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Yeast paired with electricity can convert CO₂ into a chemical used in biodegradable plastics

To limit further climate change, researchers are exploring technologies that can convert atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) into useful products. In collaboration with BOKU University in Vienna (Austria), researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) have demonstrated that electrochemical and microbial processes can be combined to capture CO₂ and produce itaconic acid, a bio-based chemical used in industry. According to the researchers, this new process demonstrates how CO₂ emissions can be converted into sustainable bio-based products, with the potential to produce a wider range of valuable chemicals by using different microorganisms.

Itaconic acid is a bio-based organic acid used to manufacture biodegradable plastics, textiles, adhesives and resins. It is considered a promising sustainable alternative to petroleum-based chemicals. Worldwide, around 70,000 t (77,000 short tons) of itaconic acid are produced annually, and production is increasing.

“On an industrial scale, itaconic acid is produced biotechnologically from sugar using a fungus. We have now developed a process that uses CO₂ instead of sugar as a starting material so that we can put emissions to productive use,” explains Falk Harnisch, an electrobiotechnologist at the UFZ and last author of the study.

Designing new nuclear alloys, element by element

The periodic table contains more than 100 elements. Combine them in different ways, and the possibilities quickly multiply. For researchers designing materials for advanced nuclear reactors, the abundance presents an opportunity: Could entirely new combinations of elements produce stronger alloys capable of withstanding the extreme heat, radiation and mechanical stress inside a nuclear reactor?

At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), materials scientist Osman El Atwani and his colleagues are exploring that question by designing new alloys from the ground up. Rather than starting with an existing commercial alloy and making incremental changes, his team is investigating combinations of elements that could provide the properties needed for future nuclear energy systems.

One result is V555, an experimental alloy identified through this approach and selected for initial laboratory evaluation. Researchers selected V555 from hundreds of compositions identified through a computational approach called robust alloy design (RAD), which PNNL developed to help systematically search for materials that meet multiple nuclear requirements.

Spooky Cyber Trends For 2026: How AI Is Changing The Threat Landscape

And as we are discussing spooky cyber threats, please remember to prepare for Q-Day, the point at which a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) can break widely used public-key cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). Q-Day is a foreseeable strategic cybersecurity disruption, and organizations should begin post-quantum cryptography migration, cryptographic inventories, governance planning, and long-term data protection efforts now, because waiting until Q-Day will be too late.

AI can improve cyber defense, but only if organizations use it sensibly and back it with solid principles. No single cybersecurity statistic may be the most terrifying. It is the decreasing amount of time that organizations have to identify an attack, comprehend its ramifications, and take action before it escalates into a crisis. The speed at which we can close that gap will determine resilience in the AI era.

Stay safe this Halloween and onward, as the cauldron is already boiling!

Amygdala activity predicts which new images may become lasting memories

A walnut-sized area of the brain known as the amygdala plays a giant role in determining which experiences end up in long-term memory and which are forgotten. The Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University discovery points to the amygdala as a potential target for treating memory disorders.

The amygdala, located deep below the brain’s surface in the temporal lobe, is classically associated with emotional and social behavior. In memory, its role was thought to be limited to learning and recalling experiences that evoked fear or other strong feelings.

But the new study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, uncovered a much broader role for the amygdala in forming long-lasting memories in general.

Jim Al-Khalili: Physicists Are Being Sloppy About Time

Physicists say space and time are the same thing. They are being sloppy. Jim Al-Khalili has spent his career on the foundations of physics, and his new book makes the case that the past and the future are equally real, and the laws of physics cannot explain why you can only move in one direction. That is the central mystery of time travel. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

The block universe says all times coexist and the present moment is not special. Loschmidt’s paradox says the fundamental equations of physics are reversible, and yet ice never unmelts, cream never separates from coffee. Nobody has solved that contradiction. The entanglement past hypothesis, his own new proposal developed with a colleague at UC San Diego, proposes that the answer is not in thermodynamics but in quantum entanglement growing from almost nothing at the Big Bang.

The conversation covers what the block universe actually implies about the future and free will, what Einstein actually believed about whether the past and future are equally real, why removing gravity means removing time itself, and whether AI can ever experience time the way conscious beings do. Al-Khalili says Richard Dawkins told him Claude is truly conscious. Al-Khalili thinks he is very wrong.

What you’ll hear:
–Why Al-Khalili disagreed with the Thomas Gold paper as a grad student but did not have the maths to prove it.
–What fine-tuning of the fundamental constants has to do with why the past hypothesis may not be needed.
–Why the Clockwork Orange Easter egg ended up on the cover of a physics book published by Princeton.
–Why Richard Dawkins thinks Claude is conscious and why Al-Khalili thinks he is very wrong.

“There is nowhere in modern physics, our understanding of the laws of physics, that would explain that flow of time.” — Jim Al-Khalili.

CHAPTERS.

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Maxwell’s Demon Can Extract Energy From Hidden Memories, Study Finds

In 1867, physicist James Clerk Maxwell did something very naughty.

He proposed an apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics so diabolically clever that other physicists have been trying to resolve it ever since.

His thought experiment invoked a ‘demon’ – a tiny, intelligent being stationed at a door between two chambers filled with gas, only allowing fast particles into one side and slow particles into the other – with the end result being warmth in one chamber and chill in the other.

Radio waves drive a fusion plasma current that could help reactors run continuously

For the first time, a team of physicists in the U.S. has clearly demonstrated a “helicon current drive” in a nuclear fusion experiment. Led by Jeff Lestz at General Atomics, San Diego, the team took advantage of the latest advances in tokamak technology to show that radio waves steered to travel around the donut-shaped device can be absorbed by its confined plasma, driving an electric current inside it.

Published in Physical Review Letters, the results could help future fusion reactors to operate continuously.

Maria Farrell on Technology, Ethics, Stories and the Prodigal Techbro

In December 2020, two years before ChatGPT, Maria Farrell handed me a name for a character who now seems to be everywhere.

The Prodigal Techbro.

He helps build the machine, cashes out, walks away, and then gets welcomed home as a hero for confessing. Book deals, keynotes, testimony before lawmakers. Meanwhile, the people who saw it coming years earlier are still waiting for someone to return their call.

Swap “social media” for #AI and tell me that isn’t the last three years.

Maria spent twenty years inside tech policy, from ICANN to the World Bank to teaching cybersecurity policy at Oxford, and her writing goes further than most people in that world are willing to go. Over 2.5 hours, we got into why China is selling autocracy as a service, what #feminism can teach us about our relationship with our smartphones, why the Tragedy of the Commons may be a story we were sold, and why the Agrarian Revolution might be history’s greatest fraud.

Then, near the end, she said something about who is coming to save us. I’m still chewing on it.

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