All Stories by Stephen Ornes
- Tech
Lasers help put the cork on spilled oil
Treating cork with lasers made the material able to quickly sponge up oil while repelling water, scientists in China and Israel found.
- Tech
Laser-based tech can identify illegal elephant ivory
Most elephant ivory is illegal to sell. Ivory from extinct mammoths isn’t. They look similar, but lasers can tell the difference to help catch poachers.
- Physics
Here’s why scientists want a good quantum computer
These machines could tackle big problems in climate, medicine and more. But the tech is still in its infancy — and runs on truly strange physics.
- Tech
Lego bricks inspired a new way to shape devices for studying liquids
Inspired by Lego building blocks, the approach could enable design of adaptable tools to study how fluids move through very small spaces.
- Math
Cake-cutting math offers lessons that go far beyond dessert plates
As a way to study how to fairly share a limited resource, cake-cutting can inform splitting up chores, drawing fair voting districts and more.
- Tech
Balsa wood transistors could usher in ‘greener’ electronics
Researchers in Sweden coaxed wood to conduct electricity, then used it to make a climate-friendlier building block of electronics.
- Tech
Engineers cook up a new way to tackle CO2: Make baking soda
Engineers have found a material that can collect carbon dioxide from the air. When later mixed with water, it forms baking soda that can be shed in the sea.
- Tech
With tech, farms can double up to produce both food and power
Agrivoltaics merges agriculture with photovoltaic panels, which generate electricity from sunlight. The combo produces clean energy and edible crops.
- Tech
Gravity ‘batteries’ might help a weighty renewable-energy problem
To store the energy generated by wind and solar power, researchers are looking at mammoth systems that raise and lower weights.
- Tech
New robot can pick up a single drop of liquid
The new device, which looks like a pair of plastic pinchers, is the first to be able to pick up individual droplets of liquid.
- Animals
Some ecologists value parasites — and now want a plan to save them
Parasites get a bad rap as disease-causing, unwelcome guests on other organisms. But parasites are also imperiled, and scientists don’t want to lose them.
- Planets
Noises sound totally different on Mars than on Earth. Here’s why
The Perseverance rover recorded the sound of laser pulses on Mars. Scientists used those recordings to determine the Martian speeds of sound.
