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You Don’t Have to Like Elon Musk to Value What He Builds

Summary: Technological progress often comes from unconventional people. Elon Musk’s abrasive conduct has made him a polarizing figure, but his companies have helped cut rocket launch costs, expand internet access, and make electric cars mainstream. Some traits that drive ambitious breakthroughs may also make their creators difficult to work with. Holding innovators accountable for harmful conduct need not mean dismissing their accomplishments or demanding agreeable personalities.

Last Thursday, Tesla demonstrated a prototype Roadster capable of briefly flying through the air. Elon Musk’s AI company, now part of SpaceX, recently introduced Grok Bot, autonomous agents that run on a shared persistent cloud computer and that can collaborate with one another and execute scheduled tasks in users’ apps while they are offline.

Meanwhile, SpaceX continues developing Starship, the largest rocket ever built, with the ambition of making space travel cheaper and more routine.

Randomized trial demonstrates enhanced stent expansion in severely calcified coronary nodules

A randomized clinical trial at The Mount Sinai Hospital found that combining two techniques for removing calcium nodules-rotational atherectomy and intravascular lithotripsy (IVL)-before coronary stent placement allowed stents to expand more fully than IVL alone in patients with calcified coronary nodules.

Ultrathin carbon ribbons conduct electricity like metals in first successful synthesis

As modern electronic devices shrink, so do the metal electrical wires inside them. However, they start to run into serious problems the smaller they get. Conventional wires generate excessive heat and suffer a massive spike in electrical resistance that affects overall performance.

Carbon wires are touted as a possible replacement because some types could potentially carry huge amounts of current without degrading, while taking up a fraction of the space.

And one possible candidate could be a new class of ultrathin conductors known as carbon pentaheptite nanoribbons, synthesized by researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China.

Pulsed 3D printing grows creep-resistant single crystals more than a meter long for high-temperature applications

Researchers from China have developed a new 3D-printing process capable of building titanium-alloy rods more than a meter (3.3 feet) tall composed entirely of a single crystal. The new method, described in the team’s recently published study in Nature, eliminates some of the constraints associated with conventional crystal-growing methods and opens up new opportunities for technical applications, ranging from reactor components to laser mirrors.

Most metals are polycrystalline, containing many crystal grains. The boundaries of these crystal grains can become weak points under prolonged heat and stress. On the other hand, metals consisting of a single, uniform crystal structure do not have these boundaries and are valuable for high-stress and high-heat applications, such as aerospace components.

Conventional crystal-growing methods restrict the materials, sizes and shapes manufacturers can produce. For example, the high reactivity and the high melting points of some metals create limitations for the common mold-based approach since the molds can’t withstand these extremes. Meanwhile, another method, called floating-zone melting, is costly and limits allowable fabrication size and shape.

Scientists Discover a Hidden Oxygen Source Deep Inside Earth That Could Rewrite Our Planet’s History

Ancient eruptions may have helped shape the air we breathe, with laboratory experiments revealing magma’s unexpected ability to store extra oxygen.

Molten rock deep inside Earth can take up an extra supply of oxygen under pressure, according to a new study. That finding raises the possibility that rising magma could release oxygen on its way to the surface, a process that may have contributed to increases in atmospheric oxygen billions of years ago.

Oxygen makes up more than half the atoms in Earth’s silicate interior, but its abundance does not necessarily mean it is available to escape into the atmosphere. Much of it is chemically bound to other elements. Geoscientists have generally assumed that the quantities and electrical charge states of elements such as silicon, magnesium, and iron determine how much oxygen magma contains. Knowing those ingredients should let them calculate the oxygen needed to balance the chemistry. Whether molten rock could absorb additional oxygen as a separate volatile component, as it does water and carbon dioxide, has remained largely unexplored.

Light-activated catalyst makes sustainable production of hydrogen peroxide more efficient

Hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) is a versatile chemical feedstock whose industrial production relies predominantly on an energy-intensive process with a substantial environmental footprint. One alternative is to produce it using a catalyst activated by light. In an international research project involving the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, researchers have now developed a synthesis strategy that allows them to precisely control the spatial arrangement of ions in a carbon nitride. The resulting photocatalyst is three times as efficient as conventional green production methods. The findings have been published in Advanced Materials.

Hydrogen peroxide is an environmentally friendly oxidizing agent. When it decomposes, it produces only water and oxygen, which is why it is also known as a “green chemical.” As demand grows, particularly for environmentally friendly wastewater treatment and household and medical disinfection, production volumes continue to rise.

To meet this demand, hydrogen peroxide is still produced predominantly using the so-called anthraquinone process, which incurs high energy costs and has a substantial carbon footprint. Photocatalysis is a promising alternative. In this process, a material absorbs light and uses its energy to drive a chemical reaction without fossil energy. The efficiency of the reaction depends, among other things, on how readily the charges generated by light can move through the material and how long they remain available to drive the reaction.

When a few people break the rules, bad behavior spreads quickly

The old saying that one bad apple spoils the barrel suggests that an individual behaving badly can have a negative influence on the entire group. The idea now has some fresh scientific backing.

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam, led by Lucas Molleman, wanted to test whether seeing someone break a rule makes people copy them or go even further.

So before the 2024 presidential election in the United States, the team recruited 750 participants, roughly evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, to take part in an online experiment.

A quantum pathway to entropy-free energy transfer

For scientists, breakthroughs often stem from unexpected turns. A research team led by Oscar Dahlsten, an associate professor in the Department of Physics at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK), set out to prove a theoretical limitation, only to discover a quantum solution. The finding breaks traditional physical constraints and introduces a strategy for harvesting energy from fluctuating sources.

The study was recently published in Physical Review Letters under the title “Nonunique Decompositions of Mixed States and Deterministic Energy Transfers.”

Energy from natural sources is often accompanied by entropy, or randomness, making it difficult to convert into the predictable power needed to charge batteries and operate electronic devices.

A new way to replace carbon with nitrogen atoms could lead to better medicines

When drugmakers want to improve on compounds they have already created, they can replace a carbon atom with a nitrogen atom. While effective, the techniques they use to perform this chemical swap, known as skeletal editing, have some downsides. For example, older approaches often require harsh chemicals or only work on specific types of molecules.

That got researchers led by Mark D. Levin at the University of Chicago searching for a gentler and more versatile way to do it. Unlike older methods that fail when a specific chemical step goes wrong, their new technique turns that exact problem into a helpful tool.