Rather than directly converting photons into electricity, concentrated solar energy uses mirrors to turn sunlight into heat, which can then be used to drive traditional generating turbines. Up to about a decade ago, there was a case to be made that concentrated solar energy had a bright future, as improvements in heat storage had turned it into a way to generate power around the clock.
It wasn't to be. While concentrated solar costs fell enough to compete with nuclear power, the price of photovoltaics plunged, making solar panels the cheapest source of power in most locations. Currently, if you have a good site to generate solar power, then the economics of PV panels are hard to beat.
That has left us needing to build a mixture of other facilities—typically batteries and natural gas facilities—to handle overnight needs or weather-driven shortfalls. But a small company is promising that it can help avoid the need to build a separate facility. Its version of concentrated solar is designed so that a fossil-fueled backup system shares most of the generating hardware with the solar side.
Anthropic and OpenAI say they’ve disproved a key tenet of computer science. Researchers are struggling with the fall but also feel like “overexcited bunnies” as they look at new questions to explore.
Death Clock promises to predict when you’re going to die and help you extend your time on Earth. After a month, I felt like it was sucking the life out of me.
Lying beyond Pluto, 2026 ED138 could be as large as 1,500 kilometers in diameter. Astronomers are still working to confirm whether it meets the criteria for a dwarf planet.
Although the term ‘quantum battery’ is a bit of a vague term, the cell that [Kieran Hymas] et al. demonstrate in a recent paper does seem to suggest that it uses quantum effects to charge faster than would otherwise be possible, with this rate increasing faster than its volume, meaning at a superextensive rate.
The general idea behind a quantum battery is that these somehow use a quantum effect to store and release energy faster than would be possible using classical physics. First proposed in 2013, the initial Dicke model saw its theoretical quantum advantage shot down by 2020, leading to the search for alternative models.
We have previously seen claims of a quantum advantage in batteries based on the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, such as by [Davide Rossini] et al., but this new paper may be the first prototype cell demonstrating a reproducible effect.
In the here demonstrated cell a microcavity is created with strong light-matter coupling, allowing for both energy storage and discharging, with the illuminated particles super-absorbing the light with what the researchers claim to be due to these particles cooperating using a quantum mechanism. Effectively scaling up the cell would thus scale up the charge- and discharge rate faster than in a conventional chemical cell.
Whether this demonstration can be replicated and expanded upon remains to be seen, naturally. The stored energy in this experiment was very small and the storage time only very brief, so for now it serves primarily as an interesting experimental result for researchers to dig through.
United Launch Alliance announced Wednesday it plans to return its Vulcan rocket to service on November 13, nine months after a solid rocket booster anomaly threw the company's 2026 launch schedule into oblivion.
The return-to-flight mission will launch 40 satellites for the Amazon Leo broadband constellation, the first of 38 Vulcan flights Amazon has booked to deploy the bulk of its network. The mission will lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and ULA said the launch date is pending range approval.
The launch is critical for ULA after its new flagship rocket suffered nozzle failures on its solid rocket boosters on two of its first four missions, most recently during a flight in February. In both cases, the rocket overcame the nozzle failure and completed its mission, but officials at the US Space Force, ULA's primary customer, lost confidence in Vulcan.
The rapid decline of Antarctic sea ice since 2016 has triggered a dramatic shift in a crucial part of Earth’s climate system, scientists say.
In a paper published Wednesday, researchers documented a sharp salinity increase in a vast layer of the Southern Ocean, extending from 2,300 to 4,000 feet deep and encircling Antarctica. The shift reverses decades of freshening and echoes ocean changes usually associated with major global climate shifts over millennia but is now happening in just a few years.
The switch from a decades-long trend of freshening water to increasing salinity has implications that could extend beyond Antarctica. The layer, known as Antarctic Intermediate Water, spreads northward into the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans, transporting heat, carbon, oxygen, and nutrients toward the tropics, and even across the equator, said co-author Bishakhdatta Gayen, a researcher and professor at the University of Melbourne and at the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences in Bengaluru, India.
A visualization shows the orbital path of the dwarf planet candidate 2026 ED138 in relation to the orbits of the solar system’s larger planets. Click on the image for a larger version. (Credit: NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory / NOIRLab / SLAC /AURA / R. Proctor)
Astronomers sorting through data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile have found an icy world that has a good chance of joining Pluto in the solar system’s retinue of dwarf planets.
University of Washington astronomer Mario Jurić joined the astronomer who made the discovery, Matthew Holman of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, to announce the findings today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in Spokane, Wash.
Jurić, the Rubin team’s solar system lead scientist, said the observatory’s capabilities made it possible to detect and characterize the new dwarf planet candidate, known as 2026 ED138.
“Rubin is giving us an unprecedented capacity to explore the sky through a combination of speed, depth, and precision,” Jurić said in a news release. “And the discovery is just the beginning: Once we identify a new object, we can search back months, and sometimes even decades, finding it in images where nobody knew to look. This ability to both discover and ‘precover’ objects is transforming how quickly and accurately we can determine their orbits and understand the distant solar system.”
2026 ED138 traces a tilted orbital path that takes it well beyond Pluto, the solar system’s best-known dwarf planet. It’s currently at a distance of 46 astronomical units, where 1 AU equals the average distance between Earth and the sun. Pluto, by comparison, is currently about 40 AU from the sun.
Astronomers suspect ED138 formed billions of years ago closer to the sun before being flung into a wider orbit by gravitational interactions with Neptune.
Based on an analysis of its distance, brightness and assumed composition, ED138 is thought to be somewhere between 600 and 1,500 kilometers (373 to 932 miles) in diameter. At that size, an icy object should possess enough gravity to pull itself into a round shape — satisfying the primary physical criterion for a dwarf planet.
Rubin’s researchers analyze the data from those scans to find objects of interest — ranging from asteroids to gamma-ray bursts — and track them over time. On Oct. 13, Holman was running data through a search code that he developed with Kevin Napier, a colleague at the Center for Astrophysics. ED138 stood out due to its exceptional size and brightness.
“My first reaction was one of excited disbelief,” Holman said. “Objects like this are very rare, so I immediately started checking whether I or the code had done something wrong.”
To confirm the discovery, Holman, Jurić and their colleagues found 30 archived observations of ED138 dating back to March 4. The Asteroid Institute’s ADAM Precovery service found still more images of the object, going back to 2016, in the archives of a different astronomical survey.
The precovery data confirmed that ED138 was a special case.
“Finding an object this big, roughly 1,000 kilometers across, is something that happens maybe once in a generation,” Jurić said. “It’s the largest trans-Neptunian object found in about 20 years, and Rubin turned it up while we were still commissioning the telescope.”
In 2006, the International Astronomical Union defined dwarf planets as planetary objects that are big enough to crush themselves into a roundish shape — technically speaking, into a state of hydrostatic equilibrium — but not big enough to clear their orbital neighborhood.
So far, the IAU has classified five solar system objects as dwarf planets — including Ceres in the main asteroid belt, plus Pluto, Eris, Haumea and Makemake in the region beyond Neptune. 2026 ED138 joins a host of other celestial objects that are thought to be dwarf planets but haven’t yet been added to the IAU’s official list.
“The official list hasn’t moved since 2008,” Jurić told GeekWire in an email. “I’m not sure if there’s an active process that reviews candidates, and what are the timelines.”
Jurić and his colleagues hope additional observations will boost ED138’s chances of attaining true dwarf planethood.
“The next step in building the case would be to prove it’s round (in hydrostatic equilibrium),” he wrote. “The means to do that would be directly through occultations (and there’s a good chance of that, given it’s in a dense stellar field), and then thermal measurements plus modeling and light curves (or the absence of variability).”
Airborne micro particles can be a significant health hazard in a workshop, and thus it’s important to maintain a high standard of ventilation. But monitoring their concentration is also important, and thus there exists a range of sensors to help keep you safe. [WeSpeakEnglish] has taken this idea to the MAX, with a PM2.5 sensor that drives a very large wall mounted display. You’ll never be uncertain what the level is now!
The standout feature of this thing is a huge addressable LED seven segment display PCB, upon the back of which sits a tiny Seeed Studio Xiao board to which the particle sensor is hooked up. The software displays the particle count, and handily changes the colour as the number creeps upwards. Meanwhile should you wish to log the readings, the USB exposes a serial port upon which they are placed.
We can see this is a useful project for anywhere that is likely to have a high particle count, but it’s worth noting also that a large 7-segment display with an ESP32 board attached could have plenty of other uses. Meanwhile this is a nicely finished air quality monitor, but it’s certainly not the first we’ve seen.
In breathless press releases and posts, the company has touted its models’ ability to deliver scientific breakthroughs. But its IPO filing taps the brakes on just how fast its AI will lead to big discoveries.
Protein design tools may be getting increasingly sophisticated, but you still need a sophisticated understanding of protein structure for them to work. This can include knowing enzyme mechanisms down to the positions of specific amino acids, as well as the water molecules that also occupy the area where catalysis takes place. Once you specify these, the tools can build the rest of a protein around this target.
A large collaboration of researchers based in China, however, decided to bring protein design to the masses, making a tool that can take natural language prompts and use them to produce proteins with the function you specify. If your measure for success is a working protein, then the success rate may not be great. But they still manage to get the job done. And, in a separate announcement, Hugging Face shared that it's now hosting a tool that does similar things on the DNA level.
The equivalent of vibe coding may have come to protein design—at least if you have access to a lab where you can sort the good designs from the dozens of failed ones.
The data center buildout could cause a massive increase in gas prices as companies scramble for limited supplies and infrastructure fails to meet demand.
Dating back to around 400 CE and made of dichroic glass, the Lycurgus Cup is notable for exhibiting different colors depending on the light. (It gets its name from the scene depicted on its surface, of King Lycurgus of Thrace.) Light it from the front, and the cup looks green; light it from behind, and the color changes to a deep red. University of Sheffield scientists have re-created the original recipe to produce a contemporary glass sculpture with the same optical effect.
The cup is considered one of the seven glass wonders of the world, one of just 40 glass cage cups that survived. Exactly why the unusual color effects of the Lycurgus Cup occurred was a mystery until 2007, when a team of scientists discovered the color shifts were due to the presence of nanoparticles in the glass—the result of Roman artisans adding finely ground gold and silver into the mix. Those nanoparticles change how the electrons in the cup vibrate in response to light so that the color one sees shifts with the observer’s vantage point.
As we reported in 2019, it’s a similar phenomenon to the one responsible for the shifting colors of 19th-century daguerreotypes due to the scattering properties of nanoparticles. The Romans added salt when they melted the silicon (sand) to make the glass, and those salts contained gold atoms. In the melting process, those atoms aggregate and produce nanoparticles, which in turn produce the colors. It’s how any stained glass is made. It's also similar to how the precise lattice-like structure of photonic crystals produces iridescent colors in nature, like the wings of butterflies, or opals.
Two orbiters have long outlasted their expected lifespans and completely reshaped our understanding of the Red Planet, all while operating 140 million miles from Earth.
Susanne Rust of the Los Angeles Times reports (paywalled) that industry executives knew for decades that microplastics were infiltrating the human body. Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the report: Scientists today say we're just beginning to understand the harm that the tiny bits of plastic we drink, eat and breathe are doing to the human body. Internal memos among company scientists and executives obtained by The Times reveal that for at least half a century, the plastics industry has been aware of and concerned about the potential for microplastic contamination in the human body. But recently discovered chemical company documents dating back several decades show that industry scientists have long been aware of -- and concerned about -- the way microplastic particles migrate beyond the gut in animals and humans, depositing in important organs. And the potential for that knowledge to affect the plastic food packaging industry.
Their concern goes back to 1974 and a scientific meeting at a New York City hotel, where a German gastroenterologist presented a scientific paper that showed for the first time that ingested particles like microplastics could infiltrate the rest of the body. His presentation was largely overlooked by the government scientists in attendance but became a point of worried discussion among company scientists. Tracey Woodruff, professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University, who reviewed the documents, said they indicate scientists and executives at major chemical companies have known and remained silent even as microplastics accumulated in tissues. She likened it to other industries that knew about pollutants -- greenhouse gases, asbestos and tobacco -- but did not take action to make them safer.
A spokesperson with the chemical industry's largest trade group took issue with that characterization. "Scientific debate over what the evidence shows is not silence. It is how sound science and effective policy advance," said Craig Davis, senior director of plastics chemistry at the American Chemistry Council. "Our industry is committed to advancing microplastics science by supporting independent research and policies that would do so."
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created one of the most beloved fictional detectives of all time in Sherlock Holmes, spawning countless novels, films, TV series, and so forth featuring the sleuth. Far fewer people know about the real-life inspiration for Holmes: a renowned surgeon at Scotland's University of Edinburgh named Joseph Bell, who taught Doyle when the author was still a young medical student. Bell is the subject of a new, eminently readable biography, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, by medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris.
In 2020, Fitzharris hosted a documentary for the Smithsonian Channel, The Curious Life and Death Of…, exploring famous deaths, ranging from drug lord Pablo Escobar to magician Harry Houdini. Fitzharris performed virtual autopsies, experimented with blood samples, interviewed witnesses, and conducted real-time demonstrations in hopes of gleaning fresh insights. And last year she and her husband, caricaturist Adrian Teal, collaborated on an illustrated children's book, Dead Ends! Flukes, Flops, and Failuresthat Sparked Medical Marvels.
In the world of silicon semiconductors, the process of creating transistors and similar structures involves various rounds of modifications and additions in order to create the requisite functional layers. A less involved approach would simply create these structures in-situ, with research the past years having focused on transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) monolayers to do exactly this. Recently [Seok Young Min] et al. reported (paywalled, Phys.orgsummary) on creating transistors in-situ in a tungsten ditelluride (WTe2) monolayer.
By selectively changing parts of the top layer into tungsten oxide (WOx) as an insulator and other sections into n-type WS2 and p-type WSe2 the researchers were able to create functional MOSFETs, without the normally requisite grafting on of different materials. An obvious advantage of this is that this can be done at an atomic scale, potentially achieving densities significantly higher than with industry standard silicon semiconductor technology.
WTe2 is not the only TMDC that could be viable here, of course, with other researchers investigating the use of MoSe2 for a similar purpose, as in this research by [N. Lu] et al. from 2014. This being the creation of 2D semiconductors, referring to the thin layers of these monolayer TMDCs, along with potentially other materials such as graphene.
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