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The waste will reportedly be moved by sea and rail to a plant in the Urals.

Urenco told the BBC its uranium would be further enriched in Russia and the process met environmental standards.

But environmental activists have long been concerned that Russia may become a “dumping ground” for radioactive waste from power plants.

We’ve reported on several eye-catching floating architecture projects lately, including a “parkipelago” and a greenery-covered office. This solar-powered urban poultry farm is the most off-the-wall idea of the bunch though and, assuming it goes ahead as planned, will host roughly 7,000 egg-laying hens, as well as an area for growing food, in a harbor in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

The building is officially named Floating Farm Poultry and was designed by Goldsmith for a company named Floating Farm Holding BV.

It will be based on a floating platform with three pontoons and will measure 3,500 sq m (roughly 37,670 sq ft), spread over three floors. Its interior layout will consist of a lower level used for farming vegetables, herbs and cresses under LED lighting, while upstairs will be a production factory floor for processing and packaging. The uppermost level is conceived as the poultry area and will contain the egg-laying hens.

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NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter is traveling to Mars attached to the belly of the Perseverance rover and must safely detach to begin the first attempt at powered flight on another planet. Tests done at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Lockheed Martin Space show the sequence of events that will bring the helicopter down to the Martian surface.

For more about the Mars helicopter, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/

Credit: nasa/jpl-caltech and lockheed martin space.

Former astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman: For the long-term survival of our species, we have to become a multi-planet being.


With our rising planet’s population competing for space and resources, some people are convinced we need to look beyond Earth to help ensure humanity’s survival. As Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind space tourism company SpaceX told Aeon’s Ross Andersen: “I think there is a strong argument for making life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen.”

Last month’s NASA and SpaceX successful launch of astronauts from US soil for the first time in almost a decade, has reignited discussion about space travel to Mars and beyond. Musk has been pushing Mars colonisation as extinction insurance for more than a decade now and he told Andersen that he would need a million people to form a sustainable, genetically diverse civilisation. Andersen reports:

An element that could hold the key to the long-standing mystery around why there is much more matter than antimatter in our universe has been discovered in Physics research involving the University of Strathclyde.

The study has discovered that an isotope of the element thorium possesses the most pear-shaped nucleus yet to be discovered.

Nuclei similar to thorium-228 may now be able to be used to perform new tests to try find the answer to the mystery surrounding matter and antimatter.

Magnetic materials have been a mainstay in computing technology due to their ability to permanently store information in their magnetic state. Current technologies are based on ferromagnets, whose states can be flipped readily by magnetic fields. Faster, denser, and more robust next-generation devices would be made possible by using a different class of materials, known as antiferromagnets. Their magnetic state, however, is notoriously difficult to control.

Now, a research team from the MPSD and the University of Oxford has managed to drive a prototypical antiferromagnet into a new magnetic state using terahertz frequency . Their groundbreaking method produced an effect orders of magnitude larger than previously achieved, and on ultrafast time scales. The team’s work has just been published in Nature Physics.

The strength and direction of a magnet’s ‘north pole’ is denoted by its so-called magnetization. In ferromagnets, this easily reversible magnetization can represent a ‘bit’ of information, which has made them the materials of choice for magnet-based technologies. But ferromagnets are slow to operate and react to stray magnetic fields, which means they are prone to errors and cannot be packed very closely together.

Yan McMullen had never heard of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences when he started casting about for a graduate chemistry program. But on the recommendation of one of his professors, he sent an email to the College’s Professor of Chemistry Stephen Bradforth proposing an experiment to tease out what makes a metal really a metal.

The proposal would not only turn into his Ph.D. thesis but a major scientific breakthrough.

McMullen’s proposal was not an easy sell. The experiment would be expensive and possibly dangerous.

The role genetics and gut bacteria play in human health has long been a fruitful source of scientific enquiry, but new research marks a significant step forward in unraveling this complex relationship. Its findings could transform our understanding and treatment of all manner of common diseases, including obesity, irritable bowel syndrome, and Alzheimer’s disease.

The international study, led by the University of Bristol and published today in Nature Microbiology, found specific changes in DNA — the chains of molecules comprising our genetic make-up — affected both the existence and amount of particular bacteria in the gut.

Lead author Dr David Hughes, Senior Research Associate in Applied Genetic Epidemiology, said: “Our findings represent a significant breakthrough in understanding how genetic variation affects gut bacteria. Moreover, it marks major progress in our ability to know whether changes in our gut bacteria actually cause, or are a consequence of, human disease.”