X-ray

The second largest diamond in the world has been discovered in Botswana. Canadian mining company Lucara Diamond used an advanced X-ray scanner to find a 2,492-carat diamond from its Karowe Diamond Mine. That's a whopping 17.58 oz (498.4 g).

Not content with sending tourists into space as a general destination, SpaceX plans by the end of the year to send a private space expedition, called Fram2, aboard a Dragon spacecraft on the first crewed mission to travel over the Earth's poles.

The humble X-ray may have received a long-overdue upgrade thanks to the development of a highly sensitive, printable X-ray detector that can operate over a wide range of energy levels, with potential in a wide range of real-world applications.

Stars are hot balls of plasma, but astronomers have now spotted a super strange one that may have a solid surface. Its intense magnetic field is strong enough to overcome its blistering temperatures and “freeze” its outer layers into a solid crust.

NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) X-ray space telescope has roared into orbit to start its mission studying polarized X-rays from a variety of cosmic sources, including black holes, neutron stars, pulsars, quasars, and galactic nuclei.

Artificial Intelligence promises to revolutionize many fields, but few as important as healthcare. With that in mind, Nvidia and King's College London have teamed up to build and train an AI platform to interpret radiological scans for hospitals across the UK.

Pulsars have been proposed as a space navigation system in the past. Now NASA has demonstrated the viability of the idea, with an experiment showing that a spacecraft can constantly and automatically calculate its position by tracking the perfectly-predictable X-ray signals from an array of pulsars.

A team of scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is developing a laser-based X-ray machine that can image a uranium disk the size of a stack of three US nickels hidden between three-inch (7.6 cm) steel panels.​

MIT acousticians and fluid dynamicists have teamed up with violin makers to meticulously analyze hundreds of instruments from the Cremonese period. The findings not only reveal key design features, but also shed light on whether the development of the instruments was deliberate.

A group of researchers at New Jersey-based LPP Fusion are turning to crowdfunding to demonstrate net power gain from a nuclear fusion reactor. The scientists say they could design a US$500,000, 5 MW reactor that would produce energy for as little as 0.06 cents per kWh, all by the end of the decade.

GE has adapted its medical X-ray systems to work in the crushing pressures of the deep oceans, as part of a remote-controlled submersible rig for examining pipelines in place.

The APRICOT (Automated Pinbone Removal In Cod and WhiTefish) project set out in January, 2012 to find an automated solution that would keep fish processing in Scandinavia and has now developed a machine that achieves just that.