Only one US-built nuclear reactor has ever flown in space, and that was more than 60 years ago. NASA’s announcement Tuesday that it will “pause” work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention…
Study links two crises: Climate change and antibiotic-resistant infections. For as long as we’ve known that soil bacteria manufacture molecular weapons to fight each other, we’ve been swiping their battle plans. In clinics and hospitals, those turf-war weapons have become miraculous drugs of modern medicine—antibiotics—that blow away otherwise deadly…
Appointee list is in keeping with the administration’s hostility toward science. PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is generally not a high-profile group. It tends to be noticed when things go wrong, such as when the PCAST head named by Biden had to resign due…
Hydrothermal carbonization can directly convert sloppy stillage into hard or activated carbon. Bourbon is a multi-billion-dollar market, but the American barrel-aged whiskey also produces a lot of wasted grain at distilleries. Chemists at the University of Kentucky developed a method to transform that stillage into electrodes and used those…
Too much hardware was allowed to disconnect right at the edge of normal conditions. Roughly a year ago, Spain and Portugal went dark when the electrical grid of the entire Iberian Peninsula failed. While the grid operators did a heroic job of restarting the grid quickly, there were obvious…
Opponents say the proposed rule would be a giveaway to the timber industry. When the Trump administration announced plans last year to rescind a rule limiting roadbuilding and timber harvests on millions of acres of national forests and grasslands, officials called the repeal necessary to prevent and manage wildfires.…
“We can’t quite afford to support everything that we have done in the past.” Jupiter’s colossal storms generate lightning flashes at least 100 times more powerful than those on Earth, according to scientists analyzing data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft. The findings were published March 20 in the journal AGU…
Payment reimburses the company for two leases, one for a massive 3 GW wind farm. On Monday, the Trump administration announced its newest approach to its goal of blocking the development of offshore wind: pay companies to walk away from lease sites they had paid for under the Biden…
Undergraduate’s prototype conductive nail polish could turn long fingernails into touchscreen styluses. The rise of touchscreen technology has been a boon in many respects, but for people with long fingernails, there can be issues with the capacitive variety since fingernails are non-conductive and thus don’t register on the screen…
Analyzing dozens of cases around the world yields some practical lessons. Generally, when you hear “water use” and “sustainability,” you expect those words to be followed by some bad news. Humanity’s enduring ability to ignore the math of declining water supplies is almost impressive. But there are cases where…
