The biggest undertaking in history is currently underway: a new continent will be added to this sea. It is not just a regional project, but international.

A new class of magnetism called altermagnetism has been imaged for the first time in a new study. The findings could lead to the development of new magnetic memory devices with the potential to increase operation speeds of up to a thousand times.

Altermagnetism is a distinct form of magnetic order where the tiny constituent magnetic building blocks align antiparallel to their neighbors but the structure hosting each one is rotated compared to its neighbors.

Scientists from the University of Nottingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy have shown that this new third class of magnetism exists and can be controlled in microscopic devices. The findings have been published in Nature.

For giant manufacturers, such as Germany-based Schaeffler Group with nearly 100 factories worldwide, 10 in the U.S., streamlining production of precision industrial components is paramount. When it began to digitize its operations in 2016 to get more real-time data from the shop floor, Schaeffler realized that it wasn’t enough to digitize the manufacturing processes, inventory, workforce, and logistics; it also had to digitize the physical manufacturing environment itself.

Its efforts to 3D scan each facility and create full-color lifelike digital twins, has, so far, resulted in significant time and cost savings. “Project lead times for data capture are up to 80% shorter compared to traditional methods,” says Roberto Henkel, Schaeffler’s senior VP of digitalization and operations IT. The full-color digital twins of its factories enables “far more efficient communication and planning among departments and third-party vendors.”

As the company accelerates its factory relocation to shorten supply chains and move production closer to customers, accurate factory digital twins have played a key role and also delivered some unexpected benefits.

The Geminid meteor shower is one of the most prolific annual meteor showers, impressing skywatchers year after year.

It is possible to see up to 120 meteors per hour under dark conditions when the Geminids peak each year.

A team of scientists from the United States, Italy, and China may have finally explained a large gap in the African and Eurasian fossil record. According to a model in a study published August 31 in the journal Science, the population of human ancestors crashed between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago. They estimate that there were only 1,280 breeding individuals alive during this transition between the early and middle Pleistocene. About 98.7 percent of the ancestral population was lost at the beginning of this ancestral bottleneck that lasted for roughly 117,000 years, according to the study.

[Related: Want more eye-opening science stories? Sign up for a PopSci newsletter.].

Humans have a need for serious speed—and this machine may be the answer.

You’ve probably heard of painful kidney stones. Find out where else “stones” can appear in your body, and how to tell.

Frequency-scanning systems with narrow instantaneous linewidth hold promise for various fields. Here, the authors report the use of time-variant parity-time symmetry to dynamically narrow the instantaneous linewidth of frequency-scanning systems.