If you are not clued up on Arrakis it is a desert planet that is home to a valuable mineral in the Dune universe called ‘spice’ which is mined using giant harvesters. As you can imagine being a desert planet isn’t a desirable place to be and to make it worse, water is such a scarce commodity that people have to wear suits that will harness the body’s water so it can be replenished and drank.

If that wasn’t bad enough, there are also gigantic sandworms that roam the deserts of Arrakis, which to put it bluntly, you just don’t want to encounter.

Genes are responsible for many things, including obvious physical traits like eye and hair colour. They also influence our thinking skills.

Kurzgesagt explained that there is so much matter out of our observable realm that the infinite universe may paradoxically be finite.

Firoozan, M., Baniassadi, M., Baghani, M. et al. In silico optimization of aligned fiber electrodes for dielectric elastomer actuators. Sci Rep 14, 4,703 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-54931-y.

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MOSAIC

A modular system for assistive and interactive cooking.

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Researchers have determined the amount of transverse orbital angular momentum that a type of optical vortex carries per photon, an important step for future applications.

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The origin of the charge density wave in vanadium antimonides has been widely debated. Here, the authors report the cooperation of electron-phonon and phonon-phonon coupling for the formation of the charge density wave in CsV3Sb5.

In 2010, scientists detected unusual seismic waves under Granada, Spain, which eventually led to a surprising finding: an oceanic slab that had completely flipped upside down as it was being pushed beneath its neighbor.

As detailed in a new paper published in the journal The Seismic Record, the team found that the “Alboran slab,” which meets the Eurasian slab just east of the Straits of Gibraltar, “has been overturned.”

It’s the first time such a discovery has been made, the researchers claim. And it’s due to “hydrous magnesium silicates,” roughly 370 miles beneath the surface, indicating that water on the slab’s surface had not only been pushed under, but had also been folded over and pulled beneath the slab as well.

13.8 columnist Marcelo Gleiser reflects on his recent voyage to Earth’s last wild continent: Antarctica.