Science – Page 10

This mantis shrimp-inspired robotic arm can crack an egg

biomimicry, biorobotics, Mantis shrimp, robotics, Science, soft robotics / Tim Belzer / January 29, 2025

This isn’t the first time scientists have looked to the mantis shrimp as an inspiration for robotics. In 2021, we reported on a Harvard researcher who developed a biomechanical model for the mantis shrimp’s mighty appendage and built a tiny robot to mimic that movement. What’s unusual in the mantis shrimp is that there is a one-millisecond delay between when the unlatching and the snapping action occurs.

The Harvard team identified four distinct striking phases and confirmed it’s the geometry of the mechanism that produces the rapid acceleration after the initial unlatching by the sclerites. The short delay may help reduce wear and tear of the latching mechanisms over repeated use.

New types of motion

The operating principle of the Hyperelastic Torque Reversal Mechanism (HeTRM) involves compressing an elastomeric joint until it reaches a critical point, where stored energy is instantaneously released. Credit: Science Robotics, 2025

Co-author Kyu-Jin Cho of Seoul National University became interested in soft robotics as a graduate student, when he participated in the RoboSoft Grand Challenge. Part of his research involved testing the strength of so-called “soft robotic manipulators,” a type often used in assembly lines for welding or painting, for example. He noticed some unintended deformations in the shape under applied force and realized that the underlying mechanism was similar to how the mantis shrimp punches or how fleas manage to jump so high and far relative to their size.

In fact, Cho’s team previously built a flea-inspired catapult mechanism for miniature jumping robots, using the Hyperelastic Torque Reversal Mechanism (HeTRM) his lab developed. Exploiting torque reversal usually involves incorporating complicated mechanical components. However, “I realized that applying [these] principles to soft robotics could enable the creation of new types of motion without complex mechanisms,” Cho said.

Now he’s built on that work to incorporate the HeTRM into a soft robotic arm that relies upon material properties rather than structural design. It’s basically a soft beam with alternating hyperelastic and rigid segments.

“Our robot is made of soft, stretchy materials, kind of like rubber,” said Cho. “Inside, it has a special part that stores energy and releases it all at once—BAM!—to make the robot move super fast. It works a bit like how a bent tree branch snaps back quickly or how a flea jumps really far. This robot can grab things like a hand, crawl across the floor, or even jump high, and it all happens just by pulling on a simple muscle.”

This mantis shrimp-inspired robotic arm can crack an egg Read More »

Trump executive order calls for a next-generation missile defense shield

military space, missile defense, Science, Space, space force, space policy / Kris Guyer / January 28, 2025

One of the new Trump administration’s first national security directives aims to defend against missile and drone attacks targeting the United States, and several elements of the plan require an expansion of the US military’s presence in space, the White House announced Monday.

For more than 60 years, the military has launched reconnaissance, communications, and missile warning satellites into orbit. Trump’s executive order calls for the Pentagon to come up with a design architecture, requirements, and an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield within 60 days.

A key tenet of Trump’s order is to develop and deploy space-based interceptors capable of destroying enemy missiles during their initial boost phase shortly after launch.

“The United States will provide for the common defense of its citizens and the nation by deploying and maintaining a next-generation missile defense shield,” the order reads. “The United States will deter—and defend its citizens and critical infrastructure against—any foreign aerial attack on the homeland.”

The White House described the missile defense shield as an “Iron Dome for America,” referring to the name of Israel’s regional missile defense system. While Israel’s Iron Dome is tailored for short-range missiles, the White House said the US version will guard against all kinds of airborne attacks.

What does the order actually say?

Trump’s order is prescriptive in what to do, but it leaves the implementation up to the Pentagon. The White House said the military’s plan must defend against many types of aerial threats, including ballistic, hypersonic, and advanced cruise missiles, plus “other next-generation aerial attacks,” a category that appears to include drones and shorter-range unguided missiles.

Trump executive order calls for a next-generation missile defense shield Read More »

A telltale toilet reveals “lost” site shown in Bayeux Tapestry

Archaeology, Science / Kris Guyer / January 28, 2025

Seats of power

The Bayeux Tapestry, showing King Harold riding to Bosham, where he attends church and feasts in a hall, before departing for France. The Society of Antiquaries of London

According to Creighton and his co-authors, there has been quite a lot of research on castles, which dominated aristocratic sites in England after the Norman Conquest. That event “persists as a deep schism that continues to be seen as the watershed moment after which elites finally tapped into the European mainstream of castle construction,” they wrote. The study of residences (or “lordly enclaves”) has been more peripheral, yet the authors argue that up until 1066, aristocrats and rulers like King Harold invested heavily in residences, often co-located with churches and chapels.

The “Where Power Lies” project employed a wide range of research methodology—including perusing old maps and records, a re-analysis of past excavations, geophysics, ground-penetrating radar (GPR), and photogrammatic modeling—to define the signatures of such enclaves and map them into a single geographic information database (GIS). The project has identified seven such “lordly centers,” two of which are discussed in the current paper: an early medieval enclosure at Hornby in North Yorkshire and Bosham in West Sussex.

It has long been suspected that one particular manor house in Bosham (now a private residence) stands on the site of what was once King Harold’s residence. Per the authors, the original residence was clearly connected with Holy Trinity Church just to the south, parts of which date back to the 11th century, as evidenced by the posthole remains of what was once a bridge or causeway. More evidence can be found in a structure known as the “garden ruin,” little of which survives above ground—and even that was heavily overgrown. GPR data showed buried features that would have been the eastern wall of King Harold’s lordly enclave.

The biggest clue was the discovery in 2006 of a latrine within the remains of a large timber building. Its significance was not recognized at the time, but archaeologists have since determined that high-status homes began integrating latrines in the 10th century, so the structure was most likely part of King Harold’s residence. Co-author Duncan Wright of Newcastle University believes this “Anglo-Saxon en suite,” along with all the other evidence, proves “beyond all reasonable doubt that we have here the location of Harold Godwinson’s private power center, the one famously depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry.”

DOI: The Antiquaries Journal, 2025. 10.1017/S0003581524000350 (About DOIs).

A telltale toilet reveals “lost” site shown in Bayeux Tapestry Read More »

US‘s wind and solar will generate more power than coal in 2024

carbon emissions, coal, Energy, hydro, natural gas, nuclear, renewable energy, Science, solar, Wind / Kris Guyer / January 27, 2025

We can expect next year’s numbers to also show a large growth in solar production, as the EIA says that the US saw record levels of new solar installations in 2024, with 37 gigawatts of new capacity. Since some of that came online later in the year, it’ll produce considerably more power next year. And, in its latest short-term energy analysis, the EIA expects to see over 20 GW of solar capacity added in each of the next two years. New wind capacity will push that above 30 GW of renewable capacity each of these years.

A bar chart, with the single largest bar belonging to solar energy. — The past few years of solar installations have led to remarkable growth in its power output. Credit: John Timer

That growth will, it’s expected, more than offset continued growth in demand, although that growth is expected to be somewhat slower than we saw in 2024. It also predicts about 15 GW of coal will be removed from the grid during those two years. So, even without any changes in policy, we’re likely to see a very dynamic grid landscape over the next few years.

But changes in policy are almost certainly on the way. The flurry of executive orders issued by the Trump administration includes a number of energy-related changes. These include defining “energy” in a way that excludes wind and solar, an end to offshore wind leasing and the threat to terminate existing leases, and a re-evaluation of the allocation of funds from some of the Biden administration’s energy-focused laws.

In essence, this sets up a clash among economics, state policies, and federal policy. Even without any subsidies, wind and solar are the cheapest ways to produce electricity in much of the US. In addition, a number of states have mandates that will require the use of more renewable energy. At the same time, the permitting process for the plants and their grid connections will often require approvals at the federal level, and it appears to be official policy to inhibit renewables when possible. And a number of states are also making attempts to block new renewable power installations.

It’s going to be a challenging period for everyone involved in renewable energy.

US‘s wind and solar will generate more power than coal in 2024 Read More »

Rocket Report: Did China’s reusable rocket work?; DOT may review SpaceX fines

rocket report, Science, Space / Paul Patrick / January 25, 2025

Rocket Lab announced it will soon launch a batch of eight German-owned wildfire-detection satellites.

The Chinese Longxing-2 rocket is erected at Haiyang Dongfang Spaceport in Shandong province on January 13, 2025. This single stage booster lifted off January 19 on a high-altitude demonstration flight to test reusable rocket technology, but the outcome of the test remains unclear. Credit: Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Welcome to Edition 7.28 of the Rocket Report! After last week’s jam-packed action in the launch business, things are a bit quieter this week. Much of the space world’s attention has turned to Washington as the Trump administration takes the helm of the federal government. Some of the administration’s policy changes will likely impact the launch industry, with commercial spaceflight poised to become a beneficiary of actions over the next four years. As for the specifics, Ars has reported that NASA is expected to review the future of the Space Launch System rocket. Investments in the military space program could bring in more business for launch companies. And regulatory changes may reduce government oversight of commercial spaceflight.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

What happened to China’s reusable rocket testbed? A Chinese state-owned company performed a rocket flight on January 18 (US time) aimed at testing reusable launch vehicle technology without announcing the outcome, Space News reports. The Longxing-2 test article lifted off from a makeshift launch area near Haiyang, Shandong province. The methane-fueled rocket was expected to fly to an altitude of 75 kilometers (about 246,000 feet) before performing a reentry burn and a landing burn to guide itself to a controlled splashdown in the Yellow Sea, replicating the maneuvers required to recover a reusable booster like the first stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9. This was China’s most ambitious reusable rocket demonstration flight to date.

State-sanctioned silence … Amateur footage near the launch area showed the rocket rise slowly from the tower and perform an ascent phase with no apparent anomalies. But the video ended before the rocket descended to Earth, and there have been no official updates on the results of the test flight from the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), the state-owned enterprise responsible for the demonstration. SAST published results and video footage of a previous reusable rocket demonstration to an altitude of 12 kilometers last year. The lack of official updates this time raises questions about the success of the test, which could indicate challenges during reentry or landing phases. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

A timely launch for Rocket Lab. A dedicated flight of Rocket Lab’s Electron launcher will soon deploy eight small spacecraft for a German company building a constellation of wildfire-monitoring satellites. Rocket Lab announced the deal Wednesday, saying the mission will launch from the company’s spaceport in New Zealand. The eight satellites are owned by the German startup OroraTech. Rocket Lab said the launch will take place within “just a few weeks,” representing a relatively quick turnaround from contract signing to liftoff. This schedule will allow OroraTech to “meet the season-sensitive requirements of its wildfire-detection mission,” Rocket Lab said.

Infrared eyes … OroraTech’s satellites will host thermal infrared cameras to provide 24/7 monitoring of wildfires globally, supporting better and faster wildfire response to protect forests, people, and infrastructure, according to Rocket Lab. These eight satellites follow the launch of OroraTech’s first three prototype wildfire-detection spacecraft since 2022. The company plans to expand its constellation with up to 100 satellites by 2028. While this launch isn’t directly tied to the ongoing wildfire crisis in Southern California, OroraTech’s mission highlights the role of space-based detection for future firefighters. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s and Stephen Clark’s reporting on all things space is to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll collect their stories and deliver them straight to your inbox.

Sign Me Up!

US green-lights space-related exports to Norway. The United States and Norway have signed an agreement to allow the export of American space hardware to Norway for launches there, Space News reports. The Technology Safeguards Agreement, or TSA, ensures the protection of US space technology exported to Norway. It allows for American satellites and potentially launch vehicles to operate from Andøya Spaceport, located on an island above the Arctic Circle in Norway.

A valuable alliance … There are no US companies with publicly known plans to launch from Andøya, but the US military has touted the value of allies in funding, launching, and operating space-based platforms for communications, navigation, and reconnaissance. This agreement, announced on January 16 in the final days of the Biden administration, follows similar space tech transfer agreements with New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. The German rocket startup Isar Aerospace is scheduled to launch its first Spectrum rocket from the Norwegian spaceport as soon as this year. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Lunar lander test-fires uprated rocket engine. The Leros 4 rocket engine, developed by Nammo UK in Buckinghamshire, has successfully ignited in space, powering the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost lunar lander, European Spaceflight reports. This is a higher-thrust version of Nammo’s flight-proven Leros engine design that has provided propulsion for NASA probes to the planets and for numerous telecommunications satellites. Like other engines in the Leros line, the Leros 4 consumes a bipropellant mix of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, which combust when coming into contact with one another.

Thrusting toward the Moon … Firefly announced the successful main engine burn Sunday to begin raising the Blue Ghost spacecraft’s orbit around the Earth. Subsequent burns will further raise the craft’s altitude before eventually attaining enough speed to reach the Moon for a landing in early March. This is the first time a Leros 4 engine has fired in space. The variant flying on Blue Ghost is known as the “Leros 4-Extra Thrust” version, and it provides approximately 294 pounds of thrust (1,310 newtons), roughly double the power of Nammo’s next-largest engine. It’s designed specifically for interplanetary missions and is particularly well-suited for lunar landers because it can sustain thrust for lengthy burns or pulse at high frequency to control a spacecraft’s descent rate toward the Moon’s surface.

Trump’s DOT nominee says he’ll review FAA’s SpaceX fines. President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the US Transportation Department said he’d review penalties aviation regulators have proposed against SpaceX if confirmed for the role, Bloomberg reports. Transportation Secretary nominee Sean Duffy told senators during a hearing on January 15 that he’d also look into “what’s been happening at the FAA with regard to launches.” Last year, the FAA proposed more than $633,000 in fines on SpaceX due to alleged violations of the company’s launch license associated with two flights of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. It is rare for the FAA’s commercial spaceflight division to fine launch companies.

It’s about more than the money … In addition to the proposed fines related to SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, Elon Musk’s space company has also criticized regulators for taking too much time to review applications for launch licenses for the Starship mega-rocket. Some of the regulatory reviews were triggered by environmental concerns rather than public safety, which the FAA is responsible for ensuring during commercial rocket launches and reentries. Musk’s close relationship with Trump has led to speculation that the FAA will now have a lighter touch with SpaceX. So far, there’s no clear evidence of this happening, but it warrants observation. The FAA ordered a grounding of SpaceX’s Starship rocket after a failure of a test flight on January 16, and there’s been no announcement of a change in the agency’s posture regarding this test flight.

Falcon 9 flexes its muscles. SpaceX launched its latest batch of Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, on Tuesday, and this time, the company set a new record by deploying 27 second-generation Starlinks on the same rocket, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission was delayed from Sunday after an aircraft strayed into a keep-out zone near the launch site. This launch included a new type of Starlink spacecraft bus, or chassis, called the Starlink V2 Mini Optimized version. These satellites are considerably lighter than the previous V2 Mini design but also debut upgrades, such as a new backhaul antenna with a SpaceX-designed and built dual-band chip and improved avionics, propulsion, and power systems.

29 at a time … This means SpaceX can launch up to 29 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites on a single Falcon 9 rocket. Before now, SpaceX never launched more than 24 V2 Mini satellites on a single flight. SpaceX has launched the V2 Mini satellite design since 2023. Initially, this design was supposed to be a stopgap until SpaceX began launching much larger Starlink V3 satellites on the Starship rocket. However, SpaceX has now launched more than 3,000 V2 Mini satellites, and the debut of the optimized version suggests SpaceX plans to keep the V2 Mini around for a while longer.

Coming together in Kourou. ArianeGroup has shared that the core stage and two solid-fueled boosters for the second flight of the Ariane 6 rocket have been assembled on the ELA-4 launch pad at the Guiana Space Center in South America, European Spaceflight reports. At the same time, the flight’s payload, the French military CSO-3 spy satellite, arrived at Félix Eboué airport in French Guiana aboard an Antonov transport plane. With the launch campaign in full swing in French Guiana, it’s likely that the liftoff of the second Ariane 6 flight is just a few weeks away. The most recent publicly available schedule showed the launch is slated for February 25, but this information is now a couple of months old.

What it was made for … This launch follows the largely successful inaugural flight of Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket last July, in which the launcher deployed multiple CubeSats into an on-target orbit, but faltered before completing a deorbit burn to maneuver the upper stage toward reentry. Nevertheless, European officials are confident the issue that caused the upper-stage problem last year will not affect the upcoming launch of the French military’s newest surveillance satellite. This is the kind of mission the often-criticized Ariane 6 rocket was made for—launching a sensitive and costly European government payload to orbit with a European rocket from European territory. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

Jan. 24: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-6 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 14: 07 UTC

Jan. 25: Long March 8A | Demo Flight | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 10: 00 UTC

Jan. 27: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-7 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 19: 21 UTC

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Rocket Report: Did China’s reusable rocket work?; DOT may review SpaceX fines Read More »

Complexity physics finds crucial tipping points in chess games

chess, mathematics, networks, phase transitions, Physics, Science, tipping points / Paul Patrick / January 24, 2025

For his analysis, Barthelemy chose to represent chess as a decision tree in which each “branch” leads to a win, loss, or draw. Players face the challenge of finding the best move amid all this complexity, particularly midgame, in order to steer gameplay into favorable branches. That’s where those crucial tipping points come into play. Such positions are inherently unstable, which is why even a small mistake can have a dramatic influence on a match’s trajectory.

A case of combinatorial complexity

Barthelemy has re-imagined a chess match as a network of forces in which pieces act as the network’s nodes, and the ways they interact represent the edges, using an interaction graph to capture how different pieces attack and defend one another. The most important chess pieces are those that interact with many other pieces in a given match, which he calculated by measuring how frequently a node lies on the shortest path between all the node pairs in the network (its “betweenness centrality”).

He also calculated so-called “fragility scores,” which indicate how easy it is to remove those critical chess pieces from the board. And he was able to apply this analysis to more than 20,000 actual chess matches played by the world’s top players over the last 200 years.

Barthelemy found that his metric could indeed identify tipping points in specific matches. Furthermore, when he averaged his analysis over a large number of games, an unexpected universal pattern emerged. “We observe a surprising universality: the average fragility score is the same for all players and for all openings,” Barthelemy writes. And in famous chess matches, “the maximum fragility often coincides with pivotal moments, characterized by brilliant moves that decisively shift the balance of the game.”

Specifically, fragility scores start to increase about eight moves before the critical tipping point position occurs and stay high for some 15 moves after that. “These results suggest that positional fragility follows a common trajectory, with tension peaking in the middle game and dissipating toward the endgame,” he writes. “This analysis highlights the complex dynamics of chess, where the interaction between attack and defense shapes the game’s overall structure.”

Physical Review E, 2025. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.00.004300 (About DOIs).

Complexity physics finds crucial tipping points in chess games Read More »

Researchers optimize simulations of molecules on quantum computers

catalysts, Computer science, electrons, Physics, quantum computing, quantum mechanics, Science / Paul Patrick / January 24, 2025

The net result is a much faster operation involving far fewer gates. That’s important because errors in quantum hardware increase as a function of both time and the number of operations.

The researchers then used this approach to explore a chemical, Mn₄O₅Ca, that plays a key role in photosynthesis. Using this approach, they showed it’s possible to calculate what’s called the “spin ladder,” or the list of the lowest-energy states the electrons can occupy. The energy differences between these states correspond to the wavelengths of light they can absorb or emit, so this also defines the spectrum of the molecule.

Faster, but not quite fast enough

We’re not quite ready to run this system on today’s quantum computers, as the error rates are still a bit too high. But because the operations needed to run this sort of algorithm can be done so efficiently, the error rates don’t have to come down very much before the system will become viable. The primary determinant of whether it will run into an error is how far down the time dimension you run the simulation, plus the number of measurements of the system you take over that time.

“The algorithm is especially promising for near-term devices having favorable resource requirements quantified by the number of snapshots (sample complexity) and maximum evolution time (coherence) required for accurate spectral computation,” the researchers wrote.

But the work also makes a couple of larger points. The first is that quantum computers are fundamentally unlike other forms of computation we’ve developed. They’re capable of running things that look like traditional algorithms, where operations are performed and a result is determined. But they’re also quantum systems that are growing in complexity with each new generation of hardware, which makes them great at simulating other quantum systems. And there are a number of hard problems involving quantum systems we’d like to solve.

In some ways, we may only be starting to scratch the surface of quantum computers’ potential. Up until quite recently, there were a lot of hypotheticals; it now appears we’re on the cusp of using one for some potentially useful computations. And that means more people will start thinking about clever ways we can solve problems with them—including cases like this, where the hardware would be used in ways its designers might not have even considered.

Nature Physics, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41567-024-02738-z (About DOIs).

Researchers optimize simulations of molecules on quantum computers Read More »

George R.R. Martin has co-authored a physics paper

Science / Tim Belzer / January 23, 2025

They also suggest the existence of “cryptos”: Jokers and Aces with mutations that are largely unobservable, such as producing ultraviolet racing stripes on someone’s heart or imbuing “a resident of Iowa with the power of line-of-sight telepathic communication with narwhals. The first individual would be unaware of their Jokerism; the second would be an Ace but never known it.” (One might argue that communicating with narwhals might make one a Deuce.)

In the end, Tregillis and Martin came up with three ground rules: (1) cryptos exist, but how many of them exist is “unknown and unknowable”; (2) observable card turns would be distributed according to the 90:9:1 rule; and (3) viral outcomes would be determined by a multivariate probability distribution.

The resulting proposed model assumes two apparently random variables: severity of the transformation—i.e., how much the virus changes a person, either in the severity of a Joker’s deformation or the potency of an Ace’s superpower—and a mixing angle to address the existence of Joker-Aces. “Card turns that land sufficiently close to one axis will subjectively present as Aces, while otherwise they will present as Jokers or Joker-Aces,” the authors wrote.

The derived formula is one that takes into account the many different ways a given system can evolve (aka a Langrangian formulation). “We translated the abstract problem of Wild Card viral outcomes into a simple, concrete dynamical system. The time-averaged behavior of this system generates the statistical distribution of outcomes,” said Tregillis.

Tregillis acknowledges that this might not be a good exercise for the beginning physics student, given that it involves multiple steps and covers many concepts that younger students might not fully comprehend. Nor does he suggest adding it to the core curriculum. Instead, he recommends it for senior honors seminars to encourage students to explore an open-ended research question.

DOI: American Journal of Physics, 2025. 10.1119/5.0228859 (About DOIs).

George R.R. Martin has co-authored a physics paper Read More »

Fast radio burst in long-dead galaxy puzzles astronomers

astronomy, astrophysics, fast radio bursts, magnetars, Science / Rejus Almole / January 22, 2025

A surprising source

FRBs are of particular interest because they can be used as probes to study the large-scale structure of the universe. That’s why Calvin Leung, a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, was so excited to crunch data from Canada’s CHIME instrument (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment). CHIME was built for other observations but is sensitive to many of the wavelengths that make up an FRB. Unlike most radio telescopes, which focus on small points in the sky, CHIME scans a huge area, allowing it to pick out FRBs even though they almost never happen in the same place twice.

Leung was able to combine data from several different telescopes to narrow down the likely position of a repeating FRB, first detected in February 2024, located in the constellation Ursa Minor. When he and his CHIME collaborators further refined the accuracy of the location by averaging many bursts from the FRB, they discovered that this FRB originated on the outskirts of a long-dead distant galaxy. That throws a wrench into the magnetar hypothesis because why would a dead galaxy in which no new stars are forming host a magnetar?

It’s the first time an FRB has been found in such a location, and it’s also the furthest away from its galaxy. CHIME currently has two online outrigger radio arrays in place—companion telescopes to the original CHIME radio array in British Columbia. A third array comes online this week in Northern California, and according to Leung, it should enable astronomers to pinpoint FRB sources much more accurately—including this one. Data has already been incorporated from an outrigger in West Virginia, confirming the published position with a 20-times improvement in precision.

“This result challenges existing theories that tie FRB origins to phenomena in star-forming galaxies,” said co-author Vishwangi Shah, a graduate student at McGill University. “The source could be in a globular cluster, a dense region of old, dead stars outside the galaxy. If confirmed, it would make FRB 20240209A only the second FRB linked to a globular cluster.”

V. Shah et al., Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2025. DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ad9ddc (About DOIs).

T. Eftekhari et al., Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2025. DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ad9de2 (About DOIs).

Fast radio burst in long-dead galaxy puzzles astronomers Read More »

How to get a perfect salt ring deposit in your pasta pot

everyday physics, fluid dynamics, Physics, Science, sedimentation / Rejus Almole / January 21, 2025

Deposit morphologies for a settling particle. When increasing either the injection volume or the settling height, the deposit radius increases. Credit: M. Souzy et al., 2025

They used spherical borosilicate glass beads of varying diameters to represent the grains of salt and loaded different fixed volumes of beads into cylindrical tubes. Then they slid open the tube’s bottom to release the beads, capturing how they fell and settled with a Nikon D300 camera placed at the top of the tank. The tank was illuminated from below by a uniform LED light screen and diffuser to get an even background.

The physicists found that gravity will pull a single particle to the bottom of the tank, creating a small wake drag that affects the flow of water around it. That perturbation becomes much more complicated when many large particles are released at once, each with its own wake that affects its neighbors. So, the falling particles start to shift horizontally, distributing the falling particles in an expanding circular pattern.

Particles released from a smaller height fall faster and form a pattern with a clean central region. Those released from a greater height take longer to fall to the bottom, and the cloud of particles expands radially until the particles are far enough apart not to be influenced by the wakes of neighboring particles such that they no longer form a cloud. In that case, you end up with a homogeneous salt ring deposit.

“These are the main physical ingredients, and despite its apparent simplicity, this phenomenon encompasses a wide range of physical concepts such as sedimentation, non-creeping flow, long-range interactions between multiple bodies, and wake entrainment,” said Souzy. “Things get even more interesting once you realize larger particles are more radially shifted than small ones, which means you can sort particles by size just by dropping them into a water tank. It was a great overall experience, because we soon realized our simple observation of daily life conceals a rich variety of physical mechanisms.”

Those phenomena are just as relevant outside the kitchen, according to the authors, most notably in such geophysical and industrial contexts as “the discharge of dredged materials and industrial waste into rivers lakes and oceans,” they wrote. “In scenarios involving contaminated waste, comprehending the behavior of both the solid waste and the interacting fluid is crucial.”

Physics of Fluids, 2025. DOI: 10.1063/5.0239386 (About DOIs).

How to get a perfect salt ring deposit in your pasta pot Read More »

Edge of Mars’ great dichotomy eroded back by hundreds of kilometers

erosion, geology, Mars, oceans, planetary science, Science / Paul Patrick / January 20, 2025

A shoreline transformed?

The huge area covered by these mounds gives a sense of just how significant this erosion was. “The dichotomy boundary has receded several hundred kilometres,” the researchers note. “Nearly all intervening material—approximately 57,000 cubic kilometers over an area of 284,000 square kilometers west of Ares Vallis alone—has been removed, leaving only remnant mounds.”

Based on the distribution of the different clays, the team argues that their water-driven formation took place before the erosion of the material. This would indicate that water-rock interactions were going on over a very wide region early in the history of Mars, which likely required an extensive hydrological cycle on the red planet. As the researchers note, a nearby ocean would have improved the chances of exposing this region to water, but the exposure could also have been due to processes like melting at the base of an ice cap.

Complicating matters further, many of the mounds top out below one proposed shoreline of the northern ocean and above a second. It’s possible that a receding ocean could have contributed to their erosion. But, at the same time, some of the features of a proposed shoreline now appear to have been caused by the general erosion of the original plateau, and may not be associated with an ocean at all.

Overall, the new results provide mixed evidence for the presence of a Martian ocean. They clearly show an active water cycle and erosion on a massive scale, which are both consistent with having a lot of water around. At the same time, however, the water exposure the mesas and buttes have experienced needn’t have come through their being submerged by said ocean and, given their elevation, might best be explained through some other process.

Nature Geoscience, 2019. DOI: 10.1038/s41561-024-01634-8 (About DOIs).

Edge of Mars’ great dichotomy eroded back by hundreds of kilometers Read More »

Robotic hand helps pianists overcome “ceiling effect”

robotic exoskeleton, robotics, Science / Paul Patrick / January 20, 2025

Fast and complex multi-finger movements generated by the hand exoskeleton. Credit: Shinichi Furuya

When it comes to fine-tuned motor skills like playing the piano, practice, they say, makes perfect. But expert musicians often experience a “ceiling effect,” in which their skill level plateaus after extensive training. Passive training using a robotic exoskeleton hand could help pianists overcome that ceiling effect, according to a paper published in the journal Science Robotics.

“I’m a pianist, but I [injured] my hand because of overpracticing,” coauthor Shinichi Furuya of Kabushiki Keisha Sony Computer Science Kenkyujo told New Scientist. “I was suffering from this dilemma, between overpracticing and the prevention of the injury, so then I thought, I have to think about some way to improve my skills without practicing.” Recalling that his former teachers used to place their hands over his to show him how to play more advanced pieces, he wondered if he could achieve the same effect with a robotic hand.

So Furuya et al. used a custom-made exoskeleton robot hand capable of moving individual fingers on the right hand independently, flexing and extending the joints as needed. Per the authors, prior studies with robotic exoskeletons focused on simpler movements, such as assisting in the movement of limbs stabilizing body posture, or helping grasp objects. That sets the custom robotic hand used in these latest experiments apart from those used for haptics in virtual environments.

A helping robot hand

A total of 118 pianists participated in three different experiments. In the first, 30 pianists performed a designated “chord trill” motor task with the piano at home every day for two weeks: first simultaneously striking D and F keys with the right index and ring fingers, then striking the E and G keys with the right middle and little fingers. “We used this task because it has been widely recognized as technically challenging to play quickly and accurately,” the authors explained. It appears in such classical pieces as Chopin’s Etude Op. 25. No. 6, Maurice Ravel’s “Ondine,” and the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 3.

Robotic hand helps pianists overcome “ceiling effect” Read More »