A New Recyclable Building Material That Absorbs CO2

Robots may not be pouring concrete yet, but biological chemistry just might, thanks to a new material that captures carbon instead of emitting it.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) researchers have developed a carbon-negative building material that could reshape what sustainable construction looks like.

The team has created enzymatic structural material, or ESM, a durable, moldable, and recyclable substance produced through a low-energy, bioinspired process.

The breakthrough comes from work led by Nima Rahbar, the Ralph H. White Family Distinguished Professor and head of the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering at WPI.

Rahbar’s team used an enzyme that transforms carbon dioxide into solid mineral particles. Those particles are then bound and cured under mild conditions, allowing the mixture to form structural components within hours.

That speed alone sets it apart. Traditional concrete demands high temperatures and weeks of curing. ESM forms far faster, and with a fraction of the environmental impact.

Rahbar says the global dependence on concrete urgently needs rethinking.

"Concrete is the most widely used construction material on the planet, and its production accounts for nearly 8 percent of global CO2 emissions," he said. He added that the new method "doesn’t just reduce emissions—it actually captures carbon."

According to the researchers, producing a single cubic meter of ESM sequesters more than 6 kilograms of CO2.

In contrast, the same amount of conventional concrete emits around 330 kilograms.

Beyond emissions, ESM’s ability to cure quickly, adjust in strength, and be recycled makes it a candidate for applications such as wall panels, roof decks, and modular building parts.

Its repairability could also reduce the long-term costs of upkeep, an often overlooked component of construction waste.

"If even a fraction of global construction shifts toward carbon-negative materials like ESM, the impact could be enormous," Rahbar said.

The potential applications stretch far beyond everyday buildings. Lightweight, fast-forming, and low-energy structural materials are valuable in disaster relief zones, where speed can shape recovery.

ESM could also play a role in affordable housing, climate-resilient infrastructure, and circular manufacturing systems that prioritize recycling over disposal.

Read More......

Pi Formula Is More Than Just Math

More than a hundred years ago, long before anyone imagined supercomputers or black hole simulations, there was one legendary Indian mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan who wrote down a set of formulas to calculate the digits of π (pi).

These equations, just 17 short expressions, were mysterious even to mathematicians of his time, as they produced incredibly accurate digits of pi using very few mathematical steps. Today, pi has been computed to over 200 trillion digits, using algorithms whose foundations trace back to Ramanujan’s ideas.

However, a new study by researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has revealed something far more surprising. It suggests that Ramanujan’s old mathematical tricks are not just clever; they naturally appear in modern physics, popping up in models that describe turbulence, percolation, and even aspects of black holes.

"Ramanujan’s motivation might have been very mathematical, but without his knowledge, he was also studying black holes, turbulence, percolation, all sorts of things," Faizan Bhat, first author of the study and an ex-PhD candidate at IISc, said.

The study authors focused on a simple but deep question. Why do Ramanujan’s formulas work so beautifully? Mathematicians have admired the formulas for more than a century, and they form the basis for modern pi-computing methods such as the Chudnovsky algorithm, but their origin has always felt almost magical.

Instead of looking for a purely mathematical answer, the researchers tried something new. What if Ramanujan’s mathematics naturally arises from physical laws? In other words, could there be a real physical system where these formulas appear without being forced in?

To find out, they searched through different areas of high-energy theory. Their attention settled on conformal field theories (CFTs)—powerful frameworks used to describe systems that look the same no matter how much you zoom in. A well-known example is the critical point of water, where liquid and vapor become identical, and the system shows repeating behavior.

Within this large family, they looked at a special subset called logarithmic conformal field theories (LCFTs). LCFTs describe phenomena right at the edge of order and chaos, places where small changes ripple outward dramatically.

These include percolation (how things spread or seep through a network or material), turbulence onset (when smooth fluid flow suddenly breaks into chaotic eddies), and certain black hole descriptions, where spacetime behaves in exotic ways.

Using detailed mathematical examination, the researchers discovered that the starting structure of Ramanujan’s pi formulae, the part that sets up how the series expands, exactly matches the structure that appears in LCFTs.

Once they recognized the match, they used Ramanujan’s mathematical machinery to compute complicated quantities inside these physical theories. Calculating these values normally requires long, heavy computations, but Ramanujan’s approach—which was originally designed to compute digits of pi swiftly—allowed them to do it much faster and more efficiently.

This created a perfect mirror. Just as Ramanujan used a simple starting expression to generate many accurate digits of pi, the physicists used the same underlying structure to generate accurate physical predictions in LCFTs with surprisingly little effort.

Read More......

Ancient Norwegian Reindeer Trap Discovered

Some researchers believed that the changing climate is a key factor in uncovering jaw-dropping artifacts from over 1,000 years ago.

As Live Science reported, archaeologists in Norway discovered a 1,500-year-old reindeer trap made of hundreds of wooden logs. The ancient structure was revealed by melting ice in the Aurlandsfjellet mountains.

Alongside the trap, the researchers found other artifacts, including reindeer antlers, iron spearheads, and wooden arrows. The discovery has provided new insights into ancient hunting practices in the region.

"This is the first time a mass-capture facility made of wood has been revealed from the ice in Norway, and the facility is probably also unique in a European context," according to a Vestland County Municipality news release.

Archaeologist Øystein Skår added: "This finding makes us certain that the facility was used for mass hunting. All antlers have markings, which gives us deeper insight into the hunting activity itself."

According to Skår, cold temperatures meant the tool stayed covered in snow year-round. And based on how well-preserved the antlers were, this ice encasement process happened quickly following its use by ancient Norwegians.

Over time, it was buried in even more ice and snow, securing the device in an icy tomb for centuries. However, because of rising global temperatures and steadily melting ice, these artifacts have now seen the light of day for the first time in 1,500 years.

Ice and snow each have a high albedo, meaning they are highly reflective. Their surfaces are able to bounce sunlight and heat back into space, helping to cool the planet. But as heat-trapping pollution continues to fill the atmosphere and raise temperatures, ice and snow are melting at rapid paces, diminishing their abilities to absorb solar energy and heat. This creates a feedback loop that accelerates the warming.

Read More......

One Time, Two Early Humans Coexisted

In a groundbreaking discovery in early human evolution, scientists revealed that, using the "Burtele Foot" and the "Lucy fossil," they identified two hominin species that coexisted at the same place and time.

Back in 1974, scientists discovered 40 percent of a single hominin skeleton known as Lucy at the Hadar site in Ethiopia, which rose to prominence as the most complete early human ancestor ever found. Many years later, in 2009, another "enigmatic" hominin foot, Burtele, was discovered nearby at the Afar Rift.

Though researchers understood that the two human remains did not belong to the same species, Burtele Foot remained unclassified until recently, when researchers unearthed more fossils that helped solve the mystery. Lucy had already been categorized as a separate hominin, A. afarensis.

In 2015, a team at Arizona State University announced yet another human ancestor, Australopithecus deyiremeda, to which it would turn out Burtele’s Foot also belonged. The evidence added up.

Researchers could then conclude that 3.5 million years ago, at a "poorly understood time in human evolution," according to Reuters, two different hominins lived alongside one another, though they did not walk alike.

A team from ASU recently unearthed a new set of fossils: 25 teeth and a jawbone. Based on what they gleaned from the new evidence, Burtele, composed of eight-foot bones once attached to a very early hominin species, A. deyiremeda, which possessed both ape-like and human-like traits, according to Reuters.

Now that researchers know that Burtele and Lucy were distinct species, the Woranso-Mille site has become significant as the only location in the world where scientists have identified the coexistence of two hominin species with distinct characteristics.

The Burtele Foot retained an opposable big toe, according to a press release by Arizona State University News, which would have assisted this early human in climbing, with longer, more flexible toes. When it walked on two legs, it most likely pushed off its second digit rather than the big toe as we modern humans do today. Lucy’s species, A. afarensis, was fully bipedal with an abducted big toe. Researchers gleaned that early humans walked differently.

"So what that means is that bipedality — walking on two legs — in these early human ancestors came in various forms. The whole idea of finding specimens like the Burtele Foot tells you that there were many ways of walking on two legs when on the ground; there was not just one way until later."

Isotope analysis, furthermore, if not surprisingly, showed that the two species did not dine alike either. "I think the biggest surprise was despite ... how diverse these early australopith (early hominin) species were — in their size, in their diet, in their locomotor repertoires and in their anatomy — [they] seem to be remarkably similar in the manner in which they grew up," said Haile-Selassie, director of the Institute of Human Origins and professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at ASU.

Studying how these ancient ancestors moved and what they ate gives scientists insight into how different species lived together without one driving the other to extinction.

"If we don’t understand our past, we can’t fully understand the present or our future. What happened in the past, we see it happening today," he said.

"In a lot of ways, the climate change that we see today has happened so many times during the times of Lucy and A. deyiremeda. What we learn from that time could actually help us mitigate some of the worst outcomes of climate change today."

Read More......

Radiation Waste Converted Into Cancer-Fighting Isotope

Scientists recently found a way to convert high-energy radiation waste from particle accelerators into a critically scarce medical isotope used in cancer therapy.

The intense beams of particles inside accelerators, typically focused on unlocking the deepest secrets of the universe, eventually collide with a component called a "beam dump." This is where the leftover energy — massive amounts of radiation — is absorbed and usually dissipated as waste heat.

The photons in a particle accelerator’s beam dump are intense, high-energy radiation byproducts of the main physics experiment.

A team of researchers at the University of York states that this powerful radiation, specifically the photons, can be captured and repurposed. It can be utilized to create materials necessary for cancer treatment.

The target isotope, copper-67, is a highly valuable asset in oncology. The method shows potential for generating this rare isotope, which is used for both diagnosing and treating cancer.

"We have shown the potential to generate copper-67, a rare isotope used in both diagnosing and treating cancers, by demonstrating that what we might view as waste from a particle accelerator experiment can be turned into something that can save lives," said Dr. Mamad Eslami, a nuclear physicist from the University of York’s School of Physics, Engineering and Technology.

In nuclear medicine, medical isotopes are the key tools—they emit radiation used to both diagnose and treat diseases. Because they aren’t abundant in nature, these isotopes have to be produced synthetically.

Copper-67 is a highly valuable medical isotope because it functions as a theranostic agent, meaning it can both treat and track disease simultaneously.

Specifically, it emits radiation that is effective at destroying cancer cells, while also releasing radiation that allows doctors to monitor the treatment’s progress and assess its location using diagnostic imaging. This dual capability makes it exceptionally useful in personalized cancer care.

Clinical trials are currently investigating its use against aggressive diseases like neuroblastoma and prostate cancer.

However, the global supplies of Copper-67 are severely restricted because current production methods rely on expensive, dedicated accelerator time and often use aging infrastructure.

Read More......