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“While astronauts in space need to get creative with their water supply, that’s not to suggest that people ought to start drinking pee to access clean water. Rather, Aquaporin, the company behind the new system, suggests that the same kind of technology could be used to clean up other types of wastewater or filter existing drinking water supplies to the point that they could be used.”


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Roughly 2 billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water, according to CNN, and a system like Aquaporin could help remove pollution and plastics from the supply.

“It has an enormous potential,” Dines Thornberg, innovation manager at BIOFOS, Denmark’s largest state-owned wastewater facility, told CNN. “I think the Aquaporin system could lead the way in actually creating clean, affordable drinking water from wastewater in the future. I am really optimistic that we can meet the challenges of water scarcity in many parts of the world with technologies like this.”

Although a single cataclysmic event gained most attention this year — the COVID pandemic — there were many other newsworthy developments in science and research, from daring space missions to room-temperature superconductors.


Mars missions, record‑breaking wildfires and a room‑temperature superconductor are among this year’s top non‑COVID stories.

Virgin Galactic will fly again when VSS Unity is ready.


A bad computer connection foiled Virgin Galactic’s attempt to reach space over the weekend, company officials said.

VSS Unity, Virgin Galactic’s newest SpaceShipTwo vehicle, lifted off Saturday morning (Dec. 12) from New Mexico’s Spaceport America beneath the wings of its carrier airplane, VMS Eve.

Blue Moon. Strawberry Moon. Supermoon. Snow Moon. Blood Moon. Earth’s favourite satellite buddy has a name for every occasion. Yet the most glorious view of the full Moon we’ve seen to date has no name.

That’s probably because it’s not indicative of an occasion, but a way of looking at our satellite. With your naked eyes, you would never see the rainbowy, soap-bubble-like view of the Moon as pictured above.

But that’s what it looks like to the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), an incredibly powerful radio telescope array located in the desert of Western Australia.

A phenomenon first detected in the solar wind may help solve a long-standing mystery about the sun: why the solar atmosphere is millions of degrees hotter than the surface.

Images from the Earth-orbiting Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, aka IRIS, and the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, aka AIA, show evidence that low-lying magnetic loops are heated to millions of degrees Kelvin.

Researchers at Rice University, the University of Colorado Boulder and NASA ’s Marshall Space Flight Center make the case that heavier ions, such as silicon, are preferentially heated in both the solar wind and in the transition region between the sun’s chromosphere and corona.