Category: Science

Epic Cleantec’s soil amendment Photograph: Matt Simon Researchers are experimenting with using the same technique for wastewater solids, basically turning sludge into a solid product. “If you do pyrolysis—because it’s thermochemical, it’s a heated process—you kill these bacteria, kill these pathogens, kill these viruses. It’s much cleaner,” says engineer Fengqi You, who studies wastewater at […]

Meet ANDI, the world’s sweatiest mannequin. Although he might look like a shop-floor stalwart from a distance, a closer glance reveals bundles of cabling and pipework concealed beneath his shell. He’s wired up with sensors, plumbed into a liquid supply, and dotted with up to 150 individual pores that open when he gets warm. It […]

You had an exclusive partnership with GlaxoSmithKline for five years, from 2018 to 2023. How successful was that? It was overwhelmingly productive. Fifty drug targets came out of it, far more than we expected. They upped it again for one more year, the sixth year, though it’s non-exclusive now. We now have the ability to […]

This is a job for LLL: Give it (or its brethren) a basis of a multidimensional lattice, and it’ll spit out a better one. This process is known as lattice basis reduction. What does this all have to do with cryptography? It turns out that the task of breaking a cryptographic system can, in some […]

After a big mistake on his first run, Daniel Yule assumed he was out of the men’s slalom at this season’s Alpine Ski World Cup. “I’d already packed my bags, and I was ready to go back to the hotel,” he said in a TV interview after last weekend’s event in Chamonix, France. Instead, his […]

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When governments find themselves fighting the threat of coastal erosion, their default response tends to be pretty simple: If sand is disappearing from a beach, they pump in more sand to replace it. This strategy, known as “beach nourishment,” has become […]

Way up in the sky and sprinkled across the seas, two of the littlest yet most influential things in the world have stubbornly guarded their secrets: aerosols and phytoplankton. Today, NASA launched its Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem mission, or PACE, to unravel their mysteries. The mission’s findings could be a key to understanding how […]

Voyager 1 is still alive out there, barreling into the cosmos more than 15 billion miles away. However, a computer problem has kept the mission’s loyal support team in Southern California from knowing much more about the status of one of NASA’s longest-lived spacecraft. The computer glitch cropped up on November 14, and it affected […]

In 2015, Lucy Yung was a young industrial designer working on assistive devices for stroke victims, people with multiple sclerosis, and those with other conditions which meant they struggled with fine motor control. Her projects included a pen that used high-frequency vibrations to help Parkinson’s patients write more clearly. Then she was diagnosed with a […]

Death is coming for the old-school gas furnace—and its killer is the humble heat pump. They’re already outselling gas furnaces in the US, and now a coalition of states has signed an agreement to supercharge the gas-to-electric transition by making it as cheap and easy as possible for their residents to switch. Nine states have […]