"Astronomers are preparing to capture a movie of a supermassive black hole in action for the first time," reports the Guardian: The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) will track the colossal black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy throughout March and April with the aim of capturing footage of the swirling disc that traces out the edge of the event horizon, the point beyond which no light or matter can escape... The EHT is a global network of 12 radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Korea, which in 2019 unveiled the first image of a black hole's shadow. During March and April, as the Earth rotates, M87's central black hole will come into view for different telescopes, allowing a complete image to be captured every three days...

Measuring the black hole's spin speed matters because this could help discriminate between competing theories of how these objects reached such epic proportions. If black holes grow mostly through accretion — steadily snowballing material that strays nearby — they would be expected to end up spinning at incredibly high speeds. By contrast, if black holes expand mostly through merging with other black holes, each merger could slow things down. The observations could also help explain how black hole jets are formed, which are among the largest, most powerful structures produced by galaxies. Jets channel vast columns of gas out of galaxies, slowing down the formation of new stars and limiting galaxy growth. In turn this can create dense pockets of material that trigger bursts of star formation beyond the host galaxy...

While the movie campaign will take place in the spring, the sheer volume of data produced by the telescopes means the scientists will need to wait for Antarctic summer before the hard drives can be physically shipped to Germany and the US for processing. So it is likely to be a lengthy wait before the rest of the world gets a glimpse of the black hole in action.
In a correction, the Guardian apologizes for originally including an AI-generated illustration of black hole with a caption suggesting it was a photo from telescopes. They've since swapped in an actual picture of the Messier 87 galaxy black hole.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Particles from Earth's atmosphere have been carried into space by solar wind and have been landing on the moon for billions of years, mixing into the lunar soil, according to a new study [published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment last month]. The research sheds new light on a puzzle that has endured for over half a century since the Apollo missions brought back lunar samples with traces of substances such as water, carbon dioxide, helium and nitrogen embedded in the regolith — the moon's dusty surface layer.

Early studies theorized that the sun was the source of some of these substances. But in 2005 researchers at the University of Tokyo suggested that they could have also originated from the atmosphere of a young Earth before it developed a magnetic field about 3.7 billion years ago. The authors suspected that the magnetic field, once in place, would have stopped the stream by trapping the particles and making it difficult or impossible for them to escape into space. Now, the new research upends that assumption by suggesting that Earth's magnetic field might have helped, rather than blocked, the transfer of atmospheric particles to the moon — which continues to this day.

"This means that the Earth has been supplying volatile gases like oxygen and nitrogen to the lunar soil over all this time," said Eric Blackman, coauthor of the new study and a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in New York.
Earth's magnetic field "somewhat inflates the atmosphere of Earth" when it's hit by solar winds, according to study coauthor Eric Blackman, a physics/astronomy professor at New York's University of Rochester. He told CNN the moon passes through this region for a few days each month, with particles landing on the lunar surface and embedding in the soil (because the moon lacks an atmosphere that would block them).

This also means the moon's soil could actually contain a chemical record of Earth's ancient atmosphere, according to the study — "spanning billions of years..."

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this report from Futurism: China has unveiled an extremely powerful "hypergravity machine" that can generate forces almost two thousand times stronger than Earth's regular gravity.

The futuristic-looking machine, called CHIEF1900, was constructed at China's Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility (CHIEF) at Zheijang University in Eastern China, and allows researchers to study how extreme forces affect various materials, plants, cells, or other structures, as the South China Morning Post reports... [Once up and running, it will allow researchers to recreate "catastrophic events such as dam failures and earthquakes inside a laboratory, according to the university."] For instance, it can analyze the structural stability of an almost 1,000-feet-tall dam by spinning a ten-foot model at 100 Gs, meaning 100 times the Earth's regular gravity. It could also be used to study the resonance frequencies of high-speed rail tracks, or how pollutants seep into soil over thousands of years.

The machine officially dethroned its predecessor, CHIEF1300, which became the world's most powerful centrifuge a mere four months ago... It can generate 1,900 g-tonnes of force, or 1,900 times the Earth's gravity. To put that into perspective, a washing machine only reaches about two g-tonnes.

European satellite operator Eutelsat "plans to launch 440 Airbus-built LEO satellites in the coming years to replenish and expand its constellation," Reuters reported Friday. And last week America's Federal Communications Commission approved SpaceX's request to deploy another 7,500 Starlink satellites, while Starlink "projects it will eventually have a constellation of 34,000 satellites," writes Fast Company, and Amazon's Project Leo "plans to launch more than 3,200 satellites."

Meanwhile "Beijing and some Chinese companies are planning two separate mega-constellations, Guowang and G60 Starlink, totaling nearly 26,000 satellites," and this week the Chinese government "applied for launch permits for 200,000 satellites."

But a small Texas-based company called AST SpaceMobile "believes it can provide better service with fewer than 100 gigantic satellites in space." AST SpaceMobile has developed a direct-to-cell technology that utilizes large satellites called BlueBirds. These machines use thousands of antennas to deliver broadband coverage directly to standard mobile phones, says the company's president, Scott Wisniewski. "This approach is remarkably efficient: We can achieve global coverage with approximately 90 satellites, not thousands or even tens of thousands required by other systems," Wisniewski writes in an email...

The key is its satellites' size and sophistication. AST's first generation of commercial satellite, the BlueBird 1-5, unfolds into a massive 693-square-foot array in space. Today, the company has five operational BlueBird 1-5 satellites in orbit, but its ambitions are much bigger. On December 24, 2025, AST launched the first of its next-generation satellites from India — called Block 2 — and this one broke records. The BlueBird 6 has a surface of almost 2,400 square feet, making it the largest single satellite in low Earth orbit. The company plans to launch up to 60 more by the end of 2026. "This large surface area is essential for gathering faint signals from standard, unmodified mobile phones on the ground," Wisniewski explains. It is essentially a single, extremely powerful and sensitive cell tower in the sky, capable of serving a huge geographical area...

To be clear, AST SpaceMobile's approach is not without its own controversies. The sheer size of the company's satellites makes them incredibly bright in the night sky, a significant source of frustration for ground-based astronomers. McDowell confirms that when it launched in 2022, AST's prototype satellite, BlueWalker 3, became "one of the top 10 brightest objects in the night sky for a while."

"It's a serious issue, and we are working directly with the astronomy community to mitigate our impact," Wisniewski says. The company is exploring solutions like anti-reflective coatings and operational adjustments to minimize the time its satellites are at maximum brightness...
AST SpaceMobile has already proven its technology works, the article points out, with six working satellites now transmitting at typical 5G speeds directly to regular phones.

"A mega rocket set to take astronauts around the Moon for the first time in decades is being taken to its launch pad," the BBC reported this morning.

NASA is livestreaming their move of the 11-million-pound "stack" — which includes the Artemis II Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft secured to it, all standing on its Mobile Launch Platform. Travelling at less than 1 mile per hour, the move is expected to take 12 hours.

The mission — which could blast off as soon as 6 February — is expected to take 10 days. It is part of a wider plan aimed at returning astronauts to the lunar surface.

As well as the rocket being ready, the Moon has to be in the right place too, so successive launch windows are selected accordingly. In practice, this means one week at the beginning of each month during which the rocket is pointed in the right direction followed by three weeks where there are no launch opportunities. The potential launch dates are:

— 6, 7, 8, 10 and 11 February
— 6, 7, 8, 9 and 11 March
— 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 April
"The crew of four will travel beyond the far side of the moon, which could set a new record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth, currently held by Apollo 13," reports CNN: But why won't Artemis II land on the lunar surface? "The short answer is because it doesn't have the capability. This is not a lunar lander," said Patty Casas Horn, deputy lead for Mission Analysis and Integrated Assessments at NASA. "Throughout the history of NASA, everything that we do is a bit risky, and so we want to make sure that that risk makes sense, and only accept the risk that we have to accept, within reason. So we build out a capability, then we test it out, then we build out a capability, then we test it out. And we will get to landing on the moon, but Artemis II is really about the crew..."

The upcoming flight is the first time that people will be on board the Artemis spacecraft: The Orion capsule will carry the astronauts around the moon, and the SLS rocket will launch Orion into Earth orbit before the crew continues deeper into space... The mission will begin with two revolutions around Earth, before starting the translunar injection — the maneuver that will take the spacecraft out of Earth orbit and on toward the moon — about 26 hours into the flight, Horn said. "That's when we set up for the big burn — it's about six minutes in duration. And once we do this, you're on your way back to Earth. There's nothing else that you need to do. You're going to go by the moon, and the moon's gravity is going to pull you around and swing you back towards the Earth...." Avoiding entering lunar orbit keeps the mission profile simpler, allowing the crew to focus on other tasks as there is no need to pilot the spacecraft in any way.
"The Artemis program's first planned lunar lander is called the Starship HLS, or Human Landing System, and is currently under development by SpaceX..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Four astronauts evacuated from the International Space Station (ISS) have landed back on Earth after their stay in space was cut short by a month due to a "serious" medical issue. The crew's captain, Nasa astronaut Mike Fincke, exited the spacecraft first, smiling and wobbling slightly on his feet before lying down on a gurney, following normal procedures. Nasa's Zena Cardman, Japan's Kimiya Yui and cosmonaut Oleg Platonov followed, waving and beaming at cameras. "It's so good to be home!", said Cardman.

It is the first time astronauts have been evacuated due to a health issue since the station was put into Earth's orbit in 1998. The team, known as Crew-11, will now receive medical checks before being flown back to land after the splash down off the coast of California. In a news conference after splash-down, Nasa administrator Jared Isaacman said the sick astronaut is "fine right now" and in "good spirits." Judging by past Nasa communications about astronauts' health, it is unlikely that the identity of the crew member or details of the health issue will be released to the public.

Control of the ISS has been handed over to Russian cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and two other crew members. The astronauts arrived on the ISS on August 1 expecting to complete a standard six and a half month stay. They were due to come home in mid-February. But last week, a scheduled spacewalk by Fincke and Cardman was called off at the last minute. Hours later, Nasa revealed a crew member had become ill.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Global temperatures soared in 2025, but a NASA statement published Wednesday alongside its latest benchmark annual report makes no reference to climate change, in line with President Donald Trump's push to deny the reality of planetary heating as a result of human activities.

That marks a sharp break from last year's communications, issued under the administration of Democrat Joe Biden, which stated plainly: "This global warming has been caused by human activities" and has led to intensifying "heat waves, wildfires, intense rainfall and coastal flooding."

Last year's materials also featured lengthy quotes from the then-NASA chief and a senior scientist and included graphics and a video. By contrast, this year's release only runs through a few key figures, and amounts to a handful of paragraphs. According to the US space agency, Earth's global surface temperature in 2025 was slightly warmer than in 2023 -- albeit within a margin of error -- making it effectively tied as the second-hottest year on record after 2024.

NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy plan to deploy a nuclear fission reactor on the Moon by 2030 to provide continuous, long-duration power for lunar bases, science missions, and future Mars exploration. space & defense reports: NASA said fission surface power will provide a critical capability for long-duration missions by delivering continuous, reliable electrical power independent of sunlight, lunar night cycles or extreme temperature conditions. Unlike solar-based systems, a nuclear reactor could operate for years without refuelling, supporting habitats, science payloads, resource utilisation systems and surface mobility.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said achieving long-term human presence on the Moon and future missions to Mars will require new approaches to power generation. He said closer collaboration with the Department of Energy is essential to delivering the capabilities needed to support sustained exploration and infrastructure development beyond Earth orbit. The fission surface power system is expected to produce safe, efficient and scalable electrical power, forming a foundational element of NASA's Moon-to-Mars architecture. Continuous power availability is seen as a key enabler for permanent lunar bases, in-situ resource utilisation and expanded scientific operations in permanently shadowed regions. Further reading: You Can Now Reserve a Hotel Room On the Moon For $250,000

Researchers from the startup Overview Energy have successfully demonstrated beaming power from a moving airplane to the ground using near-infrared light. It marks the first step toward space-based solar power satellites that could someday transmit energy from orbit to existing solar farms on Earth. IEEE Spectrum reports: Overview's test transferred only a sprinkling of power, but it did it with the same components and techniques that the company plans to send to space. "Not only is it the first optical power beaming from a moving platform at any substantial range or power," says Overview CEO Marc Berte, "but also it's the first time anyone's really done a power beaming thing where it's all of the functional pieces all working together," he says. "It's the same methodology and function that we will take to space and scale up in the long term."

[...] Many researchers have settled on microwaves as their beam of choice for wireless power. But, in addition to the safety concerns about shooting such intense waves at the Earth, [Paul Jaffe, head of systems engineering] says there's another problem: microwaves are part of what he calls the "beachfront property" of the electromagnetic spectrum -- a range from 2 to 20 gigahertz that is set aside for many other applications, such as 5G cellular networks. "The fact is," Jaffe says, "if you somehow magically had a fully operational solar power satellite that used microwave power transmission in orbit today -- and a multi-kilometer-scale microwave power satellite receiver on the ground magically in place today -- you could not turn it on because the spectrum is not allocated to do this kind of transmission."

Instead, Overview plans to use less-dense, wide-field infrared waves. Existing utility-scale solar farms would be able to receive the beamed energy just like they receive the sun's energy during daylight hours. So "your receivers are already built," Berte says. The next major step is a prototype demonstrator for low Earth orbit, after which he hopes to have GEO satellites beaming megawatts of power by 2030 and gigawatts by later that decade. Plenty of doubts about the feasibility of space-based power abound. It is an exotic technology with much left to prove, including the ability to survive orbital debris and the exorbitant cost of launching the power stations. (Overview's satellite will be built on earth in a folded configuration and it will unfold after it's brought to orbit, according to the company). "Getting down the cost per unit mass for launch is a big deal," Jaffe says. "Then, it just becomes a question of increasing the specific power. A lot of the technologies we're working on at Overview are squarely focused on that."

"The clock is ticking" on the Hubble Space Telescope, writes the space news site Daily Galaxy, citing estimates from the unofficial "Hubble Reentry Tracker" site (which uses orbital data from the site space-track.org, created by tech integrator SAIC): While Hubble was initially launched into low Earth orbit at an altitude of around 360 miles, it has since descended to approximately 326 miles, and it continues to fall... "The solar flux levels are currently longer in duration and more elevated than previously anticipated, resulting in an earlier reentry forecast for the Hubble Space Telescope if no reboost mission is conducted," Hubble Reentry Trackersays the Hubble Reentry Tracker... ["Hubble has been reboosted three times in its history," the site points out, "all by servicing missions using the Space Shuttle."]

NASA partnered with SpaceX in 2022 to explore the feasibility of raising Hubble to its original altitude of 373 miles. Such an adjustment would have bought Hubble a few more years in orbit. However, the future of this plan remains uncertain, as NASA has not made any official announcements to move forward with it... Solar flux levels, which determine atmospheric drag, have increased in recent years, accelerating the telescope's decline. This change in solar behavior means that the possibility of Hubble reentering Earth's atmosphere in the next five to six years is quite high if no corrective action is taken. ["But it is difficult to estimate this value due to the variability of future solar flux," the site cautions. "In the best case, Hubble may not reenter for 15 more years, around 2040. In the worst case, it could reenter in 4 years..."] Once Hubble reaches an altitude of 248 miles, it is expected that it will have less than a year before reentry...

While Hubble's end may be near, there is a promising new project on the horizon: Lazuli, a privately-funded space telescope funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Lazuli aims to become the first privately-funded space telescope, and it could be the successor Hubble enthusiasts have been hoping for. Schmidt Sciences, the organization behind the telescope, plans to launch Lazuli by 2028, providing a more modern alternative to Hubble with a larger mirror and enhanced capabilities. The telescope's proposed design includes a 94-inch-wide mirror, which is a significant upgrade from Hubble's 94.5-inch mirror, and will feature updated instruments to capture more detailed data than ever before.

It will be the first medical evacuation from the International space station in its 25-year history. The Guardian reports: An astronaut in the orbital laboratory reportedly fell ill with a "serious" but undisclosed issue. Nasa also had to cancel its first spacewalk of the year... The agency did not identify the astronaut or the medical problem, citing patient privacy. "Because the astronaut is absolutely stable, this is not an emergent evacuation," [chief health and medical officer Dr. James] Polk said. "We're not immediately disembarking and getting the astronaut down, but it leaves that lingering risk and lingering question as to what that diagnosis is, and that means there is some lingering risk for that astronaut onboard."
"SpaceX says it's Dragon spacecraft at the International Space Station is ready to return its four Crew-11 astronauts home in an unprecedented medical evacuation on Jan. 14 and 15," reports Space.com: The SpaceX statement came on the heels of NASA's announcement that the Crew-11 astronauts were scheduled to undock from the space station on Jan. 14 and splashdown off the coast of California early on Jan. 15. The Crew-11 Dragon spacecraft will return NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke to Earth alongside Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platanov... NASA officials opted for a "controlled medical evacuation" in order to provide the astronaut better treatment on the ground, NASA chief Jared Isaacman has said...

Dr. James Polk, NASA's chief medical officer, has said the medical issue is not an injury to the astronaut afflicted, but rather something related to the prolonged exposure to weighlessness by astronauts living and working on the International Space Station. "It's mostly having a medical issue in the difficult areas of microgravity and the suite of hardware that we operate in," Polk said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: A company largely owned by the French and U.K. governments is pitching Canada on a roughly $250-million plan to provide the military with secure satellite broadband coverage in the Arctic, CBC News has learned. Eutelsat, a rival to tech billionaire Elon Musk's Starlink, already provides some services to the Canadian military, but wants to deepen the partnership as Canada looks to diversify defence contracts away from suppliers in the United States.

A proposal for Canada's Department of National Defence to join a French Ministry of Defence initiative involving Eutelsat was apparently raised by French President Emmanuel Macron with Prime Minister Mark Carney on the sidelines of last year's G7 summit in Alberta. The prime minister's first question, according to Eutelsat and French defence officials, was how the proposal would affect the Telesat Corporation, a former Canadian Crown corporation that was privatized in the 1990s.

Telesat is in the process of developing its Lightspeed system, a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation of satellites for high-speed broadband. And in mid-December, the Liberal government announced it had established a strategic partnership with Telesat and MDA Space to develop the Canadian Armed Forces' military satellite communications (MILSATCOM) capabilities. A Eutelsat official said the company already has its own satellite network in place and running, along with Canadian partners, and has been providing support to the Canadian military deployed in Latvia. "What we can provide for Canada is what we call a sovereign capacity capability where Canada would actually own all of our capacity in the Far North or wherever they require it," said David van Dyke, the general manager for Canada at Eutelsat.

"We also give them the ability to not be under the control of a singular individual who could decide to disconnect the service for political or other reasons."

Scientists are putting Einstein's claim that the speed of light is constant to the test. While researchers found no evidence that light's speed changes with energy, this null result dramatically tightens the constraints on quantum-gravity theories that predict even the tiniest violations. ScienceDaily reports: Special relativity rests on the principle that the laws of physics remain the same for all observers, regardless of how they are moving relative to one another. This idea is known as Lorentz invariance. Over time, Lorentz invariance became a foundational assumption in modern physics, especially within quantum theory. [...] One prediction shared by several Lorentz-invariance-violating quantum gravity models is that the speed of light may depend slightly on a photon's energy. Any such effect would have to be tiny to match existing experimental limits. However, it could become detectable at the highest photon energies, specifically in very-high-energy gamma rays.

A research team led by former UAB student Merce Guerrero and current IEEC PhD student at the UAB Anna Campoy-Ordaz set out to test this idea using astrophysical observations. The team also included Robertus Potting from the University of Algarve and Markus Gaug, a lecturer in the Department of Physics at the UAB who is also affiliated with the IEEC. Their approach relies on the vast distances light travels across the universe. If photons of different energies are emitted at the same time from a distant source, even minuscule differences in their speeds could build up into measurable delays by the time they reach Earth.

Using a new statistical technique, the researchers combined existing measurements of very-high-energy gamma rays to examine several Lorentz-invariance-violating parameters favored by theorists within the Standard Model Extension (SME). The goal was ambitious. They hoped to find evidence that Einstein's assumptions might break down under extreme conditions. Once again, Einstein's predictions held firm. The study did not detect any violation of Lorentz invariance. Even so, the results are significant. The new analysis improves previous limits by an order of magnitude, sharply narrowing where new physics could be hiding.

Astronomers using the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have discovered a record-setting asteroid, known as 2025 MN45, nearly half a mile wide and spinning once every 1.88 minutes -- the fastest known rotation for an object of its size. "This is now the fastest-spinning asteroid that we know of, larger than 500 meters," said Sarah Greenstreet, University of Washington astronomer and lead author of the study. The findings have been published in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters. GeekWire reports: 2025 MN45 is one of more than 2,100 solar system objects that were detected during the observatory's commissioning phase. Over time, the LSST Camera tracked variations in the light reflected by those objects. Greenstreet and her colleagues analyzed those variations to determine the size, distance, composition and rate of rotation for 76 asteroids, all but one of which are in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. (The other asteroid is a near-Earth object.)

The team found 16 "super-fast rotators" spinning at rates ranging between 13 minutes and 2.2 hours per revolution -- plus three "ultra-fast rotators," including 2025 MN45, that make a full revolution in less than five minutes. Greenstreet said 2025 MN45 appears to consist of solid rock, as opposed to the "rubble pile" material that most asteroids are thought to be made of. "We also believe that it's likely a collisionary fragment of a much larger parent body that, early in the solar system's history, was heated enough that the material internal to it melted and differentiated," Greenstreet said. She and her colleagues suggest that the primordial collision blasted 2025 MN45 from the dense core of the parent body and sent it whirling into space.

Jupiter's moon Europa is on the short list of places in our solar system seen as promising in the search for life beyond Earth, with a large subsurface ocean thought to be hidden under an outer shell of ice. But new research is raising questions about whether Europa in fact has what it takes for habitability. Reuters: The study assessed the potential on Europa's ocean bottom for tectonic and volcanic activity, which on Earth facilitate interactions between rock and seawater that generate essential nutrients and chemical energy for life. After modeling Europa's conditions, the researchers concluded that its rocky seafloor is likely mechanically too strong to allow such activity.

The researchers considered factors including Europa's size, the makeup of its rocky core and the gravitational forces exerted by Jupiter, the solar system's largest planet. Their evaluation that there probably is little to no active faulting at Europa's seafloor suggests this moon is barren of life.

"On Earth, tectonic activity such as fracturing and faulting exposes fresh rock to the environment where chemical reactions, principally involving water, generate chemicals such as methane that microbial life can use," said planetary scientist Paul Byrne of Washington University in St. Louis, lead author of the study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. "Without such activity, those reactions are harder to establish and sustain, making Europa's seafloor a challenging environment for life," Byrne added.

North Dakota passed a law last May to promote development of rare earth minerals in the state. But the law's language apparently also includes two fake mineral names, according to the Bismarck Tribune, "that appear to be inspired by coal company lawyers who worked on the bill." The inclusion of fictional substances is being called an embarrassment by one state official, a possible practical joke by coal industry leaders and mystifying by the lawmakers who worked on the bill, the North Dakota Monitor reported.

The fake minerals are friezium and stralium, apparent references to Christopher Friez and David Straley, attorneys for North American Coal who were closely involved in drafting the bill and its amendments. Straley said they were not responsible for adding the fake names. "I assume it was put in to embarrass us, or to make light of it, or have a practical joke," Straley said, adding it could have been a clerical error.

Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring questioned the two substances listed in state law during a recent meeting of the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which is poised to adopt rules based on the legislation... Friezium and stralium first appeared in the bill on the last afternoon of the legislative session as lawmakers hurried to pass several final bills... The amended bill is labeled as prepared by Legislative Council for Rep. Dick Anderson, R-Willow City, the prime sponsor and chair of the conference committee. Anderson said the amendments were prepared by a group of attorneys and legislators, including representatives from the coal industry...

Jonathan Fortner, president of the Lignite Energy Council that represents the coal industry, said it's unfortunate this happened in such an important bill. "From the president on down, everyone's interested in developing domestic critical minerals for national security reasons," Fortner said. "While this may have been a legislative joke between some people that somehow got through, the bigger picture is one that is important and is a very serious matter."

"The ancient evolution of fish mouths could help solve a modern source of plastic pollution," writes ScienceAlert.

"Inspired by these natural filtration systems, scientists in Germany have invented a way to remove 99 percent of plastic particles from water. It's based on how some fish filter-feed to eat microscopic prey." The research team has already filed a patent in Germany, and in the future, they hope their creation will help curb a ubiquitous form of plastic pollution that many are unaware of. Every time a load of laundry is done, millions of microplastics are washed from the fibers of our clothes into local waterways. By some estimates, up to 90 percent of plastic in 'sewage sludge' comes from washing machines. This material is then often used in agriculture as soil or fertilizer, possibly exposing those who eat the resulting crops to these pollutants...

Unlike other plastic filtration systems on the market, this one reduces clogging by 85 percent.

The New York Times checks in on U.S. university researchers and start-ups trying to create domestic rare-earth processing facility: There is too little money to be made in rare earths for the elements to be of much interest to mining giants, so the challenge of reestablishing a domestic industry has fallen to small companies like Phoenix Tailings, a Boston-area startup that runs the metal-making plant in Exeter, New Hampshire. A handful of other companies in the United States are processing rare earths in small quantities, including MP Materials, which owns a mine in Mountain Pass, California, and recently began producing rare-earth metal in Fort Worth, Texas. Similar efforts are underway in Europe and Asia. "It's small volumes of low-value materials that are very expensive to process," said Elsa Olivetti, a materials science and engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Meaning it's hard to make money."

Phoenix Tailings' New Hampshire operation is about 2 months old, housed in a converted medical device plant. The company buys metric-ton bags of powder — a mixture of neodymium and praseodymium bound with oxygen — from mining and refining companies in the United States, South America and Australia. It funnels that flour-like material into a drying oven and eventually into furnaces that heat it to the temperature of volcanic lava. This circuit takes up less than 15,000 square feet and is designed to generate no emissions other than those associated with the electricity Phoenix Tailings uses. The closed-loop design distinguishes this process from the more energy-intensive techniques used in China, where workers scoop up molten metal with ladles. That approach releases perfluorocarbons, potent greenhouse gases that do not break down easily.
In late 2024 the company was three weeks from bankruptcy — but it's recently been valued at $189 million.

A UK-based company has successfully powered up a microwave-sized space factory in orbit, proving it can run a 1,000C furnace to manufacture ultra-pure semiconductor materials in microgravity. "The work that we're doing now is allowing us to create semiconductors up to 4,000 times purer in space than we can currently make here today," says Josh Western, CEO of Space Forge. "This sort of semiconductor would go on to be in the 5G tower in which you get your mobile phone signal, it's going to be in the car charger you plug an EV into, it's going to be in the latest planes." The BBC reports: Conditions in space are ideal for making semiconductors, which have the atoms they're made of arranged in a highly ordered 3D structure. When they are being manufactured in a weightless environment, those atoms line up absolutely perfectly. The vacuum of space also means that contaminants can't sneak in. The purer and more ordered a semiconductor is, the better it works.

[...] The company's mini-factory launched on a SpaceX rocket in the summer. Since then the team has been testing its systems from their mission control in Cardiff. Veronica Viera, the company's payload operations lead, shows us an image that the satellite beamed back from space. It's taken from the inside of the furnace, and shows plasma - gas heated to about 1,000C -- glowing brightly. [...]

The team is now planning to build a bigger space factory -- one that could make semiconductor material for 10,000 chips. They also need to test the technology to bring the material back to Earth. On a future mission, a heat shield named Pridwen after the legendary shield of King Arthur will be deployed to protect the spacecraft from the intense temperatures it will experience as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere.

NASA is closing its largest research library at the Goddard Space Flight Center amid budget cuts and campus consolidation, putting tens of thousands of largely non-digitized historical and scientific documents at risk of being warehoused or discarded. The New York Times reports: Jacob Richmond, a NASA spokesman, said the agency would review the library holdings over the next 60 days and some material would be stored in a government warehouse while the rest would be tossed away. "This process is an established method that is used by federal agencies to properly dispose of federally owned property," Mr. Richmond said.

The shutdown of the library at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is part of a larger reorganization under the Trump administration that includes the closure of 13 buildings and more than 100 science and engineering laboratories on the 1,270-acre campus by March 2026. "This is a consolidation not a closure," said NASA spokeswoman Bethany Stevens. The changes were part of a long-planned reorganization that began before the Trump administration took office, she said. She said that shutting down the facilities would save $10 million a year and avoid another $63.8 million in deferred maintenance.

Goddard is the nation's premiere spaceflight complex. Its website calls it "the largest organization of scientists, engineers, and technologists who build spacecraft, instruments, and new technology to study Earth, the Sun, our solar system, and the universe." [...] The library closure on Friday follows the shutdown of seven other NASA libraries around the country since 2022, and included three libraries this year. As of next week, only three -- at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. -- will remain open.