A cooling system powered directly by heat rather than an electric motor has worked in laboratory tests, offering a possible way to turn waste heat or solar energy into cooling. The prototype, developed by researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Tsukuba, uses two ultrathin nickel-titanium films that convert heat first into mechanical motion and then into cold.

The concept addresses a limitation of elastocaloric cooling, an emerging solid-state alternative to conventional refrigeration. Shape-memory alloys cool when a mechanical load applied to them is released, but existing elastocaloric systems still need electrically powered actuators to supply that force. The new design instead uses heat itself to drive the process.

That distinction matters because cooling and heating account for almost half of global energy consumption as demand continues to grow. Conventional refrigerators, air conditioners, and data centers have relied for more than a century on electricity-driven compressors that move heat with refrigerants, many of which also contribute to global warming.

Heat replaces the electric actuator
The system pairs two nickel-titanium films with different jobs. When heated, the first film shrinks through a shape-memory effect, converting thermal energy directly into mechanical work without an electric motor.

That movement acts on the second film. Repeated loading and unloading cause reversible changes in its crystal structure that produce cooling. In effect, the first film replaces the electrically driven actuator that elastocaloric systems have previously required...

After an eight-year journey, a spacecraft carrying European and Japanese probes began the monthslong, high-risk approach to Mercury on Thursday to study the sun-scorched planet.

The BepiColombo mission set off from Earth in 2018 on a winding path to study the smallest and least understood planet in our solar system, with the aim of releasing the two probes into its orbit.

On Thursday, it began its arrival phase, described by the European Space Agency (ESA) as its "most operationally challenging planetary arrival sequences ever attempted."

Mercury's relatively tiny mass—it is only slightly bigger than the moon—means its gravitational pull is extremely weak compared to the sun, making it complex for spacecraft to approach the planet without ending up incinerated or lost in space.

"It's a very ambitious mission," Santa Martinez, the mission manager at ESA, told a news conference ahead of its arrival.

The spacecraft had to travel more than 10 billion kilometers (6.2 billion miles), executing a series of nine flybys to speed up, slow down and perfect its trajectory.

The two probes, which are attached to each other, finally separated Thursday from the transfer module that had propelled them—a crucial first step in the final approach.

It was the equivalent of "launching a new spacecraft. Only this spacecraft happens to be around a different planet," explained Ignacio Tanco, ESA's head of inner solar system mission operations, before the separation began.

All went to plan
On Thursday, Mercury was some 63 million km (39 million miles) from the sun and 200 million km (124 million miles) from Earth.

"At these distances ... any real-time operation becomes impossible," Tanco said, explaining that there was about a 30-minute delay between checks being performed and commands being executed from the ground to the craft.

It means the spacecraft had to check and execute the separation autonomously—a "tricky business," Tanco said.

But all went to plan...

Tonight, Isar Aerospace successfully reached orbit with their Spectrum launcher, lifting off from Andøya Spaceport in Norway.

Congratulations to all the teams involved 👏🚀

At 22:12 CEST Isar Aerospace’s two-stage launch vehicle soared from the launch pad. Spectrum is 28 m tall, 2 m in diameter and, with its ten engines, it is targeting to launch payloads of up to 1000 kg to low Earth orbit.

“A historic launch from Andøya Spaceport in Norway today, the first European Launcher Challenger to reach orbit” said ESA’s Director General Josef Aschbacher, “Spectrum quite literally rose to the challenge and delivered its payloads in low Earth orbit. An astounding achievement by German company Isar Aerospace, founded only eight years ago, and backed by the European Space Agency. This is yet another step towards a more diverse autonomous European launch service sector, and I am excited for what is still to come!”
esa.int/Enabling_Suppo…

Heat, it turns out, has a memory. A cooling cup of coffee may not seem particularly thoughtful. At the scale of a kitchen, heat appears to follow a straightforward rule: it moves from warmer places to cooler ones. Leave the cup unattended long enough, and the disappointing result offers convincing evidence that this rule works.

But shrink the system to the dimensions of a modern computer chip—or observe it over just trillionths of a second—and this simple description can become incomplete. Heat flowing at one place and time may still carry the influence of a temperature disturbance that occurred earlier or somewhere else in the material.

In other words, heat can retain a kind of physical memory. A new theoretical framework, provides a unified way to describe that memory.

"Heat does not remember in the way that we remember a person or an event," Dong said. "Its memory is stored in the microscopic motion of the material. The heat flowing at this moment can still carry information about a temperature disturbance that occurred earlier."

When the textbook rule begins to bend
For roughly two centuries, scientists and engineers have relied on Fourier's law to describe heat conduction. It assumes that heat flow at a particular location responds immediately to the temperature gradient at that same location.

This local and instantaneous description works remarkably well for familiar objects and at ordinary scales. It helps engineers predict how buildings retain heat, how engines cool and how warmth spreads through cookware. In simple terms, Fourier's law describes heat flow as responding to conditions "here and now."

At very small length scales and short times, however, "here and now" may no longer tell the complete story.

In crystalline solids, heat is often carried by collective atomic vibrations called phonons. At large scales, enormous numbers of phonons scatter and interact, producing the smooth diffusion described by Fourier's law. At very short distances and times, some of those phonons can travel significant distances before scattering. The resulting heat flow can also retain the influence of an earlier disturbance.

Depending on the material and experimental scale, heat transport may then appear diffusive, quasi-ballistic, spatially nonlocal or even wave-like. Scientists have developed equations for each of these regimes, but those equations are usually introduced as separate models suited to different conditions.

The new framework places those behaviors inside one mathematical description.

"Instead of choosing a different theory every time heat begins to behave differently, we wanted to identify the deeper microscopic structure connecting those behaviors," Zeng said. "In our framework, familiar diffusion, nonlocal transport and wave-like or hydrodynamic behavior emerge as different limits of the same underlying theory."

Researchers at Lund University have developed a new type of light-emitting diode based on thin, branched nanowires that could offer significantly higher efficiency and lower production costs than current technology. By controlling where in the structure the light is generated, the researchers have reduced the losses that would otherwise limit the amount of light that can be used. Their study is published in the journal Nano Research.

Escaping light trapped in LEDs
In materials used for conventional light-emitting diodes—such as the LED bulbs found in most households—a large proportion of the light is trapped inside the material because of what is known as total internal reflection. This phenomenon means that only a small proportion of the light comes out, even though it is generated inside the material.

The new design aims to overcome this problem. The method is based on the fact that light is emitted from very thin side branches that extend from a central nanowire. "If the structures are made thin enough—thinner than the wavelength of light—the light cannot be trapped inside the material in the same way.

"Theoretically, this could enable a very high light output. In principle, it would be possible to release virtually all the light," said Magnus Borgström, professor of solid-state physics at Lund University.

In materials used for today's LEDs, only around 4% of the light is emitted without additional surface treatment. To improve efficiency, various techniques and methods of processing the material are used to increase light extraction. If the new technology proves successful, it would be possible to avoid these costly processes. Although LEDs are already inexpensive, any improvement in efficiency is important for industrial production.

Small robots and drones have increasingly been used to help respond to disasters, reaching locations that are too hard or too dangerous to send humans, such as collapsed buildings. Many of these efforts have been focused on search and rescue. But new research shows how bugs—with their ability to crawl through even narrower gaps in rubbled—outfitted with electrodes could be used as the next generation of first responders.

A research team from the University of Queensland (UQ) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have developed the “Paraborg” to not only help with searching for victims, but also administer first aid. While the idea of receiving medical care from a cockroach might be a little skin-crawling, the new cyborg bug could one day help buy human rescuers valuable time in a disaster zone.

“Cyborg insects have been designed for ‘search and explore’ missions for the past couple of decades,” Tan Vo Doan, a bio-robotics researcher at UQ, says in a press release. “We wanted to take the next step.”

The team relied on a giant burrowing cockroach that inhabits northern Queensland to develop the Paraborg, which they documented in a recent paper published the journal Advanced Science. The armored cockroach is up to 87 millimeters (3.5 inches) in length and weighs up to 40 grams (1.4 ounces).

Taking advantage of this large size, the research team developed two types of Paraborgs with different functions: one equipped with a camera to film the condition of disaster victims, and another with an automatic injection mechanism to administer medication. Cockroaches can carry up to 1.5 times its body weight. In practice, a cockroach equipped with the injection mechanism saw its total height increase by about 15 millimeters and its weight by about 17 grams, which the study found did not significantly impair its normal movements. To create the cyborg cockroaches, the team anesthetized them when the electrodes and microchips were attached, and they lived as normal cockroaches once the equipment was removed...

The Pantone color of the year for 2026 is white. It's called Cloud Dancer, which is described as a "lofty white." This choice reflects a growing trend away from color in our visual world.

You might have noticed this yourself. Where an area once had a distinct sense of place, we are seeing more cookie-cutter developments popping up. Take the London borough of Elephant and Castle, which has seen billions of pounds of development in recent years. The area has gone from a Latin American enclave full of distinct and varied buildings to what Oli Mould, a professor of social, cultural and historical geography, has warned is an "identikit homogeneous gentrified place" that risks "destroying the very thing that makes a community thriving and beautiful in the first place."

There is a similar increasing sense of uniformity and sameness in urban design around the world. In 1993, architect Rem Koolhaas traveled 360,000 km (224,000 miles) around the world, observing the rationalization of urban design (the movement toward efficiency rather than creativity in the process) through what he termed the "generic city." Functional, efficient but colorless.

Algorithms of taste
This trajectory toward blandness is reinforced and sustained by the increasing tendency to allow algorithms to mediate the choices we make. This has the effect of training perspectives to converge in "a strong pull toward sameness."

Algorithms make predictions based on our choices, from music to home furnishings. The algorithm takes that choice and suggests similar products based on it, ultimately reinforcing and producing a monotonous and generic aesthetic taste. For instance, if you like a pop song by Sabrina Carpenter, you will then be served many songs exactly like it until your Spotify Wrapped says you are among the top listeners of something Spotify has bafflingly called "Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop."

These sorts of algorithms, in turn, reinforce the production of products to meet those generic tastes, ultimately flattening the diversity of creative work in everything from the songs we listen to to the urban surroundings in which we live.

Algorithmically driven taste results in a monoculture where art, pets and everything in between are chosen to match the generic palette of an algorithmic world.

This generic algorithmic taste is also having an impact at the design stage, particularly where metrics and investment desires overwhelm other considerations. Environments are increasingly considered by key decision-makers such as developers not in terms of their contribution to lived experience and cultural life, but as investment objects or financial assets, readily translated and transacted. The result is a flattening not only of our visual environment but also of our engagement with that environment. This loss is significant for our social well-being.

Back in 1983, American sociologist George Ritzer introduced the concept of the "McDonaldization" of society to explain the business rationalization of moving the design process toward faster, easier-to-manage, cheaper and more predictable outcomes. Like a McDonald's burger, the production process becomes standardized. The burger is the same no matter where in the world you have one. Ritzer described this in environments ranging from restaurants to hospitals.

Ritzer acknowledged some of the advantages, such as cost savings and customers knowing what to expect. However, the main problem he identified with this streamlining is that there is no space for experimentation or personality because creativity and design are organized around efficiency. In this control of process, we paradoxically lose control because we lose choice and creativity...

The planet Venus is arguably the most mischievous planetary body in the solar system. This is because like Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, Venus is shrouded in a thick atmosphere that can’t be viewed with optical telescopes and require radar images to see the surface. Unlike Titan, whose atmosphere looks quite dull, Venus’s swirling and awe-inspiring clouds give observers the impression that its surface is covered in wonderous features. However, the truth is far from ideal, as Venus’s surface is a living hell with searing temperatures and crushing pressures. But, unlike its surface and Titan, Venus’s atmosphere provides many more ideal conditions, even Earth-like conditions. But while life would be hard to exist on its surface, could we find life in the atmospheric clouds of Venus?

Now, an international team of researchers led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) might have shed new light regarding whether life could exist in the clouds of Venus. As discussed in a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers provided evidence that non-Earth-like planets could be just as viable of hosting life as we know it along with Earth-like planets. While astrobiologists have long focused on liquid water being the driver in the search for life beyond Earth, this study proposes that life might exist even under the harshest environmental conditions.

For the study, the researchers focused on whether peptides, which consist of short amino acid chains, could survive within the sulfuric acid clouds of Venus. To accomplish this, the researchers conducted a series of laboratory experiments using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, which examines the molecular structure and physical composition of chemical compounds.

Through this, the researchers successfully observed three peptides successfully forming the necessary folded structures enabling them to remain stable for several weeks under environmental conditions of 98 percent sulfuric acid. The team attributes this to the lack of water within the system, with water being known for breaking apart peptide chemical bonds. Folding is important because it enables amino acids to form specific structures that eventually become chemical reactions.

“Life needs to have specially shaped proteins so that they have a specific target they can latch onto and perform their function,” said Dr. Sara Seager, who is a Professor of Planetary Science at MIT and a co-author on the study. “Before this, people thought that peptides couldn’t survive in sulfuric acid, so showing peptides are not only stable, but also fold, is a really big deal.”

The abrupt defunding of USAID sent shockwaves worldwide. In the first of a series supported by Pulitzer Center and in collaboration with Science Magazine, we take an on-the-ground look at the impact of defunding health services in key places worldwide.

Listen to Big Picture Science here: bigpicturescience.org/episodes/malaw…

A fruit fly's brain is roughly the size of a poppy seed — and yet that tiny package contains over 100,000 neurons. A new map charts every single neuron in the male fruit fly brain, as well as the insect's equivalent of a spinal cord, totaling more than 166,000 neurons.

This new map joins a map of a female fruit fly brain that was unveiled in 2024 and covers about 140,000 neurons. These two wiring diagrams, also called "connectomes," can now be compared to see if there are differences between the sexes' brains that help to explain behavioral differences reflected during mating or in aggressive actions, including sex-specific fighting moves.

"It is the first time we can compare both sexes of an animal with complex social behavior," study co-author Gerry Rubin, head of biology and a senior group leader of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus, said in a statement. "Male and female flies have a lot of differences in their behavior, and neuroscientists want to understand how the brain controls those behaviors. This now allows us to easily home in on the neurons that are causing those differences."

Initially released as a preprint, the new fly brain map was published in the journal Cell and Current Biology Thursday (Sept. 3). The study describing the map was published alongside three other papers, each of which uses the new data to explore a specific aspect of fruit fly neurobiology.

"The fly nervous system performs remarkably sophisticated computations with relatively few neurons and little energy, and its architecture could suggest principles for designing more efficient artificial systems," said Carlos Ribeiro, a principal investigator at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, whose team contributed to the brain map and led one of the related studies.

UK astronomers have uncovered new clues about the origin of 3I/ATLAS—only the third known object from beyond the solar system ever spotted. In a new paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers reveal that the comet formed in extremely cold conditions, far from any star.

Dr. Lea Ferellec, a research fellow based in Northumbria University's School of Engineering, Physics and Mathematics, led the study, which looked at the ionized gases streaming off 3I/ATLAS as it moved away from the sun.

The observations were obtained using the Large Integral Field Unit (LIFU) mode of a new instrument, the WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE), developed with the support of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and installed on the Isaac Newton Group's 4.2-meter William Herschel Telescope.

By combining WEAVE's LIFU imaging spectroscopy with the WHT's new non-sidereal guiding capabilities, the team identified five different ions in the comet's stream simultaneously.

This is a rare achievement for any comet and a remarkable first for an interstellar object of this nature.

By measuring how much dinitrogen gas was present compared with carbon monoxide, the researchers worked out that 3I/ATLAS formed somewhere extremely cold, likely colder than -240°C (-400°F).

This suggests it formed a long way from its home star, in the outer, icier edges of wherever its solar system took shape.

A rare sample from another system
Speaking about the findings, Ferellec said, "This object gives us a rare chance to study material that formed somewhere completely different from our own solar system...

Some of the strangest weather in the solar system doesn’t happen on Earth, or even Jupiter’s Great Red Spot - it happens in the interior of the Ice Giants like Neptune and Uranus. Specifically, scientists have long believed that, at certain pressure and temperatures, it literally rains diamonds inside of these planets. And for the first time, scientists have mimicked the process they believe creates that. A new paper by physicists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), published in Nature Physics, resolves a 20 year old scientific mystery, and shows how the same physics that makes it rain diamonds inside Neptune could also help us triple our fusion energy output.

Let’s talk about the actual experiment first. The LLNL scientists set up their experiment at the University of Rochester’s Omega Laser Facility - which does exactly what is advertised in its name. In this specific case, the laser vaporized the outer layer of a diamond sample - and the scientists were watching it with as many sensors as they could, including an ultra-fast technique called X-ray diffraction. That vaporization sent a huge shockwave through the interior of the diamond itself, compressing it to pressures more than three times that of Earth’s core, with resultant temperatures equivalent to the surface of the Sun - but only for a billionth of a second.

What they saw helped solve a 20 year old mystery. This wasn’t the first time scientists have melted diamond. However, previous physical measurements of the melting point of diamond disagreed with computer models based on quantum mechanics by up to 20%. That might not sound like a lot, but in the context of these experiments, that 20% represented a more than 1,000 degree Kelvin difference in the theoretical and observed melting point.

Despite their best efforts, scientists couldn’t get the two numbers to match up - until now. Armed with the new X-ray diffraction data, the authors were able to confirm their measured melting point of diamond aligned with modern quantum-physics based models. But that wasn’t their most interesting finding - they also discovered that, under the right conditions, diamonds would float on a sea of carbon.

As a press release from LLNL points out, we’re all familiar with one specific example where the solid version of a material is less dense than the liquid version - ice and water. But finding that solid diamond is actually less dense than liquid metallic carbon was somewhat of a surprise for the researchers. And it opened up the possibility of what, on paper, sounds like one of the coolest weather features anywhere in the solar system - diamond rain...

This summer, you may have wondered why you are seeing so few insects squished on your car's windshield compared with a road trip several years ago. This is because insects are declining globally at an alarming rate.

One extensive citizen science survey looked at insect numbers over several years by tracking insect deaths on car license plates. Participants were asked to clean their license plates before a journey, then photograph them afterward and count the number of bugs killed.

The survey was conducted from 2021 to 2025. It found the number of flying insects sampled on vehicle license plates across the UK had fallen by 60% in five years. Analysis of records from more than 25,000 journeys showed an annual average decline in bug splats of 19% since the survey began in 2021.

Some people may look at these statistics and wonder why they should care. But the decline of insect life is a significant cause for concern. It's not just in the UK that we are seeing declines, but also across Europe and in tropical rainforests, including some of the most biodiverse spots on the planet. Agricultural land is seeing some of the worst effects.

There are an estimated 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) insects alive on this planet, with more than a million described species and estimates of millions more yet to be discovered. But we are losing insects far faster than other animals, and at an unprecedented rate.

A review in 2019 suggested 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction. Ants, bees and wasps (Hymenoptera), butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera), and dung beetles are thought to be the most affected. More recent reviews show similar declining trends on a global scale.

Why are insects disappearing?
The reasons for losing our insects include habitat loss, disease, pollution and pesticides. Agriculture is a major concern because converting land to farming can remove existing habitats—essentially removing some insects' homes. Agricultural chemicals, such as pesticides designed to kill agricultural pests, are also negatively affecting the nontarget insects that we want to protect.

Climate change is a major concern and one that potentially exacerbates other factors. When it's hotter, water availability becomes more difficult, plants become more stressed and food becomes harder for insects to find...

A Mars probe from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) may answer some longstanding questions about the Red Planet and its moons. The mission—dubbed MMX for “Martian Moons eXploration”—aims to collect at least 10 grams of samples from Phobos, one of two moons orbiting the planet, and if successful, these will be the first rocks from a Martian moon ever brought to Earth.

They won’t arrive quickly, however. The MMX probe will take approximately one year to reach Mars. It will then collect samples during three years of operations while orbiting the red planet before taking another year to return to Earth. If all goes well, scientists expect to receive the moon rocks in 2031.

One of the most interesting questions the probe can answer is how Mars’ moons, Phobos and Deimos, formed. There are two main possibilities. One is that the moons condensed from material ejected during a massive collision with Mars. The other hypothesis is that the moons were asteroids from the outer solar system that were captured by Mars’ gravity.

The moons are dark in color, and their light-reflecting properties closely resemble those of asteroids rich in water and carbon. Their orbits, however—which are nearly circular along Mars’ equatorial plane in the same direction as the planet’s rotation—are better explained by the giant impact hypothesis. Comparing samples from Mars’ moons to those previously collected from the Martian surface could help settle this debate.

A large Norwegian study found that students who exercised infrequently were more likely to develop clinically defined depression, anxiety, or another common mental disorder over the following year. How often they exercised appeared to matter more consistently than how hard or how long they worked out.

The findings were published in the open-access journal PLOS One by Michael Grasdalsmoen of Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and his colleagues.

Why Student Mental Health Matters
Depression and anxiety are leading causes of disability among young adults worldwide. The transition into higher education can bring academic pressure, financial concerns, disrupted routines, and separation from familiar support systems, making this period an important window for prevention.

Exercise has long been associated with better mental health, but much of the earlier evidence has relied on snapshots taken at a single point in time. Fewer studies have followed students prospectively and then used a standardized diagnostic assessment to identify mental disorders.

To examine how different exercise habits might shape later risk, the researchers tracked 10,460 full-time students in Norway between the ages of 18 and 35.

Frequency May Matter Most
At the beginning of the study, participants reported how frequently they exercised, how demanding the activity was, how long their sessions lasted, and their total weekly exercise time. One year later, they completed a self-administered diagnostic instrument that assessed common mental disorders.

Students with lower overall activity levels were more likely to meet clinical criteria for anxiety or depression at follow-up. Of the different measures examined, exercise frequency produced the most consistent association with mental health.

The patterns were not identical for everyone. Among women, lower exercise intensity predicted anxiety and depression, while among men, shorter weekly exercise duration emerged as a stronger risk factor...

Put forward by MIT Professor Joe Formaggio and Dr. Ben Jones from the University of Texas at Arlington, the idea of the neutrino laser was elegant in its ambition.

Cool a cloud of radioactive atoms down to nanokelvin temperatures — a billionth the chill of interstellar space — and the atoms should settle into a Bose-Einstein condensate, a bizarre quantum state where they act as a single, synchronized entity.

In this state, the physicists proposed, the atoms’ radioactive decay would speed up dramatically, and the neutrinos they emit as a byproduct would stream out together in a tight, laser-like beam, dramatically shortening radioactive half-lives in the process.

But according to MTI Professor Wolfgang Ketterle, the Nobel laureate who co-discovered Bose-Einstein condensates in 1995, the idea was too good to be true.

Working with MIT physicists Hanzhen Lin and Yu-Kun Lu, Professor Ketterle presents a two-part analysis demonstrating that the neutrino laser concept, along with a similar proposal for gamma-rays, is physically and fundamentally impossible.

Neutrinos are emitted with roughly a million times more energy than the visible photons used in ordinary lasers, meaning the atom releasing one recoils at velocities equivalent to Mach 10, fast enough that it essentially vanishes from the condensate almost instantly. This leaves no time for the kind of quantum ‘imprint’ the amplifying effect would require.

“As long as the recoil atom stays in the condensate, it can make the condensate superradiant,” Professor Ketterle said.

“But when a neutrino is emitted at a million electronvolts, the atom recoils at velocities equivalent to Mach 10, faster than a fighter jet. This is so fast that the atom would almost instantly disappear.”

Even in an idealized scenario where an imprint could form, the researchers found it would function backward: rather than telling the condensate to emit the next neutrino in the same direction, it would signal the opposite, preventing any beam from building up.

They trace this anti-correlation to the fact that neutrinos are fermions — a class of particle, including electrons, that behaves fundamentally differently from the photons that make ordinary superradiant lasers possible...

A common blue pigment could help turn carbon dioxide (CO2) from an industrial waste product into a useful fuel. A joint research team led by Tohoku University's Advanced Institute for Materials Research (WPI-AIMR), in collaboration with Hokkaido University and startup AZUL Energy, has developed a catalyst that converts CO2 directly into methane (CH4) with high efficiency using copper phthalocyanine, an inexpensive and readily available blue pigment.

Strong methane output and stability
The researchers applied the copper phthalocyanine catalyst to a gas diffusion electrode, enabling CO2 to be reduced to methane in a single electrochemical step. The system achieved a maximum current density of 575 mA cm-2 and a maximum Faradaic efficiency of 79.5% for methane production, demonstrating that the catalyst can selectively convert CO2 into methane at high rates.

The catalyst also showed stable performance during long-term operation. At a current density of 150 mA cm-2, the system maintained methane selectivity above 60% for approximately 80 hours. This durability and selectivity represent an improvement over conventional copper nanoparticle catalysts, which can produce a mixture of different products and make subsequent gas separation more difficult.

The challenge of direct conversion
Converting CO2 into useful chemicals and fuels using electricity generated from renewable energy is known as electrochemical CO2 reduction (ECR).

The approach has attracted attention as a potential means of recycling carbon while reducing reliance on fossil resources. Methane is particularly attractive as a target product because it is a widely used gaseous fuel and can potentially be integrated into existing gas infrastructure.

However, producing methane directly from CO2 is challenging. Electrochemical reduction involves a complex network of reaction pathways, and conventional catalysts can produce several different carbon-containing products alongside methane. Separating and purifying these products adds complexity and energy requirements to the overall process.

A team of Griffith University archaeologists has uncovered evidence that humans were using mind-altering substances much earlier than previously supposed.

Led by Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith's Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), and involving ARCHE colleagues Associate Professors Carney Matheson and Michelle Langley, the team combined biochemical and archaeological evidence to trace the prehistoric roots of one of the world's most popular addictive stimulants, "betel nut," an ancient drug used throughout much of the Asia-Pacific region.

The group's research, conducted in collaboration with Indonesian archaeologists from Makassar's University of Hasanuddin and the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), shows that the use of betel nut as a drug emerged among some Indonesian communities up to 25,000 years ago, predating the previously suggested Neolithic or Bronze Age origins (about 3,500 years ago).

Europe's climate monitor said Thursday that August was the hottest month ever recorded around the world and warned of worse to come as an unprecedented El Niño pattern grows stronger.

Global temperatures over land and sea soared to all-time highs in August and capped an extreme summer of heat waves and wildfires that ranked as the hottest on record for western Europe and the contiguous United States.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service said global average air temperatures in August were 16.96°C (62.5°F)—surpassing the previous record for a single month, set in July 2023, by 0.01°C. The EU monitor said it considered the two months joint-highest given the narrow difference.

Copernicus observations go back to 1940, but evidence from ice cores, tree rings and coral skeletons puts today's climate in a much starker historical context.

"Humans haven't seen temperatures as hot as today for, arguably, at least the last 100,000 years," Samantha Burgess from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which oversees Copernicus, told AFP.

U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell said the "evidence is irrefutable: this is the spiraling price of humanity's fossil fuel addiction."

Striking
The exceptional summer also drove ocean temperatures to record highs for three straight months, said Simon van Gennip from Mercator Ocean International on Thursday.

Marine heat waves have persisted in some overheated basins for more than 60 days, "highlighting just how unusual and persistent" the situation was, he said.

Global sea surface temperatures set a new all-time daily high in August and equaled the hottest month for oceans ever recorded.

Copernicus said the main driver was global heating from burning coal, oil and gas, but also sharply rising temperatures in the Pacific, where a historic El Niño is gaining strength.

El Niño episodes are characterized by unusually warm Pacific waters but trigger major global changes in rainfall and winds, raising the odds of wild weather thousands of miles away.

Global forecasters predict this year's event will peak later this year at an intensity never observed in the modern era.

On Thursday, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said there was a 75% chance it "would exceed the strength of previous El Niño events dating back to 1950."

Copernicus said its influence was already being felt in Indonesia, where a long, intense dry season has fed wildfires that have torched swaths of Borneo island.

But climate scientists said the worst was yet to come—and August's extraordinary heat was just a preview

Key figures from Europe's space industry and other international players have converged on Paris to discuss how to advance the continent's ambitions in a global market dominated by the United States.

The two-day International Space Summit that started Wednesday gathers officials, astronauts, researchers and industry leaders from about 120 countries to discuss the future of the space industry and pursue potential business deals.

"Europe is taking its destiny into its own hands, including in space," French President Emmanuel Macron said in a message posted on X. He called for innovation and investment "to build a powerful Europe, independent even in space."

Here's what to know about Europe's efforts to compete in the global space race.

Europe seeks to build up sovereign space capabilities
Macron's space summit underlines his push to reduce Europe's reliance on the U.S. for vital tech services, which extends to space launches as well as satellites for communications and reconnaissance...