A wind turbine standing nearly 1,200 feet tall has reached its full height in eastern Germany, creating a new approach to capturing wind energy at elevations where winds are stronger and more consistent. 

Developed by German engineering company GICON for the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, or SPRIND, the pilot turbine in Schipkau is designed to test whether going dramatically higher can produce substantially more electricity from the same amount of wind infrastructure.

The structure reaches 1,197 feet, including its blades, making it Germany’s second-tallest structure after Berlin’s TV tower. GICON says the design could eventually generate roughly twice as much electricity as a conventional turbine with the same rotor diameter, although that estimate still needs to be demonstrated in operation.

A wind turbine built to reach higher

The main idea behind GICON’s design is to go where the wind is better. Wind speeds generally increase with altitude, while higher elevations can also provide more consistent wind conditions. Hence, a turbine operating hundreds of meters above the ground has access to a larger and potentially more reliable energy resource than a conventional turbine.

The Schipkau pilot has a rated capacity of 3.8 megawatts, while future versions are expected to exceed 7 MW. The company’s projected doubling in energy output refers to electricity generated over time, rather than the turbine’s maximum rated power.

Reaching that altitude, however, required GICON to rethink how such a turbine could be constructed. Instead of using a conventional crane capable of reaching the top of the tower, the company used a telescoping tower design. 

A specialized lifting mechanism raised the inner tower through a surrounding lattice structure before securing it at its final height. GICON founder and CEO Jochen Grosmann described reaching 1,197 feet as a major milestone for the project, which began as a concept before becoming a full-scale pilot facility.

Adding power without new wind farms

One of the more interesting possibilities is that high-altitude turbines could eventually be added to existing wind farms rather than requiring entirely new sites. GICON and SPRIND envision the systems operating as a second tier of wind generation, with the taller turbines positioned above conventional wind turbines. Therefore, their rotors would operate at higher elevations while existing turbines continue generating electricity below.

According to the current assessment, Germany could potentially accommodate as many as 4,000 high-altitude turbines within existing wind farms. If the concept works as expected, that could allow additional electricity generation without expanding wind farms into new areas, while also making better use of existing grid connections and developed wind-energy sites.

While the completion of the structure marks an important achievement, the more important test is still ahead, as official commissioning is planned for November, after the remaining construction work is completed. 

Once operational, the turbine will provide the data needed to determine whether the additional height delivers the expected increase in energy production and whether the benefits justify the additional engineering complexity.

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Moog and Niron Magnetics will showcase their rare-earth-free actuator solutions at the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) 2026 Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C., in October.

At the event, the companies plan to demonstrate their work using Niron’s Iron Nitride permanent magnets, which convert electrical signals into mechanical motion. The promising technology is being tested for applications including land vehicles and guided munitions.

“The Army is transforming quickly, and the systems soldiers rely on can only move as fast as the supply chains behind them,” said Ryan Aures, Moog Land and Sea Systems engineering director, in a press release. “Our work with Niron is about making sure a disruption never stands between the warfighter and the capability they need.”

The project builds on a collaboration between Moog and Niron announced in December 2025. Moog is testing and qualifying Niron’s Iron Nitride permanent magnets in electromechanical actuators, which would reduce dependency on critical minerals – an innovative solution to a global problem.

Iron Nitride removes rare earth elements

Almost every precision system the Army depends on contains rare earth. “Today almost all of that supply runs through a single foreign source,” said Jonathan Rowntree, CEO of Niron Magnetics.

According to an October 2025 report from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), “China controls up to 90 percent of the world’s critical-mineral processing capacity, including more than 99 percent of processing for three rare earths needed for heat-resistant magnets,” CFR said.

Niron claims that its Iron Nitride technology can produce permanent magnets without rare earth materials–which would eliminate the problem in a world scrambling to move manufacturing to domestic soil.

Critical minerals are used in products ranging from smartphones and vehicles to advanced weapons systems including the F-35.

US moves to expand domestic magnet supply

The U.S. government has also taken steps to expand domestic rare-earth production. According to CFR, the Department of Defense took a 15 percent stake in U.S.-based rare-earth producer MP Materials for $400 million in July 2025.

The Moog-Niron project takes a different approach by developing permanent magnets that do not require rare-earth materials, which would be the ultimate shutdown response to the entire situation if the Army just eliminated the need.

According to the company’s release, Niron has been producing Iron Nitride magnets and conducting customer qualification since 2025. The company expects to begin commercial production within the next 18 months.

Niron says its magnets are already being used in applications spanning artificial intelligence infrastructure, automotive products, industrial equipment and consumer electronics.

For the defense project, Moog is testing and qualifying the magnets specifically in electromechanical actuator systems.

Technology headed to AUSA 2026

The companies will jointly present the technology at Moog’s booth during AUSA 2026. Moog and Niron plan to display Iron Nitride magnets installed in tested motor hardware. The companies said attendees can also speak with engineers about integration, qualification timelines, and supply availability.

Niron, meanwhile, is working to commercialize its Iron Nitride permanent magnets through its proprietary manufacturing platform.

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Japanese scientists may have found a surprisingly simple way to predict how some unusual materials behave by looking at the size of their crystal structure.

In their latest study, they claim that this structural measurement can predict magnetic ground states across a family of unusual materials more consistently than the electron-counting method scientists have traditionally relied on. 

This could make the search for unusual magnetic materials less of a guessing game. 

Until now, the challenge has been that quasicrystals and related materials have extremely complex atomic arrangements, making it difficult to find a single rule that works across different chemical compositions. 

“Quasicrystals are among the most uniquely structured materials discovered to date and are expected to exhibit novel magnetic states and quantum phenomena not found in ordinary crystals. Until now, there has been no unified guideline for systematically exploring these novel phenomena in quasicrystals and their approximate crystals,” Farid Labib, first study author and assistant professor at Tokyo University of Science, said.

The new study suggests that a crystal’s size could provide that missing common measure when researchers search for unconventional magnetism.

Looking beyond the electron count

The researchers focused on Tsai-type approximant crystals. These materials mimic important structural features of quasicrystals while having a repeating crystal structure that can be studied experimentally. 

Their atoms form nested clusters, with rare-earth elements such as terbium, dysprosium and holmium occupying positions that carry magnetic moments.

Researchers have often used the valence-electron concentration, or the number of valence electrons per atom, to classify magnetic behavior. 

However, the magnetic boundaries associated with this measure shift with the rare-earth element and alloy composition, making it less reliable as a universal guide.

The researchers therefore synthesized Au–Al and Au–Ga-based 1/1 approximant crystals containing terbium, dysprosium and holmium, then compared their structures and magnetic properties. They also combined their measurements with data from previously reported Tsai-type compounds to see whether the pattern held across different compositions.

They found a nearly monotonic inverse relationship between electron concentration and the lattice parameter—the dimensions of the crystal’s repeating unit. This allowed them to reorganize the materials according to lattice size rather than chemical composition.

Three magnetic states separated by crystal size

The distinction turned out to be remarkably clear. Crystals with lattice parameters above about 14.72 Å (14.72 x 10^-10 m) developed a whirling antiferromagnetic state, where magnetic moments form an ordered pattern with opposing contributions. 

Between 14.62 and 14.72 Å, they showed a whirling ferromagnetic state with a net magnetization. Below about 14.62 Å, the materials enter a spin-glass state, where magnetic moments become frozen in a disordered arrangement.

The whirling magnetic states arise in these non-Heisenberg compounds partly because the local atomic environment creates a strong crystal electric field. This field favors particular orientations for the rare-earth magnetic moments, influencing how they ultimately arrange themselves. 

The magnetic moments also interact indirectly through electrons moving through the material, linking the atomic structure to the way those moments arrange themselves.

A structural roadmap for new materials

The important point is not simply that lattice size correlates with magnetism. The study establishes specific structural thresholds that place different compounds on a common magnetic phase diagram.

This makes the lattice parameter an experimentally accessible starting point for deciding which materials may host a desired magnetic ground state.

“The unified magnetic phase diagram constructed in this study can serve as a practical roadmap for systematic exploration of new magnetic quasicrystals and approximant crystals exhibiting novel magnetic orders and quantum phenomena,” Kazuhiro Nawa, study co-author and a researcher at Tohoku University said. 

“It can also provide a guideline for designing new magnetic materials with targeted magnetic ground states, opening new opportunities for discovering unconventional magnetism in quasiperiodic and complex intermetallic systems,” Nawa added.

The finding does not make electron concentration irrelevant. Rather, it suggests that lattice parameter may be a more consistent guide for Tsai-type compounds, while its usefulness in other magnetic materials remains untested.

What remains unclear is exactly why the lattice parameter works so well across these different compounds. The researchers also need to determine whether the same relationship holds in true quasicrystals.

Despite these limitations, the study indeed offers a more systematic route for exploring complex alloys and designing new quantum materials.

The study is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

For more than a century, the electricity grid has mostly worked in one direction. Power plants generate electricity, grids deliver it, and homes, factories and businesses consume it. That model is starting to look a little dated.

As solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and connected devices spread, millions of things that consume electricity can also store it, shift when they use it or, in some cases, send it back. “Everything-to-grid” is the emerging idea of coordinating those resources so they become active parts of the power system rather than simply sitting at the end of the network. The World Economic Forum included the concept among its Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026.

What exactly is everything-to-grid?

The simplest way to think about it is to imagine the grid gaining millions of tiny batteries, generators, and adjustable loads. An electric vehicle plugged into a charger is normally a consumer. But with bidirectional charging, its battery can potentially send electricity back to a building or the grid. 

A building with solar panels and batteries can generate, store, and supply electricity. A factory could shift some electricity-intensive processes away from peak-demand periods.

Instead of asking only, “How much electricity do we need?”, an everything-to-grid system also asks, “What can we move, store, or temporarily switch off right now?” That flexibility can be valuable when electricity demand suddenly rises, or renewable generation fluctuates.

Your car could become a grid asset

Electric vehicles are one of the most obvious pieces of this puzzle because their batteries can store substantial amounts of electricity while the vehicles are parked for much of the day. Vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, technology allows compatible vehicles and chargers to exchange electricity with the grid rather than simply charging the battery. 

Software can decide when a vehicle should charge, pause charging, or discharge electricity, while accounting for factors such as grid conditions and the owner’s need to drive.

The U.S. Department of Energy has been examining V2G as a way of integrating EVs into the wider power system. However, widespread deployment still depends on compatible vehicles, chargers, communications systems, regulations, and business models. In other words, your car could spend the afternoon being a car and the evening moonlighting as a very expensive power bank.

Buildings become more than electricity consumers

Buildings are another major part of the concept. A grid-interactive building combines energy efficiency, smart controls, communications and distributed energy resources such as solar panels and batteries. Heating, cooling, water heating and other systems can be adjusted according to electricity prices, grid conditions or the availability of renewable power.

The U.S. Department of Energy describes these buildings as flexible energy resources that can help reduce peak demand and make better use of periods when electricity is plentiful. The IEA similarly describes grid-interactive buildings as “prosumers” that can produce, consume, store, buy, and sell energy.

Why renewables make this more important

Solar and wind power are increasingly important sources of electricity, but their output varies with weather and time of day. Solar generation, for example, can fall rapidly as evening demand rises.

That makes flexibility increasingly valuable. The IEA expects renewables to overtake coal in global electricity generation in 2026 and says modernizing grids and improving system flexibility will be critical as wind and solar expand. Everything-to-grid systems could help absorb surplus electricity when renewable generation is high and reduce demand when the grid is under pressure.

The catch: somebody has to coordinate the chaos

Making millions of independent devices behave like one useful power resource is considerably harder than installing a solar panel or plugging in an EV. It requires communication standards, smart inverters and chargers, control software, electricity-market rules, and cybersecurity. 

The more connected the grid becomes, the more important it is to protect those connections from failures and attacks. The DOE specifically identifies cybersecurity as an important consideration for increasingly connected grid-interactive buildings. There are also practical questions around battery degradation, consumer compensation, privacy, and who gets to control an asset in someone’s home.

Everything-to-grid, then, isn’t about turning every appliance into a miniature power station overnight. It is about changing the architecture of electricity itself, from a system where consumers mostly take power from the grid into one where millions of connected assets can help manage it.

The grid of the future may still have giant power plants and transmission lines. But alongside them could be millions of cars, buildings, batteries and machines quietly doing their part. That is a much more complicated grid. It could also be a much more flexible one.

OpenAI’s frontier intelligence model GPT-6 Astra has completed the Orc starting area in World of Warcraft in about 40 minutes without processing a single rendered game frame, according to the developer of the open-source agent-wow project.

Instead of seeing the game through screenshots or computer vision, the AI reconstructed its environment from server network messages and game data, then built its own tools to navigate and play.

The experiment was conducted on a private local server running AzerothCore, not Blizzard’s live World of Warcraft service. The developer gave Codex, running GPT-6 Astra at its high reasoning setting, a single instruction: create an Orc character and complete all quests in the starting zone. The agent reportedly finished the run without dying.

Reading the game’s network traffic

The unusual part of the experiment is how little conventional game automation was provided to the model. Agent-wow does not use computer vision, screenshots, or direct keyboard and mouse controls. Instead, it allows an AI agent to communicate with the game server through World of Warcraft’s network protocol, Tom’s Hardware reported.

The project also does not provide predefined movement, combat, or interaction systems. The agent is expected to build the capabilities it needs through modules. During the run, GPT-6 Astra created a module that could process dozens of different server messages and keep the resulting information in memory. A Python script then used those messages to construct the model’s view of what was happening in the game and send actions back to the server.

That meant the model could determine things such as its surroundings, quest progress, and available targets without ever receiving the visual information a human player normally relies on.

The experiment therefore tests something different from simply teaching an AI to recognize a game screen. The model had to reason about a structured but unfamiliar environment using the information available through the game’s underlying protocol.

Astra built its own tools to complete the quests

The agent also had access to AzerothCore’s underlying data, including SQL files containing information about quests, NPCs, and spawn locations. It used those resources to determine where quests started and ended, and how different objectives were connected.

The developer said the model effectively created a plan for completing prerequisite quests in sequence. It also managed routine tasks such as selling unwanted items, equipping better gear, and training abilities before reaching the final cave in the starting area.

Navigation was another problem the agent had to solve, with GPT-6 Astra generating a C++ helper that used AzerothCore’s navigation-mesh data, known as mmaps, to calculate routes. The helper used the Detour pathfinding library to generate waypoints between locations, which the agent could then follow.

The developer said the system even encountered locations where collision information appeared to be incomplete and was able to exploit those map quirks. That makes the result interesting, but also means the run should not be treated as a straightforward test of how well an AI can navigate an unmodified commercial game world.

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E-ink displays can look almost suspiciously like paper. They don’t glow like a phone screen, remain readable under bright sunlight, and can display the same page for days without constantly drawing power. Yet beneath that paper-like surface is a surprisingly simple bit of physics. Millions of tiny charged particles move around in microscopic containers.

The technology is officially known as an electrophoretic display, or EPD. It is used in e-readers, electronic shelf labels, digital signage and an expanding range of low-power devices.

Tiny capsules full of moving ink

At the heart of a conventional black-and-white e-ink display are millions of microscopic capsules. Each is roughly the diameter of a human hair and contains a clear fluid with electrically charged pigment particles suspended inside it.

In a common two-particle system, the particles are black and white and carry opposite electrical charges. The capsules sit above an electronic layer that can apply a controlled electric field to individual areas of the display.

Apply one polarity and the white particles move toward the top of a capsule. Reverse the field and the black particles move upward instead. What the viewer sees therefore depends on which particles are positioned at the surface. 

This movement is called electrophoresis. Charged particles move through a fluid in response to an electric field. The same basic principle was demonstrated in early electronic-paper research, including the microencapsulated electrophoretic ink described by researchers at the MIT Media Lab in a 1998 Nature paper. 

There is no backlight

This is where e-ink takes a very different route from an LCD or OLED display. A phone or laptop screen produces or controls light that travels toward your eyes. Traditional LCDs use a backlight, while OLED pixels generate their own light.

E-ink is reflective. Instead of producing the light you see, it uses ambient light, reflecting it from the pigment particles at the surface much like ink on a printed page. The brighter the surroundings, the easier the screen can be to see. 

That is why an e-reader can be remarkably comfortable to use outdoors on a sunny day while a conventional display may become harder to see. E-readers can still have a light for reading in darkness, but it is generally a front light that illuminates the surface rather than a conventional display backlight shining through the screen. 

The clever trick: the picture stays put

One of the most important properties of electrophoretic displays is bistability. Once the pigment particles move into position, they can stay there without continuously applying power. The electronics need electricity to change the image, but not simply to keep an existing image on screen.

That means an e-reader can display a page for hours while consuming essentially no display power between updates. E Ink says its displays consume power only when the image changes, with the energy required for an update depending on the display and operating mode. It is one reason e-ink devices can achieve battery life measured in weeks rather than hours.

So why does e-ink refresh so slowly?

There is a tradeoff for all that efficiency. LCD and OLED pixels can change extremely quickly because they control light electronically. E-ink has to physically move pigment particles through fluid. That makes its refresh behavior fundamentally different.

Modern E Ink displays have multiple refresh modes, and the company says some can update a full display in as little as 120 milliseconds. The technology is still generally slower and can produce visible flashing or ghosting during certain transitions, which is perfectly acceptable for turning pages or reading a document. But it is considerably less ideal for fast video or action-heavy games.

What about color?

Color e-ink works by adding more types of charged pigment particles or using different display structures. E Ink’s color technologies include systems using black, white, red, and yellow particles, while other approaches can produce a broader color range. 

Its Advanced Color ePaper technology, for example, uses colored particles rather than relying on a conventional LCD-style color filter array.  Color e-ink therefore remains reflective and low-power, but there is another tradeoff: color electrophoretic displays generally cannot match the brightness, saturation, and refresh performance of modern OLED or LCD screens.

Why e-ink still matters

E-ink is not trying to replace your smartphone display. Its advantage comes from doing less. It reflects rather than emits light, holds an image without continuously consuming display power, and can remain readable in bright environments. 

That makes it especially useful when the priority is information rather than animation: books, labels, signs, notes, and other content that doesn’t need to change every millisecond. In a world increasingly filled with glowing screens, e-ink’s cleverest trick may simply be knowing when not to glow.

Japan has demonstrated a coastal tanker using a hydrogen-fired, four-stroke, high-speed engine in what the project describes as a world first.

The 4,800-dwt vessel sailed approximately 20 miles in Osaka Bay during a roughly two-hour demonstration on September 25. The Nippon Foundation reported that the voyage reduced carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 1.2 tons compared with conventional fossil fuels.

The demonstration forms part of a foundation-sponsored research program supporting the decarbonization of shipping. The tanker combines a hydrogen engine, electric propulsion motors and lithium-ion batteries.

How the tanker’s propulsion system works

The tanker uses electricity generated by a hydrogen engine housed in a container mounted on deck which powers two electric propulsion motors connected to two shafts.

The vessel also carries a hybrid generator and lithium-ion batteries. The batteries smooth the load and help optimize fuel consumption.

In this configuration, the hydrogen engine generates electrical power rather than driving the propeller shafts directly. The electric motors provide propulsion through the vessel’s two shafts.

Yanmar Power Solutions designed the engine used in the project. Its first bench tests were completed in October 2024, when it successfully operated at a rated output of approximately 500 kilowatts.

During those initial tests, the engine used a small amount of diesel oil as a pilot ignition source to burn a premixed combination of hydrogen and air. Subsequent testing worked toward using hydrotreated vegetable oil, known as HVO, for pilot ignition.

The supplied account does not identify which pilot ignition fuel was used during the September demonstration.

The project called for a tanker specifically designed for hydrogen propulsion. Fukuoka Shipbuilding, a member of the project coalition, launched the vessel at its Nagasaki yard on February 14, 2025.

Measuring approximately 344 feet (105 m), the tanker was delivered to Uyeno TransTec in October 2025.

What the demonstration covered

The September 25 voyage tested the tanker’s hydrogen-fired engine while sailing in Osaka Bay. The Nippon Foundation described it as a carbon-neutral demonstration and estimated the carbon dioxide reduction at about 1.2 tons compared with conventional fossil fuels.

Beyond the engine, the project’s scope included developing the fuel supply system and hull design to obtain Approval in Principle from the classification society ClassNK.

The team also developed training and an operating manual for hydrogen-fueled vessels.

According to the foundation and the operator, the demonstration produced experience and knowledge to support hydrogen adoption in domestic coastal shipping. The project’s stated goal is to develop a model and pathway for that adoption.

“This demonstration represents a significant step towards the practical application of hydrogen-fueled zero-emission ships and is expected to contribute to the promotion of decarbonization in Japan’s shipping sector,” said Kazuma Kashiwagi, Director of the Environmental Bureau for Kobe City.

Japan has committed to achieving carbon neutrality in its domestic shipping sector by 2050.

The wider hydrogen vessel program

The Nippon Foundation launched the project in 2022. In June 2023, it assigned three consortia to develop separate demonstrations under its Zero Emission Ship 2050 program.

Alongside the tanker, one team focused on demonstrating a hydrogen fuel cell aboard an offshore wind turbine work vessel. Another worked on a hydrogen-fueled engine for the tugboat “Ten-Oh.”

The program’s first hydrogen fuel-cell demonstration took place in April 2024 aboard the 238-gross-ton passenger vessel Hanaria. Additional demonstrations were scheduled for 2026, alongside work on hydrogen stations to supply fuel.

Other hydrogen shipping projects include Norway’s liquid-hydrogen-fueled ferry MF Hydra and inland barges in Europe.

Cruise operators have also begun testing fuel cells and hydrogen systems to supply electricity for hotel operations and reduce emissions in port.

Advanced nuclear power holds a clear promise: round-the-clock, low-carbon electricity with far better fuel efficiency than conventional plants. Yet the next generation of reactors faces an atomic-scale obstacle. When uranium atoms split to generate energy, they leave behind troublesome chemical byproducts that degrade equipment and frustrate recycling efforts.

A research team led by Pennsylvania State University has received $1 million from the US Department of Energy to tackle this precise problem. Their goal is to track and control three stubborn fission products—samarium, europium, and tellurium—in molten salt reactors and advanced recycling systems.

Standard commercial reactors are cooled by pressurized water. But molten salt systems use liquid salts. These reactors can squeeze more energy out of nuclear fuel and allow used materials to be recycled. However, the chemical soup inside them is notoriously harsh.

Each of the three targeted elements presents its own challenge. Samarium and europium are unwanted in recycled fuel because they can interfere with reactor performance and fuel recycling processes, noted researchers. 

“Tellurium, on the other hand, can react with metals used in molten salt reactors and fuel-recycling systems, contributing to corrosion and materials degradation,” added the researchers. 

Understanding the fundamentals

To solve this, researchers need to understand how these elements behave at a fundamental level.

“We will study the oxidation states of these elements, which describe how many electrons an atom has gained or lost and strongly influence how they behave chemically,” said lead investigator Hojong Kim, professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State.

The team will examine how these byproducts interact with reactor materials during pyroprocessing, a high-temperature recycling method based on molten salts. Working alongside specialists from the University of Nevada, Reno, and Idaho National Laboratory, researchers will combine computer modeling with direct laboratory experiments.

In the lab, doctoral researcher Alok Pandey will dissolve the three elements in molten salt solvents and run electrical currents through the mixture. By varying the applied potential, he can observe how the elements shift oxidation states.

“This will allow us to understand the elements’ electrochemical properties,” concluded Pandey. “It could help improve strategies for their recovery and management during nuclear fuel recycling.”

Solving the recycling puzzle

The project also revives an earlier, unresolved puzzle. Kim previously attempted to analyze samarium under a 2018 federal grant. That effort stalled because the element existed in tiny concentrations and behaved unpredictably compared to related rare-earth metals. Armed with newer diagnostic methods, the team believes it can now crack the problem.

Their solution relies on an unexpected ally: liquid bismuth. Kim’s laboratory previously discovered that molten bismuth can act like a chemical sponge, cleanly capturing rare-earth elements out of liquid salts.

If the current trials succeed, the technique could unlock more sustainable fuel cycles. By removing corrosive and performance-choking byproducts, engineers can keep advanced reactors running longer, extract more energy from every grain of uranium, and significantly reduce long-lived nuclear waste.

Chinese scientists have developed a new kind of “living cement” that could, in theory, be used to build structures on far-away planets like Mars. According to reports, it works using just a few ingredients, including “domestic” soil/regolith, gelatin, and genetically engineered yeast.

If able to scale, this technique could be used to build shelters and other structures for future long-term human missions to the planet. What’s more, the process is relatively cheap and could be combined with on-site 3D printers.

The researchers managed to engineer a special strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast that produces extremely adhesive proteins. One of these proteins is similar to those produced by mussels that enable them to stick to surfaces like rocks.

The idea is that these proteins could be used as a kind of cement to bind soil or regolith, effectively making a kind of biological cement. The yeast cells therefore behave a bit like millions of microscopic sticky particles inside the binder.

Building Martian structures using yeast

The gelatin component forms a hydrogel around everything, while the soil/regolith provides the bulk of the material. Initially gloopy in texture, this paste can be extruded through 3D-printer nozzles to form complex structures.

As for “curing” the mixture, the researchers believe it is best to work with the conditions on Mars rather than fight them. Mars has a very thin atmosphere (about 0.6 percent of that on Earth) and is much colder on average than Earth (about -63.4°F/−53°C).

Under these conditions, liquid water will freeze and sublimate, meaning it never really stays in liquid form for very long. That is essentially freeze-drying. What’s left behind is a lightweight porous network in which the gelatin, yeast-derived adhesive proteins, and mineral grains are locked together.

You can liken that to something akin to a mixture of freeze-dried sponge and concrete. What’s more, this new material is actually pretty strong, with 12 MPa compressive strength and 6 MPa flexural strength.

That’s about on par with low-strength and lightweight concrete here on Earth. Promising indeed, and if it can save shipping thousands of tons of material for construction, that would clearly be enormously beneficial.

Instead, in theory, you’d just need to send the biological starter material, some processing equipment, and a big robot printer. Interestingly, the material is also recyclable, meaning its constituent parts can be broken down and reused.

All well and good, but before this could be seriously considered for applications outside the lab, some important things need to be refined.

More work to do

The first is that the tested material used sand as a substitute for Martian regolith. Actual Martian regolith has different particle characteristics and contains things such as perchlorates. How the gelatin-yeast mix reacts to this is yet to be tested.

Another issue is that the gelatin is porcine, meaning that it would need to be “shipped in” to a building site. The team also tested a gelatin-free formulation, although its performance was lower, and the researchers say stronger fully biological binders will be needed.

Yet another major issue is enabling the material to build pressurized structures to protect people from Mars’s harsh environment. The team proposes a ready-made pressure-retaining membrane enveloped by a shell and shielding built using this new living concrete.

Overall, it is a promising proof-of-concept showing that Martian regolith might one day be turned into printable construction material using engineered biology, while exploiting Mars’s cold and near-vacuum conditions as part of the manufacturing process rather than treating them purely as obstacles.

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Superconductivity is supposed to be an all-or-nothing quantum state. Cool a material below a critical temperature, and electrons pair up and enter a state that lets electricity flow without resistance. Warm it back up, and that collective state disappears. 

However, experiments on uranium ditelluride suggest that part of the superconducting behavior can survive after the main phase is gone.

Physicists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have found evidence that Cooper pairs—the paired electrons behind superconductivity—can arrange themselves into a repeating pattern called a pair density wave (PDW). 

What’s even more interesting is that the pattern persists above the temperature where uranium ditelluride stops being superconducting. These findings provide the first direct evidence that a PDW can exist independently of the main superconducting phase.

“We were out on a limb when we first suggested it. It’s a very peculiar state, and, although there have been experimental hints, there has been no direct confirmation of the phase’s existence,” Eduardo Fradikin, one of the researchers and a physics professor at UIUC, said.

Finding the hidden state

In conventional superconductors, electrons form Cooper pairs and those pairs condense into one collective quantum state. Unconventional superconductors can behave differently and host additional electronic phases, including charge density waves (CDWs), where electric charge varies periodically across the material.

PDWs are similar in that they form a spatial pattern, but the quantity being modulated is the density of Cooper pairs. This idea was proposed in 2007, including the striking possibility that these paired electrons could exist above the superconducting transition. 

However, “PDWs are tricky to analyze in real materials, because they behave like conventional superconductors in some experiments, and like CDWs in other,” Julian May-Mann, one of the study authors and a former graduate student from UIUC, said.

Uranium ditelluride, or UTe₂, offered an unusual place to look. Once considered an ordinary metal, it was found in 2019 to become superconducting below about 2 kelvins. It is also widely considered a candidate for an unconventional triplet-pair superconductor, in which the paired electrons can carry magnetic moments.

The researchers had previously detected CDWs on the material’s surface using scanning tunneling microscopy, but something did not fit, as magnetic fields could destroy the waves. A normal CDW should not respond so strongly to a magnetic field, prompting the researchers to consider whether a PDW was hiding alongside it.

Better crystals reveal the signal

The researchers first needed cleaner UTe₂ crystals because PDWs are extremely delicate and impurities can obscure their signatures. So they produced higher-quality samples using a new molten-flux growth method.

“Thanks to new methods for growing higher-quality samples, we were able to observe spectral signatures that respond to temperature and magnetic fields exactly as pair density waves should,” Vidya Madhavan, one of the lead researchers and a physics professor at UIUC, said.

They examined the crystals with a vector magnetic-field scanning tunneling microscope. Unlike a conventional setup, the instrument could vary both the strength and direction of the magnetic field—important because UTe₂ is anisotropic, meaning its properties depend strongly on direction.

The measurements revealed electronic modes whose responses to temperature and magnetic fields matched theoretical expectations for a PDW, including modes that survived above the superconducting critical temperature.

“We even showed that the modes persist above the temperature at which superconductivity disappears, a telltale theoretical prediction that has not been convincingly observed before now,” Madhavan added.

The researchers also found that a CDW-only explanation conflicted with established principles governing how electronic phases should respond to temperature and magnetic fields. The PDW interpretation provided a more consistent explanation of the observations.

A clue, but not the final answer

The result could reshape how physicists think about unconventional superconductors by suggesting that Cooper pairing can begin before the material develops its full superconducting state. 

This could help researchers understand why some unconventional materials develop complex phases and potentially guide the search for new superconducting states.

“Pair density waves are the Cheshire Cat’s grin of superconductivity. They are the vestige that remains once the phase itself has disappeared. In conventional superconductors, Cooper pairs form when the full phase transition occurs, but, in this system, their observation in PDWs above the transition point shows that they are formed beforehand in a different state,” Fradikin explained.

However, there is an important limitation as well. Scanning tunneling microscopy probes the material’s surface, so the researchers cannot yet prove that the same PDW exists throughout the interior.

The next challenge is therefore to determine whether the hidden state extends into the bulk of UTe₂ and to establish its nature more firmly. 

The study is published in the journal PNAS.