NASA Targets 500kW Nuclear Reactor for Moon
Sanjukta Praharaj
5:07 pm
NASA is moving ahead with plans to place a 500-kilowatt nuclear fission reactor on the Moon by fiscal year 2030,
NASA is moving ahead with plans to place a 500-kilowatt nuclear fission reactor on the Moon by fiscal year 2030,
Chinese researchers successfully completed the world’s first in-orbit test of a wireless implantable Brain-computer Interface (BCI) device, marking a major
China has completed a high‑stress launch escape test of its Mengzhou lunar spacecraft aboard a Long March-10 rocket at Wenchang. Conducted at max Q by CASC, the test validated independent solid‑fuel crew abort and the first controlled vertical splashdown of the booster stage. The milestone advances China’s 2030 crewed moon landing and reusable rocket technology, with a Lanyue lander already in testing and a 2035 lunar south pole station on the roadmap.
UK scientists have fired lasers at Charles Darwin’s 200-year-old Galapagos specimen jars to identify their unknown preservation fluids—without opening them. Led by Dr. Wren Montgomery and physicist Sara Mosca, the team used portable SORS spectroscopy to achieve nearly 80 percent accuracy, solving a major conservation challenge for the Natural History Museum London. The method, reported in ACS Omega, could protect over 100 million museum specimens worldwide.
University of Sydney engineers have developed a liquid metal method that produces clean hydrogen from seawater using only sunlight. Led by Professor Kourosh Kalantar-Zadeh, the team achieved 12.9% efficiency with a circular gallium-based process. The innovation, reported in Nature Communications, solves a key problem in green hydrogen production and offers a scalable path forward.
Samsung will start mass-producing the world’s first HBM4 memory next week for NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin AI GPUs. This 6th-generation high-bandwidth memory, shipping after Lunar New Year, marks a key breakthrough for AI hardware, solving critical data bottleneck issues and setting a new performance standard for the next wave of generative artificial intelligence.
ETH Zurich scientists found a planet’s fate for life is set during its fiery birth. Their models reveal a narrow chemical “Goldilocks zone” for oxygen that allows phosphorus and nitrogen—essential for DNA and proteins—to be retained. Earth was uniquely lucky; most planets, like Mars, form outside this zone. This dramatically refines where we should search for life in the universe.
Egypt’s Arab Organization for Industrialization (AOI) unveiled its Hamza-3 suicide drone with a 1,800 km range and swarming capabilities in Riyadh. Alongside the Sakr 105 rocket launcher and Haris-2 jammer, the systems highlight a push for localized production, though key components are still imported from China, mirroring a broader Arab drive for defense self-sufficiency.
As the US-Russia New START treaty ends, the CTBTO has denied U.S. claims of secret Chinese nuclear tests. Focus shifts to China’s ~600-warhead arsenal, growing by ~100 annually. Beijing rejects trilateral arms talks, citing its smaller stockpile versus America’s 5,000+, framing its build-up as essential “strategic deterrence” amidst a collapsing global arms control framework.
Physicist Pan Jianwei and his USTC team have extended device-independent quantum encryption to 100km, a 40x distance record. Using just two entangled rubidium atoms, their system generates secrets secure even if the hardware is compromised. This leap closes a critical gap toward hack-proof quantum networks, even as current speeds remain far slower than conventional internet.
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