Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Kyoto Fusioneering are building UNITY-3, a landmark test facility for fusion breeding blankets. This DOE-backed public-private partnership aims to solve the critical fuel production challenge for commercial fusion power plants.
An international team including the South African Medical Research Council and HZDR analyzed hair from over 400 children, proving for the first time that uranium from 140-year-old gold mining waste is being absorbed by communities living nearby.
In a world first, a University of Oxford team led by Associate Professor Harrison Steel has engineered quantum mechanical processes inside proteins. This breakthrough creates a new class of quantum-enabled biosensors, with a prototype already developed for advanced medical imaging.
Cornell University researchers, led by Professor Sriramya Nair, are using a $1.4 million DARPA grant to pioneer underwater 3D printing. Their method utilizes seafloor sediment as the primary material, aiming to transform the construction and repair of ports, piers, and seabed infrastructure.
Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences have discovered 5,100-year-old dams using digital archaeology, proving ancient Chinese communities managed water cooperatively. This finding by researcher Liu Jianguo directly counters the long-standing Western theory of “Oriental despotism,” showing large-scale projects preceded centralized power.
Swiss EMPA researchers have developed the FireDrone, an extreme-heat-resistant UAV that withstands 392 °F temperatures using aerogel insulation and active cooling. It relays real-time thermal imagery to firefighters, revolutionizing safety and situational awareness in structural and industrial blazes.
MIT physicists at CERN have found the first direct proof that the early universe’s quark-gluon plasma flows like a liquid. By detecting wakes left by speeding quarks, Professor Yen-Jie Lee’s team confirms the trillion-degree “primordial soup” behaved as a near-perfect fluid in its first microseconds.
Aboard the International Space Station, NASA’s Chris Williams set the stage for a student robotics challenge using Astrobee helpers, while Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev conducted virtual reality balance research. The work advances orbital technology and studies human adaptation for future deep-space missions.
Chinese aerospace firm Adaspace Technology has deployed Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen-3 AI model in orbit, completing a full inference cycle from Earth and back in less than two minutes. This milestone in the U.S.-China space race demonstrates the practical potential of orbital data centers powered by solar energy and marks a major leap for the planned 2,800-satellite “Star-Compute Project.”
The Broads Authority is successfully trialing a submarine drone to survey its 125-mile waterway network. The £10,881 device can inspect underwater infrastructure and wrecks at depths of 200m, saving money and improving safety over traditional diver surveys.
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