Melania Trump Launched A Nationwide AI Challenge With US$ 10K Prizes

The U.S. First lady Melania Trump unveiled last 26 August the Presidential AI Challenge, a government-backed competition inviting students from kindergarten through 12th grade to use artificial intelligence to solve community problems.

The initiative, announced in a White House video message, seeks to prepare American youth for a future shaped by AI.

"As someone who created an AI-powered audio book and championed online safety through the Take It Down Act, I’ve seen firsthand the promise of this powerful technology," Trump said. "Now, I pass the torch of innovation to you."

The contest stems from an executive order President Donald Trump signed to advance AI education.

It asks students to form teams, work with an adult mentor, and use AI tools to build apps, websites, or other solutions to community challenges. Registration opened on 26th August, and submissions are due in December.

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House science and technology office, said the goal is to get children comfortable with AI. "We want to have America’s youth plugged in and working on and using AI tools," he said on Fox News Channel. He called the range of possible projects "endless."

Trump framed the challenge in historic terms. "Just as America once led the world into the skies, we are poised to lead again," she said. "This time, in the age of AI."

The White House guidebook advises that elementary students use only age-appropriate AI programs under adult supervision.

Every team that submits a project will receive a Presidential Certificate of Participation. Additional awards will be given at each stage of the competition.

State champions earn a Presidential Certificate of Achievement, cloud credits, and access to online resources. Regional champions receive the same, plus eligibility for a three-day event in Washington, D.C., where selected projects will be showcased at the White House.

National champions receive a Presidential Award Certificate, cloud credits, and US$ 10,000. Elementary winners receive the money for their school or community group, while middle and high school winners get US$ 10,000 each. Educator winners also receive US$ 10,000 per team member.

Interested students and educators can register for the Presidential AI Challenge here.

The initiative reflects the administration’s broader AI strategy. President Trump earlier this year introduced "Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan," designed to ease regulations and boost innovation. At a July summit, he pledged that the U.S. would do "whatever it takes" to lead globally in artificial intelligence.

Melania Trump has tied herself closely to this push. She promoted the Take It Down Act, which targets AI-generated sexual exploitation and deepfakes, and stood beside the president when he signed it into law in May.

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NASA Tech Deployed To Earthquake Areas

After the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria, the countries have been trying to bind up their wounds. Rescue teams are still working to save people’s lives, although it has been for several weeks.

NASA’s disaster relief teams employed "FINDER" equipment to identify the body’s tiniest motions caused by essential life functions in Turkey, which was mainly affected by the earthquake.

The device uses microwave signals to penetrate collapsed buildings and identify trapped victims' breathing patterns and cardiac rhythms.

Engineers based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California designed the system after flaws in rescue capabilities emerged in the wake of Haiti's 2010 disaster.

The development team spent years refining the sensors that identify human vital signs among background interference.

The technology distinguishes people from animals and filters mechanical vibrations from rescue equipment. Body movements as small as one millimeter from heartbeats register on the device's sensors.

"Your body moves a millimeter when your heart beats. Because the rubble itself isn't moving, we can separate those motions out. Then, we look to see if the motion shows both heartbeats and respiration," Jim Lux, who managed the prototype development, told Interesting Engineering.

The portable units conveniently fit inside standard protective cases that emergency personnel are already familiar with. Thanks to this design choice, rescue workers can quickly integrate the technology into their existing protocols without struggling through a learning curve.

Florida company SpecOps Group now produces commercial versions of the original NASA design. The transition from laboratory prototype to field equipment took several years.

The technology gives rescue teams precise location data that expedites victim recovery. Faster rescues mean more survivors can return home to their families.

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For These Spiders, "Size Does Matter"

Four newly discovered tarantula species were just dubbed the "Genital King," and for tarantulas, size really does matter.

The species are all under the genus Satyrex, which loosely translates to the epithet that Tinder dates around the world would love to boast. Still, they would certainly fall short compared with this tarantula, which can be found in southeastern Yemen and southwestern Oman, countries that share a border in Asia on the Arabian Peninsula.

A study published by the peer-reviewed scientific journal ZooKeys revealed the discovery of the well-endowed spiders.

Spiders don't have penises, but instead have pedipalps, which are secondary sexual organs that deliver sperm to females, said Alireza Zamani, the arachnologist and taxonomist at the University of Turku in Finland, who discovered the spider.

Most tarantulas' pedipalps are around 1.5 times larger than the carapace, their midsection, according to Zamani. It's "extremely rare," but sometimes pedipalps can be 2.5 times longer.

However, for the Genital King, "it is almost four times longer than the carapace," said Zamani. "It's almost as long as the longest legs of the tarantula."

If the tarantula swapped roles, and those proportions belonged to a human instead, their penis would almost be the length of their leg.

How did the spider develop such a big member? Well, researchers don't know, but they have a hypothesis.

"This elongation has happened as a result of what we call sexual selection," Zamani said. "The females of this species, and probably others that we are currently considering in this genus, are very, very aggressive."

The tarantulas are more aggressive than any species in the Americas.

So, the running theory is that the tarantulas have such long pedipalps because it makes it easier for them to administer their sperm into the female and make a quick getaway before the female tarantula can attack.

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Vegetative "Green Roofs" Offer Health Benefits

A Tongji University research project has provided evidence that green roofs can remove microplastics from rainwater, according to Anthropocene.

The vegetative building toppers have long been used to help insulate structures, reducing heating and cooling costs. They can also reduce stormwater runoff. They consist of a waterproof membrane, soil, plants, and some other infrastructure needed to hold it all together. They also provide urban habitat for birds and insects, and can last twice as long as regular roofs, all according to the Government Accountability Office.

A lab-scale mockup in Shanghai demonstrated the ability to filter out the tiny plastic polluters. The roof was able to collect 97.5 percent of ground rubber, polyurethane fibers, and other microplastics that were added to simulated rainfall, per the lab summary.

"Our study highlights the powerful potential of urban green roofs to act as passive interceptors of atmospheric microplastics," research team member Shuiping Cheng, from Tongji University in Shanghai, said in Anthropocene.

Microplastics are turning up all over the place, including in wild animal feces, the deep sea, and human blood, according to multiple reports. Washing a load of clothes sheds millions of microplastics, per PBS News. A researcher at the University of Bonn in Germany has developed a fish gill-inspired filter to capture most of them from the machines.

The health impact of the prolific pollution is still being studied, but Harvard Medicine said that scientists are concerned about cancer and reproductive health risks, among other troubles.

In Shanghai, vegetative roofs top only a "small fraction" of the sprawling city of more than 24 million people. Anthropocene reported that those green building surfaces can capture nearly 62 tons of microplastics annually.

"These nature-based solutions can offer unexpected co-benefits in mitigating airborne pollution in densely built environments," Cheng said in the report.

The GSA added that the natural roofs can also limit the impact of urban heat islands, negating "increased energy consumption, heat-related illness and death, and air pollution" from concrete- and asphalt-abundant cityscapes.

NASA has reported that planet warming is contributing to increased heat wave risks that may make some places uninhabitable.

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The "Black Moon" Is Rising

The Moon has always fascinated many and the upcoming iteration of the celestial object only fuels the curiosity.

A rare black moon is set to rise this weekend, Saturday morning, at around 2:06 A.M. EDT, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. The black moon — which was named fairly recently and is not an official astronomical term — is different than many of the well-known moons of the year, such as the pink, harvest, or blood moons.

Unlike the other celestial spectacles, you can’t see this one.

That’s because the black moon is a special kind of new moon. One of the moon’s eight phases, a new moon occurs when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun, making it invisible from Earth.

The black moon marks this invisible phase, with the illuminated side facing the sun and the dark side facing Earth.

There are two kinds of black moons: seasonal and monthly. This is a seasonal black moon, which happens once every 33 months or so. Whereas, the monthly black moon refers to when two new moons rise during a single month, with the second considered to be the black moon.

In February, the black moon is even less frequent than the seasonal black moon, occurring when there is either no new moon or no full moon. That happens only every 19 years, according to Time and Date.

To make matters even more of a headache, the term "black moon" has also been used to describe the third new moon in a season of four new moons, according to Earthsky. But, that’s also often known as a blue moon. So, it may be truthful to use the phrase "once in a black moon" now.

The phrase "once in a blue moon" dates back to 1528, according to MIT. A blue moon is also the second full moon in a calendar month.

So, what’s so special about the black moon if you can’t even see it and it shares its dates with a blue moon?

First, the absence of the moon’s light will make stargazing even more dazzling. Often, light from the moon can be strong enough to block out incoming meteor showers.

With new moons, the moon has even more of an effect on tides because the sun and Earth are in alignment. The moon’s gravitation pull is the primary force that drives ocean tides.

The next seasonal black moon is expected on 20 August 2028, and the next monthly black moon will happen on 31 August 2027.

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Scientist Found One Powerful Object In Space

A powerful mystery object was discovered in a nearby galaxy and only visible so far in millimeter radio wavelengths could be a brand new astrophysical object unlike anything astronomers have seen before.

The object has been named 'Punctum,' derived from the Latin pūnctum meaning "point" or "dot," by a team of astronomers led by Elena Shablovinskaia of the Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos at the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile. Shablovinskaia discovered it using ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array.

"Outside of the realm of supermassive black holes, Punctum is genuinely powerful," Shablovinskaia told Space.com.

Astronomers don't know what it is yet — only that it is compact, has a surprisingly structured magnetic field, and, at its heart, is an object radiating intense amounts of energy.

"When you put it into context, Punctum is astonishingly bright — 10,000 to 100,000 times more luminous than typical magnetars, around 100 times brighter than microquasars, and 10 to 100 times brighter than nearly every known supernova, with only the Crab Nebula surpassing it among star-related sources in our galaxy," Shablovinskaia said.

Punctum is located in the active galaxy NGC 4945, which is a fairly close neighbor of our Milky Way galaxy, located 11 million light-years away. That's just beyond the confines of the Local Group. Yet, despite this proximity, it cannot be seen in optical or X-ray light but rather only millimeter radio wavelengths. This has only deepened the mystery, although the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has yet to take a look at the object in near- and mid-infrared wavelengths.

Its brightness remained the same over several observations performed in 2023, meaning it is not a flare or some other kind of transitory phenomenon. Millimeter-wave radiation typically comes from cold objects such as young protoplanetary disks and interstellar molecular clouds. However, very energetic phenomena such as quasars and pulsars can also produce radio waves through synchrotron radiation, wherein charged particles moving at close to the speed of light spiral around magnetic field lines and radiate radio waves.

What we do know about Punctum is that based on how strongly polarized its millimeter light is, it must possess a highly structured magnetic field. And so, Shablovinskaia believes what we are seeing from Punctum is synchrotron radiation. Objects with strong polarization tend to be compact objects, because larger objects have messy magnetic fields that wash out any polarization.

Perhaps that synchrotron radiation is being powered by a magnetar, the team believes, which is a highly magnetic pulsar. However, while a magnetar's ordered magnetic field fits the bill, magnetars (and regular pulsars for that matter) are much fainter at millimeter wavelengths than Punctum is.

Supernova remnants such as the Crab Nebula, which is the messy innards blasted into space of a star that exploded in 1054AD, are bright at millimeter wavelengths. The trouble is that supernova remnants are quite large — the Crab Nebula itself is about 11 light-years across — whereas Punctum is clearly a much smaller, compact object.

"At the moment, Punctum truly stands apart — it doesn't fit comfortably into any known category," said Shablovinskaia. "And honestly, nothing like this has appeared in any previous millimeter surveys, largely because, until recently, we didn't have anything as sensitive and high-resolution as ALMA."

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Climate Change Is Not As Catastrophic As Some Believed

There is a new report from the Department of Energy concludes that gave credence to the argument that even if climate is changing and humans contribute to it, it is not necessarily the impending catastrophe many have been warned about. In another era, an agency charting this kind of middle course would be unremarkable. Today, it feels revolutionary.

The debate over climate change and responses has become so polarized that acknowledging the problem of human-driven warming without accepting a narrative that can sound apocalyptic invites attacks from all sides. I understand that the findings are controversial and hope climate scientists debate every detail. Considering the upside of getting this issue right, you would think more people would encourage open debate.

That is exactly what led energy analyst Travis Fisher of the Cato Institute to return briefly to the administration and help organize the Climate Working Group, which generated the report. Like many of us who read from outside our ideological circles, Fisher was frustrated that many members of the left treat climate-crisis dissent as a thought crime, while many on the right still dismiss climate change as a joke.

Fisher was initially hesitant to return to government service after a bruising prior stint. He was won over by Energy Secretary Chris Wright's stated desire to follow the data and inject more hard evidence into the conversation. Wright's plan was simple: "Elevate the debate" by gathering a team of credible, often-overlooked, independent experts to critically review the state of climate science—without political filters—and publish the results openly.

Five scientists were chosen by the energy secretary. They are all highly credentialed and have decades of research under their belts. Importantly, they were given complete freedom over their conclusions. One need not agree with the Trump administration's overall climate policy—such as the dismissal of the 400 volunteer scientists preparing the next congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment—to recognize the legitimacy of this new report and its small group of authors.

What does the report say? In a nutshell, as Fisher puts it: "Climate science—let alone climate policy—is far more nuanced than the summaries for policymakers (produced by previous government efforts) would have you believe."

The report affirms that greenhouse gases are warming the planet but tempers several claims. For example, the authors found no convincing evidence that U.S. hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or droughts have become more frequent or intense in recent decades, despite what you'd gather from headlines. This debate will continue, as it should, with many related dimensions to consider. But at least there is now high-profile evidence on record to give a say to reasonable experts who disagree with other more alarmed perspectives.

The Department of Energy report's authors also find that the planet's warming is unlikely to cause as much economic damage as is commonly claimed, in part because they believe past projections have been too extreme—something the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other mainstream climate scientists have recognized in recent years.

Another finding in the report is that drastic policies meant to reduce warming could do more economic harm than good, and that even the most heavy-handed climate policy can't make much of a difference. Even if we eliminated all U.S. emissions, the authors argue, it would have an "undetectably small" effect on global temperatures. Far from denying climate change, this perspective puts it into context and reminds us that sometimes the strongest medicines can hurt more than the disease.

None of this is to say that the report has all the answers or that other more worried scientists should not be heard. That's exactly the point: There should be an ongoing debate. Insisting that "the science is settled" implies that only one narrative is allowed and downplays other important conversations about the effects and scale of the challenge.

So, while some self-styled science defenders try to silence any dissenting view, one of the authors of the new report, Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, rightly notes that "any scientist that isn't skeptical isn't doing their job ... The 'mainstream' attempt to enforce a faux consensus to support political objectives is antithetical to science." A healthy process welcomes scrutiny and disagreement, which should help sharpen the work of any conscientious expert.

For better or worse, the study is already having an impact, with the Environmental Protection Agency citing it in a proposal to reconsider the federal government's 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. That will mean legal fights, lots of criticism — and more debate.

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Lost Maya City Discovered Using 327-Year Old Letter

Archaeologists have recently discovered the location of Sak-Bahlán — the last city of the Lacandon rebels of Chiapas — in the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. The city had been lost in the jungle following its abandonment 300 years ago, and had eluded both previous expeditions and (fortunately) most of the 17th- and 18th-century Spanish conquest.

The independent outpost of the rebels (known as the "land of the white jaguar") was finally discovered thanks to the use of Geographic Information Systems predictive modeling.

"It was the most arduous field trip I’ve ever had in my life, but, finally, we found the archaeological evidence, right at the spot I had marked," Josuhé Lozada Toledo, National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) Chiapas Center specialist, said in a translated statement.

The Maya people group known as the Lacandon lost their capital, Lacam-Tún (translated as "great rock"), to the Spanish in 1586, and retreated to Sak-Bahlán for just over 100 years of independent existence, according to historical records. The group lived undisturbed during that time, even as the Spanish searched for the site. But in 1695, Spanish Friar Pedro de la Concepcion found the stronghold by happenstance, and the Spanish soon took it over and renamed it Our Lady of Sorrows.

By 1721, however, anyone still living at the site had abandoned it, leaving it lost to the jungle of what is now the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. Efforts to relocate the site had since proven fruitless — until now.

The new effort to locate the stronghold relied on predictive modeling based on information from historical documents — including a letter by Spanish friar Diego de Rivas written in 1698, which described a journey taken by a group of soldiers from the site.

Lozada Toledo and archaeologists Brent Woodfill and Yuko Shiratori knew the city was located on a plain surrounded by a bend in the Lacantún River. Lozada Toledo used GIS to reconstruct pre-Hispanic and historical communication routes of various Maya groups, supplementing the models with further layers of data.

Information from Friar de Rivas’ letter showed that the soldiers left Sak-Bahlán and walked four days to the Lacantún River. They then sailed for two days to arrive at El Encuentro de Cristo (where the tributary joins the Pasión River), and left their canoes to walk to Lake Petén Itzá in Guatemala.

"From those places mentioned, which I had georeferenced, I made a conversion of the four days mentioned, from some point on the Lacantún River to Sak-Bahlán," Lozada Toledo said.

After accounting for a number of variables — including vegetation layers and how much each person was carrying — Lozada Toledo mapped an approximate range of where Sak-Bahlán should be located.

The team discovered a site near the Mexico-Guatemala border full of stone structures, tools, ceramics, and even a Spanish church, Lozada Toledo told Spanish-language Milenio — evidence that matched up with documents about the former Lacandon city. They’d found it.

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Ancient Tools Of Unknown Origin Discovered

Archaeologists determined that seven stone tools found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi date back to somewhere between 1.04–1.48 million years ago and belonged to an ancient human species yet to be identified by researchers. The bombshell discoveries were recently published in the journal Nature.

The seven tools were originally excavated between 2019 and 2022 in a cornfield in the city of Calio. They were crafted with hard-hammer percussion techniques in which large pebbles cultivated from riverbeds were struck to form sharp-edged flakes, which would assist with cutting and scraping.

Professor Adam Brumm, of Griffith University's Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, co-led the international research team and described the tools as "simple, sharp-edged flakes of stone that would have been useful as general-purpose cutting and scraping implements."

After determining the age of the tools to be somewhere between 1.04–1.48 million years old, scientists found that the timeline directly corresponds with the arrival of Homo erectus on the neighboring island of Java, where fossils dating back 1.6 million years have been discovered. This newest find introduces more questions than it provides answers regarding the archaeological history of Sulawesi, where previously the oldest discovered fossil was an upper jaw fragment belonging to modern Homo sapiens, dating to just 25,000–16,000 years ago.

Researchers say that the tools' discovery raises tantalizing questions about hominin travel across Southeast Asia. The find would seem to indicate multiple waves of occupation by different species and populations rather than a linear migration. The tools themselves show a nuanced and detailed understanding of stonesmanship, which could only have been passed down through several generations.

"Sulawesi is a wild card—it's like a mini-continent in itself," Brumm said. "If hominins were cut off on this huge and ecologically rich island for a million years, would they have undergone the same evolutionary changes as the Flores hobbits? Or would something totally different have happened?"

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Design Of A Spacecraft To Alpha Centauri

Engineers have designed a spacecraft that could take up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to Earth. The craft, called Chrysalis, could make the 25 trillion mile (40 trillion kilometer) journey in around 400 years, the engineers say in their project brief, meaning many of its potential passengers would only know life on the craft.

Chrysalis is designed to house several generations of people until it enters the star system, where it could shuttle them to the surface of the planet Proxima Centuri b — an Earth-size exoplanet that is thought to be potentially habitable.

The project won first place in the Project Hyperion Design Competition, a challenge that requires teams to design hypothetical multigenerational ships for interstellar travel.

Before boarding the ship, the Chrysalis project would require initial generations of ship inhabitants to live in and adapt to an isolated environment in Antarctica for 70 to 80 years to ensure psychological wellbeing. The ship could theoretically be constructed in 20 to 25 years and retains gravity through constant rotation.

The vessel, which would measure 36 miles (58 km) in length, would be constructed like a Russian nesting doll, with several layers encompassing each other around a central core. The layers include communal spaces, farms, gardens, homes, warehouses and other shared facilities, each powered by nuclear fusion reactors.

The core in the center of the vehicle hosts the shuttles that could bring people to Proxima Centuri b, as well as all of Chrysalis' communication equipment.

The layer closest to Chrysalis' core is dedicated to food production, nurturing plants, fungi, microbes, insects and livestock in controlled environments. To preserve biodiversity, different environments including tropical and boreal forests would be maintained.

The second level from the center provides communal spaces, like parks, schools, hospitals and libraries, for the ship’s inhabitants. The next shell would then hold dwellings for individual households, equipped with air circulation and heat exchangers.

Work happens on the next level up, where there are facilities for industries ranging from recycling to pharmaceuticals to structural manufacturing. The fifth and outermost shell would serve as a warehouse for varied types of resources, materials, equipment and machinery. The Chrysalis' designers suggest that robots could run this level, reducing the need for human physical labor.

Births would be planned in Chrysalis to ensure the population stays at a sustainable level, which the research team determined to be about 1,500 people — 900 people less than the ship's total capacity.

Those responsible for the ship's governance would collaborate with artificial intelligence, "allowing for resilience of the whole social system, better knowledge transfer between the different generations of inhabitants and a deeper vision of the overall dynamics of the Chrysalis spaceship complex," the project engineers wrote in their pitch.

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Da Vinci's Heart Finally Solved

It took nearly 500 years for researchers to finally understand the anatomical function of a heart feature first described by Leonardo da Vinci. To find the answer, scientists used fractal theory, MRIs, and a lot of computational elbow grease to shed light on structures called trabeculae. They found this branching, snowflaky muscle layer plays a part in the risk of heart disease.

"The inner surfaces of the human heart are covered by a complex network of muscular strands that is thought to be a remnant of embryonic development," the researchers explain in a paper in Nature. "The function of these trabeculae in adults and their genetic architecture are unknown. Here we investigate trabeculae using the fractal analysis in 18,096 participants of the UK Biobank."

Leonardo drew pictures of the fine, lacy, snowflake-like trabeculae after examining a heart up close and dissecting it. The artist likely noticed the tree root-like branching structure, and he theorized that the trabeculae were like the systems we use now to keep sidewalks and roads from freezing: a network for blood, in this case, that was kept warm by circulating in small vessels around the warm and vibrant heart.

In studying the trabeculae, scientists were able to identify common features across different patient imagery and to begin to draw conclusions about what the structural trabeculae are doing.

"Using biomechanical simulations and observational data from human participants, we demonstrate that trabecular morphology is an important determinant of cardiac performance," for example, meaning certain trabecular structures meant an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

"We identified 16 significant loci that contain genes associated with haemodynamic phenotypes and regulation of cytoskeletal arborization," the researchers explain.

By studying the genome as well as trabeculae of their tens of thousands of subjects, they began to pinpoint places in the genome that spoke to how trabeculae are able to form and function—with implications about the way other body cells form and behave as well. (Arborization is just what it sounds like: the technical term for branching, like a tree.)

Fractal analysis colors everything from mapmaking to botany to telecomms: anytime a major “trunk” branches into smaller and smaller areas until it has photographed the whole country, like Google Maps, or covered the entire Earth landmass with high-speed internet. In this case, the trabeculae branch into smaller and smaller threads, and the nature of the fractal network is where many of the clues lie.

"Only the combination of genetics, clinical research, and bioengineering led us to discover the unexpected role of myocardial trabeculae in the function of the adult heart," researcher Hannah Meyer said in a statement. The researchers say this is also just a first step toward a more complex understanding of the trabeculae.

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'Super Steel' Developed For Fusion Energy

The biggest unknown in fusion energy is not the physics powering gargantuan reactors known as tokamaks.

Scientists are confident that if a reactor contains a superheated plasma, fueled by heavy hydrogen isotopes of deuterium and tritium, at temperatures approaching 100 million degrees Celsius, you will produce a self-sustaining reaction, generating near endless amounts of clean energy. Tokamaks around the world—not to the National Ignition Facility’s successful fusion ignition in 2022—have proven this out time and again.

The real problem is the materials needed to build the thing.

"You need a material solution. Give me the materials that can hold this thing together, at temperature, to be efficient," Phil Ferguson, Ph.D., Director of the Material Plasma Exposure eXperiment (MPEX) Project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory told Popular Mechanics in 2024. "We are still lacking a breakthrough in materials."

Not only does a fusion reactor need parts, such as the divertor, to handle the plasma’s extreme heat, other parts of the very same machine need to withstand and operate at temperatures approaching absolute zero.

One of these parts is the very heart of the reactor, called the central solenoid, which is responsible for a majority of the magnetic flux to generate the plasma and is powered by ultracold cable-in-conduit superconductors. The shield, or jacket, for the central solenoid needs to be a steel material that can retain superior mechanical and thermal properties at cryogenic temperatures while also withstanding intense magnetic fields.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the world’s most advanced tokamak that’s due for first plasma by 2034, uses a material known as 316LN stainless steel designed to operate at a maximum of 11.8 Tesla.

Now, a new report from the state-run South China Morning Post (SCMP) suggests that Chinese scientists have come up with a new material that has even ITER’s steel jacket of choice beat. This super steel, called China high-strength low-temperature steel No. 1, or CHSN01, can withstand up to 20 Tesla and 1,500-megapascal (MPa) of stress. Scientists detailed the 12-year process to create this particular steel jacket in the journal Applied Sciences this past May.

"While ITER’s maximum 11.8 Tesla field design is enough for itself, future higher-field magnets will require advanced materials," said Li Laifeng, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ (CAS), reports SCMP. "Developing next-gen cryogenic steel isn’t optional – it’s essential for the success of China’s compact fusion energy experimental devices."

CHSN01 will be in the central Solenoid of China’s Burning Plasma Experiment Superconducting Tokamak (BEST), an intermediary reactor between the country’s first-generation fusion reactors and the Chinese Fusion Engineering Test Reactor—the country’s first fusion plant demonstrator. Scientists aim for the BEST reactor to achieve first plasma in late 2027.

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Abundance Of Life At 31K Feet Below The Ocean

Who would have thought that at 31,000 feet below the Ocean, life is amazing. It’s survived everything from asteroid impacts to ice ages to continental drift and simply continued chugging along. It even manages to exist—and flourish—in the deepest part of the world’s oceans, devoid of any sunlight.

Recently, a manned submersible (not a robot, but one with actual people inside) brought this truth into sharp focus by diving over 31,000 feet into the world’s deepest ocean trenches.

The mission—which, over its duration, saw a total of 17 scientists dive down in the sub—ended up finding what might be the largest chemosynthesis-based community on Earth, and uncovered thousands of new species of microorganisms. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature.

To really get a sense of what was down there, the team of researchers took the manned submersible Fendouzhe—the world’s only human-occupied vehicle (HOV) capable of the sampling and research achieved in this study—to depths as extreme as 31,200 feet, in such locations as the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench and the western Aleutian Trench. All in all, they managed to identify 7,564 species of prokaryotic microorganism, over 89 percent of which had never been seen before.

The hadal zone contains some of Earth’s least explored and understood environments. These communities of extreme deep water life forms are sustained not by sunlight—which can’t even begin to penetrate water to hadal-zone depths—but by hydrogen sulfide- and methane-rich fluids found along faults that carve their way through the deep sediment layers found in the trenches.

"Given geological similarities with other hadal trenches, such chemosynthesis-based communities might be more widespread than previously anticipated," the authors wrote. "These findings challenge current models of life at extreme limits and carbon cycling in the deep ocean."

But evidently, even at these extremes, life will win out. The diversity in the trenches is thought to equal that of the rest of the known marine world.

The first humans to descend to some of the deepest points in a variety of trenches were in awe of the experience. And the scientific potential.

"Diving in the submersible was an extraordinary experience—like traveling through time," Mengran Du, a study author and researcher at the Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Vox. "Each descent transported me to a new deep-sea realm. As a diving scientist, nothing compares to the thrill of gazing through the observation window with my own eyes."

"The presence of these chemosynthetic ecosystems," Du continued, "challenges long-standing assumptions about life’s potential at extreme depths."

Xiao Xiang, convening scientist of the Mariana Trench Environment and Ecology Research and professor at the School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, told China Daily that these deep-sea organisms could be a massive boon for science. "Our research showed the hadal zone microbes exhibit extraordinary novelty and diversity, demonstrating the immense resource potential of the hadal microorganisms in terms of new genes, new structures, and new functions."

"Such resources," Xiang continued, "may provide a new option to solve the dilemma of global depletion of biological resources and also open up prospects for innovative application in the areas of biotechnology, medicine, and energy, among others."

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Chinese Scientists Made Breakthrough With Bendable Battery

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently completed a study outlining their design and development of a hydrogel electrolyte that uses urea and zinc acetate to enable zinc-ion batteries to bend without losing voltage.

The study, published in the international edition of Angewandte Chemie, sought an alternative to conventional means of improving flexibility.

Quasi-solid-state electrolytes, for instance, encounter limitations in terms of cost, durability, and environmental impact — limitations overcome by the inexpensive, eco-friendly zinc acetate compound.

That's not to say the researchers faced zero obstacles along the way.

Zinc acetate's poor solubility, according to a summary published on Tech Xplore, interferes with performance, meaning the researchers needed to cultivate a "salting out" strategy — that is, removing hydration shells around polymer chains — in order to strengthen the electrolyte's durability.

"This approach overcomes the usual limits of the low-cost [zinc acetate] salt, making it much better at resisting wear and tear," noted researcher Li Zhaoqian. "It allows the material to withstand repeated processes of zinc plating and stripping, as well as other physical stress, improving its overall durability."

Zinc-ion batteries are used in a range of applications, from smart technology to electric vehicles and renewable power storage, serving as a much more sustainable alternative to lithium-ion batteries, which tend to be expensive to source and contain hazardous pollutants.

As carbon pollution continues to push our planet to overheat, threatening the stability of our weather, our resources, and our public health, finding ways to improve our current clean energy techniques becomes increasingly essential.

In particular, increasing the physical flexibility of batteries "highlights its potential for application in portable and wearable electronic devices," according to Li, which are becoming more popular these days in the form of watches, rings, and even clothing.

As it stands, zinc-ion batteries are less common than lithium-ion batteries because of their aforementioned limitations, despite their longevity and cost-effectiveness. However, innovations such as the product of this latest research are sure to underscore the benefits and offset the costs, facilitating their integration into various sectors.

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New Status Discovered In Easter Island

Just when experts thought they knew every moai on Rapa Nui, otherwise known as Easter Island, a dried-up lakebed kept them on their toes. These statues—largely made of a stone formed from volcanic ash and dust called tuff—pepper the island, with more than 1,000 already found and logged.

Finding another one came as a surprise. And a bit of a mystery.

"We think we know all the moai, but then a new one turns up, a new discovery, and in this case, in the lake, at the statue quarry," Terry Hunt, professor of archeology at the University of Arizona, told Good Morning America. "There have been no moai found in the dry bed or in what was previously a lake, so this is a first."

And it may not be the last.

As the area undergoes drying, the lakebed in question has given up its moai. And this opportunity may occur again. "Under the dry conditions that we have now, we may find more," Hunt said. "They’ve been hidden by the tall reeds that grow in the lakebed and prospecting with something that can detect what’s under the ground surface may tell us that there are in fact more moai in the lakebed sediments. When there’s one moai in the lake, there’s probably more."

The newly discovered moai is also one of the smallest found, leading experts to believe that hidden within these reeds is the potential for a bounty of new moai.

Created by the Rapu Nui people, moai have a mythical legend attached to them and have gained worldwide renown for their appearances. Some believe these moai were given special powers to walk across land and end up in their resting place. Whether or not the legend has legs, there are many theories regarding how these statues moved from building sites to various locations.

While the largest of the statues weighs 86 tons and rises 32 feet tall, most of the moai average about half that size. About 95 percent are carved from the volcanic tuff, but a few are made from basalt. Each one is unique, created by carvers to represent the characteristics of the person it resembled, often a chieftain or key leader.

The finishing touch on moai was the inclusion of special stones for the eyes, not carved or placed until the statue found its home.

Even though experts thought they knew the locations of all of these moai homes, finding this new, small one in the lakebed proves some had remained a complete mystery.

"It’s here in the lake and nobody knows this exists," Salvador Atan Hito, vice president of Ma’u Henua, the group that oversees the island’s national park, told Good Morning America, "even the ancestors, our grandparents don’t know [about] that one."

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The Potential Of The Eighth Continent Of Zealandia

Once there were seven. Now, the eighth continent of Zealandia doesn't want to be silent and shows everyone why it has so much promise. Well, it did—until about 95 percent of the mass sunk under the ocean.

While the majority of Zealandia may never host inhabitants — at least, not land-based ones — the would-be continent is now no longer simply lost. Researchers have finished mapping out the northern two-thirds of Zealandia, wrapping up the documentation of the nearly two million square miles of the submerged land mass.

In a study published in Tectonics, researchers from GNS Science of New Zealand document their process of dredging rock samples from the Fairway Ridge to the Coral Sea in order to analyze the rock geochemical and understand the underwater makeup of Zealandia.

Zealandia’s history is quite closely tied to the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, which broke up hundreds of millions of years ago. Zealandia followed suit — roughly 80 million years ago, according to the latest theory. But unlike neighboring Australia or much of Antarctica, Zealandia largely sunk, leaving only a small portion of what many geologists believe should still be dubbed the eighth continent.

New Zealand makes up the most recognizable above-water portion of Zealandia, although a few other islands in the vicinity are also part of the maybe-continent in question.

This research, led by Nick Mortimer, dredged the northern two-thirds of the submerged area, pulling up pebbly and cobbley sandstone, fine-grain sandstone, mudstone, bioclastic limestone, and basaltic lava from a variety of time periods. By dating the rocks and interpreting magnetic anomalies, the researchers wrote, they were able to map the major geological units across North Zealandia.

"This work completes offshore reconnaissance geological mapping of the entire Zealandia continent," they said.

The researchers found the sandstone roughly 95 million years old from the Late Cretaceous period and a mix of granite and volcanic pebbles from up to 130 million years old during the Early Cretaceous period. The basalts are newer — they’re about 40 million years old and from the Eocene period.

Along with the mapping, the paper says that the internal deformation of both Zealandia and West Antarctica show that stretching led to the subduction-style cracking of the plates that welcomed ocean water to form the Tasman Sea. Then, a few million years later, further Antarctica break-away continued to stretch the crust of Zealandia until it thinned enough to break apart and seal the largely underwater fate of Zealandia. This goes against the prevailing theory of a strike-slip breakup.

The team believes, according to Science Alert, that the stretching direction varied by up to 65 degrees, which may have allowed the extensive thinning of the continental crust.

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AI Can Hasten Human Singularity

In this new age of AI, the idea of "singularity" looms large. This slippery concept describes the moment AI exceeds beyond human control and rapidly transforms society. The tricky thing about AI singularity is that it’s enormously difficult to predict where it begins and nearly impossible to know what’s beyond this technological "event horizon."

However, some AI researchers are on the hunt for signs of reaching singularity measured by AI progress approaching the skills and ability comparable to a human.

"The change is so small that every single day you don’t perceive it, but when you see progress … across 10 years, that is impressive," Trombetti said on a podcast. "This is the first time ever that someone in the field of artificial intelligence did a prediction of the speed to singularity."

Although this is a novel approach to quantifying how close humanity is to approaching singularity, this definition of singularity runs into similar problems of identifying AGI more broadly. And while perfecting human speech is certainly a frontier in AI research, the impressive skill doesn’t necessarily make a machine intelligent (not to mention how many researchers don’t even agree on what "intelligence" is).

Whether these hyper-accurate translators are harbingers of our technological doom or not, that doesn’t lessen Translated’s AI accomplishment. An AI capable of translating speech as well as a human could very well change society, even if the true "technological singularity" remains ever elusive.

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Ancient Egyptian Handprint Found

Roughly about 4,000 years ago, when an ancient Egyptian potter left a handprint on the bottom of a "soul house" used in a burial, the mark likely wouldn’t have been noticed. Today, however, that handprint is being put on display at a Cambridge museum.

"We've spotted traces of fingerprints left in wet varnish or on a coffin in the decoration, but it is rare and exciting to find a complete handprint underneath this soul house," Helen Strudwick, curator of the Made in Ancient Egypt exhibit and senior Egyptologist at The Fitzwilliam Museum, said in a statement provided by the University of Cambridge. "This was left by the maker who touched it before the clay dried."

The 4,000-year-old handprint was discovered on the underside of a 'soul house'—a structure shaped like a building with an open courtyard, which was used to hold food offerings in tombs. The soul house was a symbolic offering site and resting place, and their installation was a common practice in ancient Egypt.

The clay soul house is dated to between 2055 and 1650 B.C. by researchers at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, and the handprint on the underside was likely made when the potter moved the house to dry prior to placing it in the firing kiln.

"I have never seen such a complete handprint on an Egyptian object before," Strudwick said. "You can just imagine the person who made this, picking it up to move it out of the workshop to dry before firing."

Researchers at the museum believe the soul house was first made with wooden sticks and then coated with clay to make a two-story building supported by pillars. Staircases were formed by pinching wet clay. The potter then would have fired the clay, which would have burnt away the wooden framework and left empty spaces in its place.

Clay and ceramics were common in ancient Egypt, and were used as both functional and decorative objects (though the functional sort were more plentiful). Clay was considered such a common material—either deposited by the Nile as silt or found as shale—that the potters were not afforded status in society, with some texts comparing them to pigs wallowing in the mud, according to the BBC.

More information is known about the ceramic and clay artifacts created by the craftspeople than the potters themselves, and the Fitzwilliam Museum’s October opening of the Made in Ancient Egypt exhibit aims to begin rectifying that disparity by telling the stories of artifact makers. The museum hopes to "create a vivid picture of these workers as individuals" using work orders, receipts, delivery notes, and unfinished objects.

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