China Morning Post.

Amongst a broad gamut of potential applications, the technology could allow operators to surveil foreign satellites to a previously impossible level of detail. The researchers at China’s Academy of Sciences’ Aerospace Information Research Institute outlined their findings in a new study published in the Chinese Journal of Lasers (Issue 52, Volume 3).

Related: NASA and Japan launch world's 1st wooden satellite into orbit

According to the South China Morning Post, the scientists conducted a test across Qinghai Lake in the northwest of the country with a new system based on synthetic aperture lidar (SAL), a type of laser radar capable of constructing two-dimensional or three-dimensional images.

How this new powerful spy satellite works

SAL relies on the motion of an object (like a satellite) to provide finer resolution images than other, beam-scanning radar imagery systems. Previous SAR systems have relied on microwave radiation, which has longer wavelengths, which results in lower resolution images.

However, this new system operates at optical wavelengths, which have much shorter wavelengths than microwaves and produce clearer images (though microwaves are better for penetrating into materials, because their longer wavelengths aren’t scattered or absorbed as easily).

During the test, which targeted arrays of reflective prisms placed 63.3 miles (101.8 km) away from the lidar system, the device detected details as small as 0.07 inches (1.7 millimeters) and measured distances to within 0.61 inches (15.6 mm).

This is a huge leap forward from previous milestones, like a 2011 test conducted by defense firm Lockheed Martin that was able to achieve an azimuth resolution of 0.79 inches (2 centimeters) from only 1 mile (1.6 km) away, or a Chinese test where scientists achieved a then-best 1.97 inch (5 cm) resolution at a distance of 4.3 miles (6.9 km).

To achieve this latest breakthrough, the Chinese team split the laser-beam driving the lidar system across a 4x4 micro-lens array, which in turn expanded the system’s optical aperture — the opening that controls the amount of light entering a camera system — from 0.68 to 2.71 inches (17.2 mm to 68.8 mm). In this way, researchers could bypass the tradeoff of field of vision versus size of aperture, which has historically restricted such camera systems.

It’s important to note that testing took place during near perfect weather and atmospheric conditions with steady wind and limited cloud cover. Inclement weather or other impairments to visibility could significantly impact the system’s precision and reliability.

Boom Supersonic's XB-1 has successfully broken the sound barrier, becoming the first supersonic civil aircraft in U.S. history.

Today (Jan. 28), the XB-1 took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California and reached Mach 1.1 — equivalent to 1.1 times the speed of sound, or 844 mph (1,358 km/h). It reached this record speed on three separate occasions during its 34-minute test flight.

Boom Supersonic is now the first independent company to break the sound barrier with an aircraft intended for civilian use. (The Concorde was created in agreement with the U.K. and French governments, while the Tupolev Tu-44 was designed and manufactured with support from the Soviet government.)

In the first phase of the flight, the aircraft climbed to 34,000 feet (10,300 meters) in just a few minutes, showcasing its ability to perform extremely steep climbs. It then performed several subsonic checks, running through safety measurements similar to those performed in previous XB-1 test flights.

The aircraft then pushed on to supersonic speeds. Once the aircraft hit Mach 1.1, engineers remotely activated the "flutter excitation system" to test the airflow around the craft and make sure it wasn't affecting the integrity of the plane's fuselage. After this, the aircraft performed maneuvers to try out its handling and flying abilities at high speed, as well as tested its "hands-off" behavior.

The XB-1 has a curved shape and downward-curving nose to reduce wave drag and airflow, thereby keeping it stable and preventing damage.

The XB-1 sustained its record-breaking airspeed for just a handful of minutes, as Boom Supersonic was only allowed to use a relatively small pocket of airspace.

San Francisco to Tokyo in 6 hours

The successful test flight, which was live-streamed by Boom Supersonic, proved the capabilities of several in-house technologies. In addition to its three Symphony engines, the XB-1 has two cameras on its landing gear that enable pilots to see the runway clearly, thus negating the need for a moving "droop nose" like the one on the Concorde. All in-flight performance was carefully measured by teams on the ground

"We just collected some really valuable data, and I can't wait to get my hands on that data," Nick Sheryka, chief flight test engineer for the XB-1, said during the livestream.

"The entire control room team is going to spend several days poring over the data that we collected here during today's flight," Sheryka added. "And they're going to be checking the actual performance that was demonstrated against what our models predicted, and how we expected it to fly."

Data collected on these successful tests bring the company closer to building the Boom Overture, a planned supersonic passenger airliner intended to start regular commercial operations in the 2030s.

"So we've got our litmus test here today, our proof data that we'll use to inform our future efforts on Overture," Sheryka said.

If fully realized, Boom Overture would shorten transatlantic flights to less than four hours, while a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo could take just six hours.

The XB-1 will fly at supersonic speeds again as soon as next week. The company is planning on taking photos during this flight, using a process known as "Schlieren photography," which is used to visualize shock waves.

The unofficial successor to Concorde is one step closer to reality after Boom Supersonic marked the 11th successful test flight of its XB-1 supersonic demonstrator aircraft.

On Jan. 10, the XB-1 completed a sustained flight at 728 mph (1,172 km/h) — equivalent to Mach 0.95, which is just shy of the speed of sound.

The test was conducted at a height of 29,481 feet (8,986 meters); while the aircraft flew at this speed in its 10th test, that test was at a much higher altitude and therefore a lower air pressure.

By flying so fast, so low in the latest test, the XB-1 achieved a record 383 knots equivalent airspeed — indicative of incredibly high dynamic air pressure. The aircraft will never experience such intense conditions again even when it finally breaks the sound barrier, as its in-service flights will take place at much higher altitudes where the air is thinner, company representatives said in a statement.

Putting the aircraft under this strain at transonic speed, just below the speed of sound, demonstrates the robust quality of its airframe and proves it will remain controllable at higher speeds.

The company had previously stated that it would aim to hit and exceed Mach 1 speeds in early 2025. Depending on the need for a 12th test flight, the firm is on track to meet this target.

Related: Passenger plane with entirely new 'blended wing' shape aims to hit the skies by 2030

Boom Supersonic began test flights with the XB-1 in March 2024 . Subsequent flights have probed its stability with and without its digital handling system and stress-tested the frame of the aircraft using a device that simulates the potentially disruptive energy caused by airflow at high velocity, while also pushing it to ever-faster maximum speeds.

"The second half of our test campaign is all about expanding XB-1's envelope incrementally in altitude, air speed, and Mach number until we inevitably make that sonic boom," Nick Sheryka, c​hief flight test engineer for the XB-1 at Boom Supersonic, said in a promotional video.

"But why not just go supersonic on the next flight? It's important to remember that XB-1 is not a drone; there's a human pilot inside that cockpit. With an autonomous aircraft, there's no risk to human life. This is how new space rocket technology is iterated on so quickly, but you and your family are not going to step onto a drone airliner anytime soon," he added.

Much like how SpaceX's early rocket launches laid the groundwork for its larger Starship project, the XB-1 is intended as a testing platform that Boom Supersonic can use to help develop Boom Overture, a supersonic passenger plane the company hopes will start service in the 2030s.

If successfully launched, the Boom Overture could carry 64 to 80 passengers on transatlantic journeys that will take just 3 hours and 30 minutes between London and Newark.

That U.S. Space Force X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV-7) has silently slipped past one-year of flight time.

The craft is engaged in performing aerobrake maneuvers, a technique to alter its orbit around Earth, as well as safely dispose of its attached service module.

Lofted in December of 2023, the military spaceplane was placed in an orbit higher than any of the earlier space plane missions – into a highly elliptical high Earth orbit.

From that orbit, the United States Space Force, supported by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, conducted radiation effect experiments and tested Space Domain Awareness technologies.

X-37B/OTV-7 is also referred to as United States Space Force-52 (USSF-52). This spaceplane was lofted on Dec. 28, 2023.

The OTV-7 flight marks the first time the U.S. Space Force and the X-37B have attempted to carry out a dynamic aerobraking maneuver.

Expending minimal fuel

In a statement released last year by Boeing, builder of the X37B "will perform ground-breaking aerobraking maneuvers to take the dynamic spaceplane from one Earth orbit to another while conserving fuel. Partnered with the United States Space Force, this novel demonstration is the first of its kind."

The use of the aerobraking maneuver requires the heat-tiled spacecraft to conduct a series of passes using the drag of Earth's atmosphere. That technique enables the spacecraft to change orbits while expending minimal fuel.

There are no details as yet on whether the X-37B’s aerobrake maneuvering is complete.

If so, the uncrewed vehicle was slated to resume its test and experimentation objectives until they are accomplished.

At that point, the vehicle is to de-orbit and execute a safe return to Earth, likely at the Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Landing Facility Runway.

Flight log

• OTV-1: launched on April 22, 2010 and landed on December 3, 2010, spending over 224 days on orbit.
• OTV-2: launched on March 5, 2011 and landed on June 16, 2012, spending over 468 days on orbit.
• OTV-3: launched on December 11, 2012 and landed on October 17, 2014, spending over 674 days on-orbit.
• OTV-4: launched on May 20, 2015 and landed on May 7, 2015, spending nearly 718 days on-orbit.
• OTV-5: launched on September 7, 2017 and landed on October 27, 2019, spending nearly 780 days on-orbit.
• OTV-6: launched on May 17, 2020 and landed on November 12, 2022, spending 908 days on-orbit.
• OTV-7: launched on December 28, 2023 and remains in-flight.

Originally posted on Space.com.

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.

LAS VEGAS — A novel passenger jet could take to the skies in the next five years that has a completely different shape than any currently flying.

The plane uses a "blended wing" design, which could improve fuel efficiency by 50%, JetZero and Siemens representatives said Wednesday (Jan. 8) in a press conference held at CES 2025 in Las Vegas.

The concept of blended-wing aircraft, in which the wings blend seamlessly into the body, is more than 100 years old, having been first described by Russian pilot Nicolas Woevodsky, but it is most commonly associated with military aircraft.

Related: Supersonic passenger planes 1 step closer to return after successful Boom XB-1 test flight nears sound barrier

Passenger jets have conventionally adopted a long, tubular body with wings that do not blend into a single flat plane. This is because switching to a novel plane design has been deemed commercially risky. Blended-wing aircraft, by contrast, can reduce fuel consumption and be quieter, thanks to higher lift-to-drag ratios and better integration of the noisy propulsion systems.

A new plane based on a 100-year-old design

JetZero representatives say their blended-wing design requires a shorter and wider fuselage that is blended together like the wing to provide lift, in turn reducing the surface area that is needed and creating a lighter plane with less drag. The size of the engines are also reduced, thanks to the reduced weight and drag, meaning more passengers can fit into a relatively smaller aircraft.

The new plane will be 100% compatible with sustainable aviation fuel as well as being capable of accommodating hydrogen fuel — with the long-term aim being to fly with zero emissions. It will hold 250 passengers and have a range of 5,750 miles (9,250 kilometers).

At CES, JetZero representatives announced a manufacturing partnership with Siemens to help realize the plane by 2030 — which they admitted was a very short timeframe. The companies hope they can meet this ambitious timeline thanks to digital twinning capabilities, which involve creating an exact digital replica of the proposed design. The digital twin also incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) that will help spot ways to improve the design — or whether a particular part may be replaced with one that's more optimal, for example.

"This digital twin is a strategic competitive advantage for us to be able to — with the end in mind — effectively create a simulation virtually," Tom O'Leary, co-founder and CEO of JetZero, said on stage.

Although JetZero aims to begin testing the aircraft by 2027, the factories to build it do not yet exist. In November, the company announced it had signed agreements with suppliers to create the components for the flight control system on a future prototype aircraft.

JetZero engineers are also working on an airplane for the U.S. Air Force.

A new type of solar paint could extend the range of electric vehicles (EVs) to thousands of miles.

Revealing the technology on Nov. 24, automaker Mercedes-Benz representatives said its new photovoltaic paint could power an EV for up to 7,456 miles (12,000 kilometers) per year in optimal lighting conditions.

The "nanoparticle" paint can be applied directly to the body of an EV, reducing dependence on external charging. It is also based on non-toxic and readily available raw materials, making it both environmentally friendly and cost-effective to produce, Mercedes-Benz representatives said in a statement.

The technology could be a game-changer for EVs, particularly in parts of the world that receive lots of sunlight. It would also overcome a key barrier facing current EVs: their comparatively limited range and reliance on charging infrastructure, which varies hugely worldwide.

Related: Future electric cars could go more than 600 miles on a single charge thanks to battery-boosting gel

Most current EVs use high-performance lithium-ion batteries which, while improving every day, are still hindered by long charging times and limited energy density.

Photovoltaic paint converts light energy into an electrical charge via a process known as the photovoltaic effect.

When photons (light particles) hit the paint, semiconductor nanoparticles known as quantum dots absorb the light energy and transfer it to electrons within the material. The movement of electrons creates an electric current, which is collected through tiny conductive layers embedded in the paint. This current can then be directed to the EV’s electrical system to either power its components immediately or charge its battery for later use.

Drivers in LA may never need to charge their EVs again

Mercedes-Benz's solar paint comprises a nanoparticle-based layer beneath the vehicle's topcoat that allows 94% of the sun’s energy to pass through to the photovoltaic coating underneath. The solar coating is sandwiched between the body panel and the visible layer of paint, meaning it doesn't affect the vehicle's appearance.

According to Mercedes-Benz representatives, one paint coating is a mere 5 microns (0.0005 centimeters) thick and weighs just 1.8 ounces (50 grams) per 10.8 square feet (1 square meter, meaning it can be applied to almost any part of the car’s surface akin to "a wafer-thin layer of paste."

Despite being extremely lightweight, the paint packs an energy efficiency of 20%, meaning one-fifth of sunlight energy that hits its surface is converted into usable power. This is comparable to the efficiency of common solar panels.

The automaker claimed that covering a 118-square-feet (11-square-meter) area — comparable to a mid-size SUV — with the paint generated enough electricity to cover most daily driving needs. For example, drivers in Stuttgart could cover 62% of their daily commute using solar energy alone, while those in sunny Los Angeles might generate enough energy to meet 100% of their driving needs, representatives said.

The photovoltaic system generates energy even when the vehicle is off, assuming there is sunlight. The automaker suggested that excess energy could be fed back into drivers’ homes via bidirectional charging.

Unfortunately, representatives from Mercedes-Benz didn't specify exactly when (or if) its paint tech would hit the road. Instead, they said their current focus was ensuring it could be applied "on all exterior vehicle surfaces — regardless of their shape and angle."