Health tech, space, energy, research and science breakthroughs.
NASA has released the first full global inventory from its Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, and the numbers are stark: 47% of the planet’s continental freshwater basins have lost significant volume compared with a 2015 baseline. The mission, developed with France’s CNES, covers rivers wider than 100 meters, lakes and reservoirs across all … Read more
NASA’s Perseverance rover has rewritten its own record book again. On 12 October 2026 the six-wheeled explorer completed the longest self-planned drive of a single Martian day in its mission, days after its odometer overtook every other vehicle humanity has operated on another world. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the run beat the rover’s previous … Read more
NASA and the US Department of Energy have locked in a decade-long partnership to put fission reactors in space, signing a memorandum of understanding titled Accelerating American Leadership in Space Nuclear Power and Propulsion. The document was signed on 8 October at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s “Science: A New Golden … Read more
Desalination has long carried a double burden. Conventional plants consume between 3 and 10 kilowatt-hours per cubic metre of freshwater they produce, and they leave behind concentrated brine that is costly to manage. A facility in Caofeidian, Tangshan, China, now claims to have solved both problems at once, cutting energy consumption by 60% against the … Read more
Perovskite solar cells have carried the industry’s heaviest expectations for more than a decade, and the same flaw has stalled them every time: the material degrades under light, heat and moisture far faster than conventional silicon. A research team co-led by the University of California San Diego, working alongside Princeton University and Sungkyunkwan University in … Read more
Nobody warns you at the point of sale what happens when a photovoltaic array goes months without rain and dust settles across the cells. The efficiency penalty is real, measurable and — in many cases — avoidable with basic upkeep. The International Energy Agency estimates that soiling costs residential installations between 4% and 7% of … Read more
Japan has sold more adult diapers than baby diapers every single year since 2011, and the gap has only widened. What looked like a demographic curiosity fifteen years ago is now the clearest preview of a structural shift in global consumer markets: shrinking birth rates on one side, rapidly expanding elderly populations on the other. … Read more
The race to build a more potent obesity drug has a new benchmark. A combination therapy called EloraTZP, developed by Eli Lilly, produced 23.3% average body-weight loss over 48 weeks in a mid-stage trial — the strongest result the company has reported for any incretin-based programme to date. The findings were presented at the European … Read more
A superconducting quantum processor can now hold its coherence long enough to run roughly 5,000 consecutive two-qubit operations plus 5,000 measurement-and-reset cycles without collapsing. That is the headline finding from IBM and five US academic institutions in Nature Physics — and it points to an error-correction mechanism that seems to grow stronger, not weaker, as … Read more
Engineers at the University of California San Diego and the Toyota Research Institute of North America have developed a battery binder that dissolves in plain water at room temperature — a seemingly minor change of ingredient that could strip toxic solvents, high-temperature furnaces and hazardous waste out of both lithium-ion manufacturing and recycling. The work … Read more