The Earth may not be engulfed by the expanding fireball of the dying sun, which has long been assumed to be our home planet’s ultimate fate, according to scientists.
Don’t worry: This is not expected to happen for another 5 billion years, long after all life on Earth has been wiped out.
When the sun burns through all of the hydrogen in its core, it will go through two immense expansion phases: first becoming a red giant, then, when its helium is spent, an “AGB” star.
A research team at the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM) has developed a technology that converts wet spent coffee grounds directly into high-quality biochar in just 90 seconds, with no drying or oil removal required. The breakthrough offers a fast, energy-efficient path to turning high-moisture organic waste into valuable fuel and carbon materials. The study, led by Dr. Taejun Park in collaboration with GodTech Co., Ltd., was published in the Chemical Engineering Journal, one of the world’s leading journals in chemical engineering.
Addressing a growing waste challenge Every year, global coffee consumption generates more than 10 million tons of spent coffee grounds, most of which end up in landfills or are incinerated, releasing greenhouse gases and polluting the environment.
Spent coffee grounds hold real energy potential, but their high moisture content has long been a barrier. Converting them into fuel or carbon products typically requires energy-intensive predrying, making large-scale resource recovery economically impractical.
Quantum properties of light are extremely delicate. When researchers attempt to measure them, even small losses on the way to a detector can make them invisible, limiting their use outside carefully controlled environments. A collaborative team of researchers involving scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) has shown a new way to measure several quantum channels of light at the same time and reveal their entanglement, even when almost all of the light is lost before reaching the detector. The results, recently published in Nature Communications, open new possibilities for scalable quantum technologies.
Anyone who has used an old radio or television is familiar with noise in the sound or picture. These are random fluctuations that distort the transmitted information. Light behaves in a similar way. It also exhibits noise, appearing as fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. Even perfect laser light has such fluctuations, known as shot noise.
Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a method that uses a single ion to detect electromagnetic fields above a surface and to create a three-dimensional map of them. In the future, this approach can be used to improve chips for quantum computers and quantum sensors.
Single electrically charged atoms—ions—have been successfully used for some time as quantum bits in quantum computers and quantum sensors. Unlike the bulky ion traps of the early years, there are now miniaturized chips in which ions can be trapped and manipulated only a hair’s breadth above the surface of the chip. This has many advantages, but also one decisive drawback: Noisy electromagnetic fields coming from the chip itself can severely impair the sensitive quantum states of the ions and hence the performance of the computer or sensor.
A team of researchers led by Jonathan Home, a professor at the Institute for Quantum Electronics at ETH Zurich, has now developed a technique that allows them to create a very precise three-dimensional map of electric and magnetic fields very close to the surface of the chip. In the future, materials for chip production can be better optimized and tested for their suitability for use in quantum applications. The results of their research were recently published in Science Advances.
Researchers from the Molecular Physics and Physical Chemistry departments of the Fritz Haber Institute have shown how two highly synchronized infrared (IR) laser beams can control molecules as they switch between different structural conformations. Their study provides a new window into how molecules rearrange themselves during chemical reactions, offering fundamental insights into the microscopic processes that govern chemistry.
Chemical reactions are the foundation of all the processes that sustain life. Researchers around the world are working to develop precise physical descriptions of these processes to better understand, predict or specifically control them.
In chemical reactions, molecules undergo various structural transformations, changing their 3D shapes between different conformations. These changes can be visualized as movements across an energy landscape, where the shape of the terrain determines how fast a reaction proceeds. Similar to a ball rolling through a hilly landscape, a molecule must overcome energy barriers—the “mountains”—to settle into a new, stable state in the next “valley.”
The transmission of optical information through random scattering media is a major challenge in optics, biomedical imaging, telecommunications and remote sensing. When light passes through a turbid or diffusive medium, such as biological tissue or a randomly structured optical material, the original image information can be severely distorted, making reliable recovery difficult.
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have introduced interleaved diffractive networks to address this challenge by enabling optical information transfer through random and unknown diffusers. The work is published in the journal Laser & Photonics Reviews.
Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) are the first to directly utilize orbital currents without the need for conversion of the orbital current into a spin current.
“We have thus realized the first purely orbitronic device approach,” said Dr. Christin Schmitt, a scientist in the research group of Professor Mathias Kläui at the JGU Institute of Physics.
Orbitronics is a promising technology for future memory devices, as it could enable the realization of large-scale storage media with extremely low energy consumption. It is based on orbital moments, which can be described in simplified terms as the quantum-mechanical “vortices” of electrons around atomic nuclei, as well as orbital currents, i.e., the movement of these circulations through an electrical conductor.
Quantum materials, materials exhibiting physical behavior governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, have proved promising for the development of numerous advanced technologies, including quantum technologies, memory devices and solar panels. In some of these materials, electrons can collectively arrange themselves in unusual patterns, giving rise to states that cannot be explained by classical physics theories.
For more than two decades, theoretical physicists have predicted the existence of a loop current order in some quantum materials. This is a state characterized by tiny electrical currents circulating around microscopic loops inside a crystal, which would produce no measurable electric current flowing through a material.
These current loops were predicted to emerge when electrons spontaneously organize themselves into a less symmetrical pattern than the crystal itself, even if atoms remain in similar positions. While this phenomenon was widely studied and described by theorists in the past, it has so far proved difficult to observe experimentally.
A new airborne imaging approach can reliably detect unexploded weapons that lie in shallow coastal waters and remain an ongoing hazard to public safety, marine ecosystems and infrastructure worldwide. By combining advanced multispectral sensing with artificial intelligence, the researchers were able to identify underwater munitions with high confidence, even when they are partially hidden by sediment, biological growth or debris.
Scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science developed and tested the approach and published their findings in the April issue of Frontiers in Marine Science. The study demonstrates that integrating NASA underwater imaging technologies with machine learning enhances detection accuracy while reducing false positives in complex marine environments.
“Unexploded ordnance in shallow waters remains a serious global challenge,” said Ved Chirayath, Vetlesen Endowed Chair of Earth Sciences in the Department of Ocean Sciences, the study’s lead author. “Our results demonstrate a scalable, airborne solution that can help improve detection accuracy and support safer coastal environments.”