Science

Scientists are constantly searching for better ways to store renewable energy, and MIT researchers have now found a way to turn cement and an ancient material into a giant supercapacitor. Potentially, this electrified cement could turn building foundations and roads into almost limitless batteries. To create the new substance, a team from the Massachusetts Institute

WASHINGTON — Innovative Rocket Technologies, known as iRocket, has signed an agreement with the Air Force Research Laboratory to jointly develop and test rocket propulsion hardware.  The New York-based startup, founded in 2018, develops rocket engines and plans to build a small launch vehicle. iRocket signed a four-year cooperative research and development agreement, or CRADA,

The earliest impact scars from asteroids that bombarded Earth’s surface may be lost forever to the ravages of time. According to a new analysis, there’s a reason scientists have been unable to find any craters older than about 2 billion years. The constant erosion and geological processes on Earth have likely erased them from the

Last week, a group of South Korean physicists made a startling claim. In two papers uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, they say they have created a material that “opens a new era for humankind”. LK-99, a lead-based compound, is purportedly a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor. Such a material, which conducts electricity without any resistance under

A Bronze Age arrowhead excavated in Switzerland in the 19th century turns out to be made from an unexpected material. The tiny artifact is made from iron retrieved from an object that fell from the sky. But there’s a twist. It wasn’t even the closest meteorite to the settlement at the time. Rather, a team

Mitigating climate change on Earth is such a dire challenge that scientists are seriously investigating every single option they can think of. The latest idea is wild… but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. Astronomer István Szapudi, of the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy, reckons we could catch an asteroid, park it in

Super-heated seawater off the Florida Keys has grown so perilous to the world’s third-largest barrier reef that scientists are now removing samples of coral from ocean nurseries to place in cooler land-based tanks. Sea temperatures off Florida have risen to extraordinary highs this month, presenting a severe threat to the barrier reef. “Hot water is

Say hello to ionocaloric cooling. It’s a new way to lower temperatures with the potential to replace existing methods of chilling things with a process that is safer and better for the planet. Typical refrigeration systems transport heat away from a space via a gas that cools as it expands some distance away. As effective

WASHINGTON — Two crewed missions remain on track to launch to the International Space Station over the next month and a half after addressing technical issues that included a Soyuz coolant leak. At a July 25 briefing, NASA officials said they are planning the launch of the Crew-7 mission to the ISS no earlier than

Scientists have discovered an exceptional case of a partially warm-blooded fish, fundamentally changing our understanding of fish physiology. The fact that basking sharks (Cetorhinus maximus) show elevated body temperatures while swimming is like “finding that cows have wings,” says marine biologist Nicholas Payne from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Of all the shark and fish

Scientists experimenting with some of the most fundamental laws of physics have found more evidence of what they’re calling photonic time crystals (PTCs): materials in which the speed at which light moves (the refractive index) oscillates very quickly. We already know much more about photonic crystals, where a repeating pattern in a material creates a

You probably haven’t spent much time thinking about how heavy your hands are – but if you had to make a guess, you’d probably be wrong. A small study that asked people to compare their hands to various weights suggests that humans generally underestimate the mass of their hands by just over 49 percent. A

Ancient grains of dust are revealing the life story of a Solar System asteroid. According to an analysis of grains collected from asteroid Ryugu, at least part of the carbon-rich rock started its life much farther from the Sun before ending up in the asteroid belt and then, ultimately, at roughly Earth’s distance from the

Science fiction is rife with fanciful tales of deadly organisms emerging from the ice and wreaking havoc on unsuspecting human victims. From shape-shifting aliens in Antarctica, to super-parasites emerging from a thawing woolly mammoth in Siberia, to exposed permafrost in Greenland causing a viral pandemic – the concept is marvellous plot fodder. But just how

WASHINGTON — Sierra Space won an Air Force contract to continue development of an engine that could be used in the upper stage of future launch vehicles. Colorado-based Sierra Space received a $22.6 million contract from the Air Force Test Center July 25 to mature the design of its VR35K-A engine. The contract will allow

An international effort to revive an ancient roundworm, frozen in Siberian permafrost for millennia, has unleashed a lifeform even older than scientists once thought. In 2018, several resurrected nematodes, of the genus Panagrolaimus, were dated to around 32,000 years old. But now, more precise radiocarbon dating suggests these soil worms have remained ‘dead awake’ in

Decades ago, regulations for laboratory maintenance were not quite as stringent as they are today. This, we assume, is at least partially what led the great minds at what was then the US National Accelerator Laboratory, now Fermilab, to an ingenious solution for cleaning a particle accelerator back in 1971. It was February. The Main

Standing atop the mountains in the southern highlands of Peru is the 15th-century marvel of the Inca empire, Machu Picchu. Today, the citadel is a global tourist attraction and an icon of precolonial Latin American history – but it was once the royal palace of an emperor. Our international team of researchers has uncovered the

The biggest volcano in the Solar System could once have been an island in a vast sea, new research has found. When Mars was young, and soggy, billions of years ago, the colossal Olympus Mons may have resembled Stromboli or Savai’i, but on a much larger scale. A new analysis shows similarities with active volcanic

Roughly 2,000 Magellanic penguins have washed up dead on the beaches of Uruguay this July with empty stomachs and “tremendously thin” bodies. “This is mortality in the water,” Carmen Leizagoyen, who works at Uruguay’s Environment Ministry, told AFP. “Ninety percent are young specimens that arrive without fat reserves and with empty stomachs.” The cause of

WASHINGTON — A bill intended to reform satellite spectrum licensing regulations failed to pass the House July 25 after some members objected to provisions they claimed gave the Federal Communications Commission authority to regulate space safety. The House debated H.R. 1338, the Satellite and Telecommunications Streamlining Act, under suspension of the rules, a procedure that

A giant creature thought to inhabit the waters of Scotland’s Loch Ness remains a popular subject of speculation, in spite of pretty thorough debunkings. One of the last plausible explanations for the beast has now too joined the discard pile. After careful investigation, data scientist Floe Foxon of Pinney Associates and the Folk Zoology Society

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) continue to discover exotic particles that we’ve never seen before. The latest to be spotted in experiments is the first pentaquark to contain a strange quark. If you’re new to quarks, they’re the subatomic building blocks that make up matter, and the strange quark is one of six

In 2022, the Royal Australian Mint issued a $2 coin decorated with honeybees. Around 2,400 years earlier, a mint in the kingdom of Macedon had the same idea, creating a silver obol coin with a bee stamped on one side. Over the centuries between these two events, currency demonstrating a symbolic link between honey and

One of the most interesting baby planet systems in the Milky Way has just yielded a detection of water vapor. And not just anywhere, either. In the extended disk of dust and gas that still clings to the star PDS 70, the James Webb Space Telescope detected the molecular signature of water in the region

We know that meat has a substantial impact on the planet, and that plant-based diets are more environmentally sustainable. But exactly how much impact does the food we eat have on environmental outcomes and what difference would following a vegan diet make compared to consuming a high meat, or even low meat diet? We studied

What happens to the body when a human gets heatstroke? How can we protect ourselves in a warming planet? To answer these burning questions, Arizona researchers have deployed a robot that can breathe, shiver and sweat. The southwestern state’s capital Phoenix is currently enduring its longest heat wave in history: on Friday, the mercury exceeded

WASHINGTON — A NASA procurement document provides details about the plans of several companies that received unfunded Space Act Agreements for commercial space capabilities in June, as well as those who failed to make the cut. NASA selected seven companies June 15 for its Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities-2 (CCSC-2) initiative. Those companies will have

The secret to eternal life has been swimming in Earth’s oceans for millions of years. The ‘immortal jellyfish’ is so named because it can, theoretically, live forever. For all we know, some of these tiny, translucent blobs have been drifting along since well before the demise of the dinosaurs, around 66 million years ago. That

Theoretical physicists have a lot in common with lawyers. Both spend a lot of time looking for loopholes and inconsistencies in the rules that might be exploited somehow. Valeri P. Frolov and Andrei Zelnikov from the University of Alberta in Canada and Pavel Krtouš from Charles University in Prague probably couldn’t get you out of