On a hot roof in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a small experimental device sat in the sun without a fan, compressor or electrical connection. Its job was simply to get colder than the air around it. Water moved through one part of the device, heat escaped through another, and layers of insulating material helped keep the cooling…
A cocoa processor in Dong Nai, Vietnam, has turned a long-standing waste problem into part of the solution for one of its biggest production headaches. Trong Duc Cocoa Company, the country’s second-largest cocoa producer, generates around 5,000 tons of empty fruit pods every year after extracting fresh beans. Rather than letting that waste pile up,…
A worker prepares the well on a Boston-area horse farm to lower Eden’s electrode (Image Credit: Bob O’Connor via IEE Spectrum) What if the rocks beneath our feet could one day be turned into a giant hydrogen factory, not by drilling up an existing fuel reserve, but by sending controlled bursts of electricity deep underground?…
PC: Eocene penguin fossils as archives of Antarctic weathering and climate change: insights from micro-X-ray fluorescence elemental mapping Fifty-five million years ago, Antarctica looked nothing like the frozen continent we know today. Its coastlines were warm and humid, its shores home to some of the earliest penguins ever to exist, and its rocks were quietly…
For years, the dense loops of repetitive DNA clustered near the middle of chromosomes were treated as evolutionary clutter. According to the new study published in Nature, titled ‘Meiotic pairing through barcode-like satellite DNA repeats’, researchers working with fruit flies have shown that this so-called satellite DNA forms a kind of barcode: a unique combination…
Scientists have traced hidden pathways through animal evolution by comparing thousands of genomes and following pieces of chromosomes that have survived for hundreds of millions of years. The study examined 5,821 chromosome-scale genomes from 4,454 species across 19 animal phyla, using 29 ancient linkage groups as markers of chromosome history. Every one of the 406…
Researchers transporting Galvezia leucantha subsp. Leucantha at the restoration site, preparing for its planting A critically endangered shrub that once came close to disappearing from the Galápagos Islands is showing signs of a slow but important recovery after a careful conservation effort lasting nearly three decades. According to findings published in the journal Nature Conservation…
Deep inside a crystal cooled to nearly -230°C, MIT physicists have caught something rarely seen in quantum materials: two populations of electrons rebuilding themselves into wave-like order after being scattered apart by laser light, and doing so in two completely different ways. Working with erbium tritelluride, a rare-earth material known for hosting a pair of…
An invasive beetle wiped out black ash trees across parts of North America Researchers have created a living seed bank to protect North America’s endangered black ash trees from extinction after decades of damage from an invasive insect. Led by scientists at Pennsylvania State University, the conservation project has successfully germinated 22,000 black ash seeds…
The Moon has been romanticised for centuries, but few people have ever tried to give someone a piece of it. In 2002, that idea became part of an extraordinary theft at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center, where an intern helped remove a safe containing Apollo lunar samples and other irreplaceable scientific material. The stolen collection included…
Aashritha Penumudi (Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Alexandria, VA) By combining laboratory biology with machine learning, a 17-year-old student from Virginia has gained new insights into how protein production can go wrong in cancer cells. Aashritha Penumudi, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, studied a…
Alyssa Yu (Poolesville High School, Poolesville, MD) A 17-year-old student from Maryland has developed a new mathematical framework to predict how multiple infectious diseases interact and spread through connected populations at the same time. Alyssa Yu, a senior at Poolesville High School in Montgomery County, created the computer model to address a major gap in…
A pond in southern Arizona can look quiet from a distance. Beneath the surface, though, the balance between species can be very different from what it was a century ago. Among the animals affected is the northern Mexican gartersnake, a wetland-dependent reptile that hunts along streams, ponds and cienegas across parts of the Southwest.Its decline…
Nearly 240,000 miles from Earth, Nasa is preparing a new kind of transportation hub where spacecraft could one day arrive, wait, dock and depart without a single runway, road or parking bay. The Gateway space station, planned for lunar orbit as part of the Artemis programme, is expected to host Orion crew capsules, lunar landers…
Electra takes a different approach to hybrid aviation. Instead of a traditional engine operating the propellers, the aircraft has a gas-powered generator in the nose. (Image: MIT News) A class project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2017 studied a new type of aircraft; now, it has ballooned into a $850 million Ohio…
In Houston, the heat is part of the setting. During the FIFA Fan Festival, though, some of the infrastructure around the event had a rather different experience of the Texas summer. Roofs treated with a thin cooling film stayed dramatically cooler than nearby untreated metal surfaces, even while sitting beneath direct sunlight.The material was not…
Image(s): Left/ Princeton University/Right/Wikipedia While a desk covered in books, papers and unfinished notes may be seen as a sign of an untidy mind, the great scientist Albert Einstein had a different view of this assumption. In particular, he asked, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is…
When archeologists found the tooth it was already damaged, measuring only 23 millimeters. Its crown had been split by agricultural activity into two parts. (Image Courtesy: N. Marković) It sat on a museum shelf for nearly twenty years, unseen, mistaken for something far more common. But now a closer look at a tiny, worn tooth…
Huacas de Moche (Image Credit: Canva) Archaeologists working at the Huacas de Moche Archaeological Complex in northern Peru have uncovered the burial of an infant estimated to be about 1,500 years old. The child, approximately 1.5 years old, was buried with a funerary assemblage that included two whistles, a rattle and a sculptural vessel. Researchers…
11-year-old Touren Pope finds 48-million-year-old turtle fossil in WyomingPhoto credit: Craig Thomas, BLM Rock Springs Field Office What began as a routine family rock-hounding trip in southwest Wyoming turned into a paleontological headline when 11-year-old Touren Pope noticed something unusual poking out of the ground. What he’d spotted was the fossilized shell of a softshell…
