Scientists unveil nuclear battery with 50-year lifespan and triple efficiency.
Researchers in China have developed a novel nuclear battery that can withstand at least half a century of radiation and deliver three times the energy efficiency of conventional designs.
The team set out to improve battery performance in extreme environments, led by Haisheng San, PhD, a professor at Xiamen University, and Xin Li, PhD, a researcher at the China Institute of Atomic Energy.
According to the scientists, conventional power systems, especially those used in extreme conditions such as space or deep-sea infrastructure, struggle with long-term reliability.
The sky at night. It inspires awe. It inspires thoughts of an existential nature: Who are we? Why are we here? And, perhaps most importantly of all, in which direction should I roll this big ball of shit? That is, if you’re a dung beetle.
“African ball-rolling dung beetles exploit the [Sun], the [Moon], and the celestial polarization pattern to move along straight paths, away from the intense competition at the dung pile,” wrote the study authors. “Even on clear moonless nights, many beetles still manage to orientate along straight paths. This led us to hypothesize that dung beetles exploit the starry sky for orientation, a feat that has, to our knowledge, never been demonstrated in an insect.”
By analyzing the data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and elsewhere have probed the properties of a massive and old galaxy designated SMILES-GS-191748. Results of the study, published August 7 on the pre-print server arXiv, shed more light on the nature of this galaxy.
SMILES-GS-191748 is a massive and quiescent galaxy at a redshift of 2.675. The galaxy most likely contains a very old stellar population that first formed when the universe was young.
Given that very little is known about the properties of SMILES-GS-191748, a team of astronomers led by University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Ian McConachie decided to inspect this galaxy using JWST and HST. They nicknamed SMILES-GS-191748 “Eridu,” after the ancient Bronze Age Sumerian city in Mesopotamia due to the galaxy’s suspected early formation time and apparent quiescent nature.
Astronomers at the Pan-STARRS Observatory in Hawaii made history in 2017 when they detected ’Oumuamua, the first interstellar object (ISO) ever observed.
Two years later, the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov became the second ISO ever observed. And on July 1st, 2025, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Rio Hurtado detected a third interstellar object in our Solar System, the comet now known as 3I/ATLAS (or C/2025 N1 ATLAS).
Like its predecessors, the arrival of this object has fueled immense scientific interest and led to proposals for missions that could rendezvous with future ISOs.
One of the best places to study stars is inside “open clusters,” which are groups of stars that formed together from the same material and are bound together through gravity.
Open clusters act as laboratories, showing how stars of different masses and ages behave. At the same time, some stars, known as “variable stars,” regularly change in brightness, and their flickers and pulses help scientists learn about the physics inside stars and about the wider galaxy.
Until now, astronomers studied clusters and variable stars separately, and usually one cluster at a time. But that approach missed the bigger picture, leaving gaps in our understanding of how the lives of stars unfold across the galaxy.