The Hercules laser, the most intense laser in the world, currently fires a beam of 300 TW. But by upgrading components that could increase to 1,000 TW, advancing astrophysics research and enabling more precise, faster and cheaper medical x-rays.
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Google Maps is both amazing and a little terrifying at times. Not content to just map out almost every corner of the Earth, Google has now added the ability to explore 12 other worlds in our little corner of the galaxy.
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Last year the FDA approved the first artificial pancreas for general use, designed to automatically monitor and inject insulin in patients with type 1 diabetes. Now a team at Harvard has developed an even more sophisticated system than connects to a patient’s smartphone and learns their habits.
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A team of scientists has announced the fifth detection of gravitational waves, but there’s a groundbreaking difference this time: the ripples were caused by the collision of two neutron stars, meaning the event was accompanied by light, radio, and other electromagnetic signals for the first time.
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A NASA study has analyzed data gathered by the OCO-2 satellite and pinpointed the cause of an unprecedented spike in atmospheric CO2 in 2015 and 2016: the El Nino weather effect caused certain tropical regions to release far more CO2 than they normally would.
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After opening the world’s first commercial Direct Air Capture (DAC) plant designed to pull CO2 out of the air, Swiss company Climeworks is now joining forces with a geothermal power plant in Iceland to create the world’s first “negative emission” power plant.
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While we may hear about ways of constructing new buildings to make them earthquake-resistant, what about all the buildings that are standing already? Well, that's where a special new concrete comes in. Sprayed onto existing walls, it allows them to withstand major tremors.
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There are a number of schemes out there intended to tackle the huge problem of ocean waste, and while none claim to be a complete solution, they do promise to help in their own ways. Among them is the Seabin, a rubbish-sucking device that is now being installed commercially for the very first time.
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There are stories in the stars, so they say, and the story of Kronos is a doozy. Astronomers from Princeton noticed some marked chemical differences between the star and its binary partner, Krios, and determined the most likely cause: Kronos has devoured the equivalent of 15 Earths.
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It is expected to prevent 280 million cases of skin cancer in the US alone. Without it, the sun would burn skin in minutes. Yet the strides made by the Montreal Protocol in repairing our ozone layer may be undone thanks to dangerous chemicals now making their way into the upper atmosphere.
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