Mars may be millions of kilometres from Minnesota, but for Cloquet student Jeremiah Bents, one small part of a future Mars mission could be tested much closer to home. Instead of looking at how to reach the Red Planet, Bents turned his attention to what astronauts might do once they get there, particularly when dealing…
The technology could also potentially be used in places such as submarines and future human settlements on the Moon or Mars (American chemical society photo) Researchers at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIU Carbondale) are working on a technology that turns plastic waste from a water bottle into part of a cookie. For this, they programmed…
Icebergs in Antarctica (Image Credit: Canva) Antarctica may look like a vast, frozen and unchanging landscape, but deep beneath its thick ice lies a surprisingly active world. In 2007, scientists reported findings based on measurements collected by NASA’s ICESat satellite between 2003 and 2006, revealing major changes in the surface of the West Antarctic Ice…
Leon Wang, the 17-year-old Connecticut student (Image Credit: Society For Science) Alzheimer’s disease remains one of the most difficult neurological disorders to treat, partly because the processes behind it can begin damaging brain cells long before symptoms become apparent. Now, a project by 17-year-old Connecticut student Leon Wang has drawn attention for exploring whether medicines…
Beneath the surface of the Great Barrier Reef, a 165-tonne building is being slowly reshaped by the environment around it. The Coral Greenhouse, an underwater installation at John Brewer Reef, was designed to work with the sea rather than simply sit on the seabed. Coral can grow across its surfaces, fish can move through its…
In late 2028, Nasa plans to send something unusual towards Mars, a spacecraft carrying a working nuclear reactor designed to generate electricity for propulsion in deep space. Space Reactor-1 Freedom is intended to test nuclear electric propulsion beyond Earth orbit, where conventional solar power becomes increasingly difficult to use. The spacecraft will not land on…
The Moon’s south pole may contain small pockets where some Earth microbes could remain alive after being carried there by astronauts or spacecraft. A new Nasa study has mapped parts of the region where five types of bacteria and fungi may withstand lunar conditions for at least a day, with the hardiest organism potentially lasting…
A pile of discarded cashew shells would normally have little to do with international shipping. In Maharashtra agricultural leftovers are being fed into reactors that can turn them into usable fuel, gases and biochar. The technology comes from an unusual India-Denmark partnership built around the Viking biomass gasifier developed at the Technical University of Denmark….
A major orange juice processing project in Brazil is taking an unusual approach to one of the industry’s biggest waste streams: turning citrus wastewater into renewable energy. Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC) is building what it describes as the world’s largest plant dedicated to producing biogas from citrus effluent at its industrial facility in Bebedouro, São…
Dr. Savannah Ulalian Bishop photographs an archaeological amphora (Picture: KOC University) Imagine an ancient amphora recovered from the seabed after centuries underwater. It may be cracked, covered with deposits or missing large sections. Restoring such an object is difficult without causing further damage.To overcome this problem, researchers at Koc University in Turkiye have developed a…
A nest box occupied by a Eurasian scops owl might seem an unlikely place to find a live snake, yet that is exactly what researchers repeatedly encountered in central Türkiye. Across six breeding seasons, they inspected 109 owl nests and found the small worm snake Xerotyphlops vermicularis in 44% of them. The reptiles were not…
In the process of striving for our long-term objectives, it may be easy to lose sight of the significance of the tasks at hand. However, James Clerk Maxwell provided a different outlook, stating that even regular work could be associated with an ideal much bigger than the situation itself. He says, “Happy is the man…
