Marine biologists have documented five species of wrasse in the western Atlantic using rocks, coral rubble and shells as makeshift anvils to crack open crabs, mollusks and other armored prey — a foraging technique already documented in fish from the Indo-Pacific but never before filmed in the Atlantic. A study published in Coral Reefs in March 2025 provides the first evidence of anvil use in three of the five species and the first video documentation of the behavior in the other two.

The wrasses behind the discovery

The research, led by Dr. Juliette Tariel-Adam of the Fish Lab at Macquarie University’s School of Natural Sciences in Sydney, focused on New World wrasses in the genus Halichoeres: the slippery dick (H. bivittatus), the Brazilian wrasse (H. brasiliensis), the yellowhead wrasse (H. garnoti), the black-ear wrasse (H. poeyi), and the puddingwife wrasse (H. radiatus), documented at Fernando de Noronha Island off Brazil’s northeast coast.

The paper lists co-authors Jaqueline G. Toledo, C. E. O’Brien, Sergio R. Floeter and Professor Culum Brown alongside Tariel-Adam. Anvil use in fish is not new to science. Since it was first documented in an orange-dotted tuskfish roughly fifteen years ago, researchers have logged the behavior in roughly two dozen of the more than 550 known wrasse species, almost all of them in the Indo-Pacific and Indian Ocean. What sets this study apart is geography and scale: it is the first systematic documentation of anvil use among wrasses native to the western Atlantic, and it draws on the largest video dataset yet assembled for the behavior in this ocean basin.

The team built that dataset by turning to citizen scientists. Divers, snorkelers and underwater photographers working across the Caribbean, the Caicos Islands and Brazil submitted footage and written accounts through a public call for observations, contributing 16 new records to the study. Combined with existing records, the dataset gave researchers close, repeated looks at details of the behavior that had previously been described only impressionistically.

How the fish crack their prey

Fish in the study grabbed a hard-shelled item — in most cases a crab, mollusk, sea urchin or hermit crab — and swam it to a chosen surface before repeatedly slamming it against that surface to crack it open. Successful cracking attempts required an average of six or more strikes and took at least a minute to complete, and prey was successfully accessed and consumed in 12 of the 19 documented events, according to the published paper. One of the study’s more striking findings involves anvil choice. 

The wrasses used a range of materials as anvils — rock outcrops, coral rubble, reef platforms and shells — without sticking to a single preferred striking surface, switching anvils mid-attempt in 53 percent of observed strikes.

Researchers interpreted this flexibility as a sign the fish are actively assessing which surface will most efficiently break a given prey item rather than relying on a classic bite-and-swim mechanism regardless of the target.

Researchers make the case for fish cognition

Tariel-Adam framed the findings as part of a broader case for taking fish cognition seriously. “Tool use is typically associated with humans, but this behaviour is proof that fish are far cleverer than they get credit for,” she said, in comments reported by Phys.org. Senior author Culum Brown, who has spent much of his career studying fish behavior and welfare, added that the wrasses “demonstrate flexible and dexterous tool use, expanding our understanding of tool use evolution in the animal kingdom.”

The paper situates the discovery within debates over how and why tool use evolves. Because anvil use has now turned up independently in wrasse lineages on opposite sides of the globe, the behavior increasingly looks like a foraging strategy that several unrelated reef fish lineages have independently evolved — one that is easily missed by divers not specifically watching for it, which is part of why the researchers built their dataset largely around community-contributed footage, supplemented by only a handful of controlled observations.

Coverage of the paper by Scimex and Oceanographic magazine both note that the research team is continuing to solicit new footage from divers and underwater photographers, on the expectation that further observations will clarify how widespread the behavior is among western Atlantic reef fish and whether other genera beyond Halichoeres practice it as well.

Further detail on the study is available via the Macquarie University research profile and additional reporting from ZME Science.

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Karen Baker runs the Yolo Food Bank in Northern California’s Yolo County, which she describes as the most food-insecure county in the state. When CBS News California Investigates told her, on camera, that California had been sitting on money that belonged to her organisation, she asked one question: was it really hers? It was.

Tens of millions of Americans are in the same position, without a journalist on hand to tell them.

Where the money comes from

Every US state runs an unclaimed property program, which is essentially a lost and found for cash. The National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, the body that coordinates those programs across all fifty states, estimates that about one in seven Americans has something waiting. Searching costs nothing.

Nothing glamorous, mostly. Dormant savings accounts, uncashed payroll cheques, utility deposits from a flat someone moved out of in 2009, insurance payouts nobody told the family about, share dividends posted to an address three moves ago, and the contents of safe deposit boxes whose renters died or forgot.

Companies do not get to keep this stuff. State law obliges banks, insurers and other holders to hand it over once an account has gone quiet for a set period, typically three years in California, as the State Controller’s unclaimed property division explains. The state then holds it. There is no deadline to claim, and no fee.

The scale of the pile

California alone is minding about $15 billion in unclaimed property, per the State Controller’s Office, spread across tens of millions of individual records. New York is worse, or better, depending on your perspective: the Office of the New York State Comptroller oversees $19 billion in unclaimed funds, some of it dating back to 1943, and returned $504 million of it in a single fiscal year.

Nationally, the numbers move. NAUPA’s own annual report put total returns at $4.49 billion to Americans in fiscal 2024. That sounds like a lot until you set it against what is still sitting there.

What the states do while they wait

So what happens to the money while it waits to be claimed? In many states, it flows straight into general operations, and the state keeps whatever it earns until someone comes looking.

Citing the California Legislative Analyst’s Office and state budget documents, CBS News reported that unclaimed property is one of California’s top General Fund revenue sources, generating around $1 billion a year, while the state has returned roughly 3.5 per cent of what it holds. The original sum comes back when the owner claims it. The interest does not.

That reporting comes from a single news investigation focused largely on one state, not a national audit.

Washington notices

Sam Liccardo and Mike Lawler agree on very little. Liccardo is a Democrat, Lawler a Republican, and together they have introduced the Safeguarding Americans’ Fairly Earned Retirement Act, which would sharply limit when states can take custody of securities, digital assets and investment accounts. Senator Elizabeth Warren has separately written to NAUPA requesting state-by-state data on how these systems work and how the rules are changing.

Whether any of that passes is anyone’s guess. The databases are already open.

Where the records sit

NAUPA’s search hub links out to every participating state’s official database, alongside MissingMoney.com, the multi-state tool covering 49 states, several Canadian provinces and Puerto Rico. Hawaii runs its own system separately.

Property is reported by the company holding it, which means records often sit in a state the owner left years ago.

Old savings bonds now follow the same route. The Treasury retired its Treasury Hunt tool on 30 September 2025, and unredeemed bonds are handled through state unclaimed property offices instead.

A market has grown up around all this. Private recovery firms, legal in most states, charge a percentage to locate money that sits in the same public databases the states publish for free.

A dollar surrendered to a state in 1994 comes back as a dollar. Not a dollar plus thirty years of compounding, not a dollar adjusted for what groceries cost now, just the dollar. Whoever holds it in the meantime is the only party earning anything.

This article is journalism, not financial or legal advice. Unclaimed property rules, dormancy periods and claims procedures vary by state and change over time. Anyone dealing with a substantial claim, an estate, or a disputed entitlement should consult a qualified professional.

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A truck wedged under a bridge, its roof peeled back like a sardine can, is such a familiar sight that the Australian city of Melbourne turned one bridge into a folk legend. The Montague Street rail bridge has claimed so many trucks that someone built a website tracking how many days since it was last hit. Bridge strikes are not exotic. They are one of the most repetitive failures in road transport.

Which brings us to a stretch of Central New York in the spring of 2026, and a load that never should have been on the road at the height it was.

What happened over 60 miles of the Thruway

On March 18, 2026, a tractor-trailer hauling an over-height excavator on a flatbed struck multiple overpasses as it traveled west on the Thruway.

The scope is what makes it notable: more than a dozen overpasses hit across roughly 60 miles between Exits 30 and 36.

The driver, 38-year-old Oleksander Tarakanovskyi of North Carolina, was apparently unaware that his load had struck the bridges. After the Thruway Authority alerted State Police, troopers found the truck and stopped it at the Mattydale tandem lot in the town of Salina.

Tarakanovskyi was charged with reckless endangerment in the second degree and issued more than 20 traffic tickets, including violations of federal commercial motor vehicle safety regulations. He was released with an appearance ticket returnable to Salina Town Court on April 8.

The reaction from officials was blunt. Frank G. Hoare, executive director of the Thruway Authority, said, “How a tractor trailer driver could be unaware that his load hit more than a dozen bridges is beyond comprehension.” State Police Major Brian T. Ferrone added, “Reckless, egregious behavior will not be tolerated.”

Why bridge strikes keep happening

The public record does not explain how Tarakanovskyi failed to notice the impacts. But the larger bridge-strike problem often starts before a truck reaches the bridge: with the vehicle’s height and route.

A Network Rail survey in the UK, part of its “Wise Up, Size Up” campaign, found that 43 per cent of lorry drivers admitted they did not measure their vehicle before setting off, while 52 per cent said they did not take low bridges into account. That’s UK data, not a direct explanation for this New York incident, but it shows why height checks and route planning are central to bridge-strike prevention.

Where the safeguards are supposed to catch it

In the US, there is no single federal vehicle-height limit; state limits for standard commercial vehicles commonly run from 13 feet 6 inches to 14 feet. On the New York State Thruway, loads 13 feet 7 inches or higher require a special hauling permit.

Permits, approved routes, escorts and height poles are all meant to move the moment of discovery to before the trip, rather than after a bridge is hit.

Take the King Street Bridge over the Hutchinson River Parkway in Westchester County. It was 

The wider problem has been documented for years. A 2013 City College of New York study found that bridges in the state were experiencing roughly 200 strikes annually at the time, with many concentrated on a much smaller group of repeatedly hit bridges.

A solvable problem that stays unsolved

At a 2018 meeting about bridge strikes on the Hutchinson River Parkway, Westchester County Executive George Latimer captured the exasperation. “This is a solvable problem,” he said, adding, “If government can’t solve a problem like this, then government can’t do anything.”

The engineering measures are familiar: know the vehicle’s height, plan a legal route, use permits and escorts where required, and install detection systems where repeated strikes justify them. The hard part is making those checks work consistently across a large road network.

The 2026 Thruway incident stands out because one over-height load allegedly produced a 60-mile trail of damage before police stopped it. But the underlying failure was not new. Bridge strikes are repetitive precisely because the safeguards depend on measurements, route choices and warnings being acted on before the truck reaches the bridge.

The post A driver hauling an excavator struck more than a dozen overpasses along 60 miles of the New York State Thruway. The driver did not stop or report it, only realizing the damage when troopers flagged him down at a tandem lot. appeared first on Space Daily.

A mother rinsed her baby’s dirty nappy in a bucket and tipped the water into the cesspool outside her front door. Within ten days, more than 500 of her neighbours were dead. If Henry Whitehead’s later reconstruction was right, hers was where it started.

The baby was five months old and lived at 40 Broad Street, Soho, in a district of tenements chopped into cheap rented rooms. Her death, on 2 September 1854, went into the records as diarrhoea rather than cholera, so she never appeared in the tally that made the street famous, as Gavi’s account of the outbreak notes.

Ten minutes’ walk away in Sackville Street lived a physician named John Snow, who had spent five years arguing that cholera travelled in water and getting nowhere. His 1849 essay on the subject was largely ignored by the medical profession. Respectable opinion held that epidemic disease rose off rotting matter as a poisonous vapour, a theory called miasma. Under miasma, the smell was the disease.

The map was made of black bars

Snow got the addresses of the dead from the General Register Office and walked them. He knocked on doors, asked survivors where they drew their water and worked out that the deaths clustered overwhelmingly around one public pump on Broad Street.

Months later he turned that investigation into the map that became famous, marking each known death as a short black bar at the address where it happened. By December he had tracked down 616 deaths, though only 574 could be placed on the map itself, the rest belonging to people who had died away from the district with no address on record. He published it in the second edition of On the Mode of Communication of Cholera in 1855.

He had no germ, no culture and no microscope image worth anything, only addresses.

The strongest evidence came from people who survived

Seventy men worked at the brewery on Broad Street and not one of them died. They drank a daily beer allowance, used a private well and never touched the public pump, per the Science History Institute’s account of the investigation. A workhouse squarely inside the death zone held over 500 people, lost only a handful and had its own supply.

Then there was the widow. A woman in Hampstead, miles to the north, died on 2 September, her visiting niece the day after. Neither had set foot in Soho for years. Snow went up to interview her son and learned she had once lived on Broad Street, liked the taste of the water and kept a servant carting bottles of it north. Her last delivery arrived on 31 August, the night the outbreak began.

Geography was the wrong variable and plumbing was the right one.

The parish agreed and the government did not

On the evening of 7 September, Snow put his case to the Board of Guardians of St James parish. They were sceptical of the theory and impressed by the arithmetic, and the handle was unscrewed the following morning.

Deaths were already falling by then, as Snow himself acknowledged. Thousands had fled the neighbourhood, and the contamination that triggered the outbreak had probably washed through days before.

The national verdict was blunter. England’s General Board of Health reviewed Snow’s theory through its Committee for Scientific Inquiries and rejected it outright: “After careful inquiry we see no reason to adopt this belief.” That committee, as Nigel Paneth and colleagues documented in the American Journal of Public Health, spent roughly a third of its 352-page scientific appendix on barometric pressure, wind direction, cloud cover and ozone levels. One of its own inspectors had handed Snow the Hampstead evidence.

The curate who found the first case

Henry Whitehead, assistant curate of St Luke’s on Berwick Street, had spent the outbreak climbing those stairs with food and last rites. He thought Snow was wrong, and joined the parish inquiry committee partly to clear the pump’s name. Snow gave him a copy of the monograph and he read it and stayed unconvinced, so he went out to disprove it. In April 1855, seven months after the last death, he traced the chain back to the baby at number 40, a case Snow had never counted, as S.P.W. Chave set out in Medical History.

The parish surveyor dug up the well and found the cesspool brickwork rotted through, inches from the well lining.

Whitehead also worked out what taking the handle off achieved. The baby’s father came down with cholera on 8 September, the morning the parish disabled the pump, and his waste would have gone the same way his daughter’s had.

Snow died in 1858, aged 45, with the profession still against him. In Florence that same autumn of 1854, an anatomist named Filippo Pacini had put cholera discharges under a microscope, seen comma-shaped organisms swarming in them and published. Italian medicine believed in bad air too, and Pacini’s finding went unnoticed by Snow, by Robert Koch and by almost everybody else until long after his death. Bacteriologists made it official in 1965, naming the organism Vibrio cholerae Pacini 1854.

Two men landed on the answer in the same year, in two cities, and the medical establishment believed neither of them. The handle came off anyway.

The post A London doctor traced hundreds of cholera deaths in 1854 to one neighborhood water pump and persuaded the parish to remove its handle — months later he mapped the outbreak, years before contaminated water was widely accepted as a cause of cholera appeared first on Space Daily.

For $995 you could buy a decent second-hand lawnmower, a mid-range mattress, or, if a government spreadsheet has a bad day, a piece of Apollo 11 with moon dust still caught in its seams.

That last one happened. In February 2015, an online auction held on behalf of the US Marshals Service listed a white zippered pouch stamped “Lunar Sample Return”. Nancy Lee Carlson of Inverness, Illinois, bid $995 and won. She knew it had flown on something. What she did not know was that it had ridden along on the first crewed landing on the Moon.

How a moon bag ended up in a garage in Kansas

Blame starts with Max Ary, who ran the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson from 1976 to 2002 and was convicted in November 2005 on twelve federal counts, including theft of government property, wire fraud and money laundering. Investigators searching his garage two years earlier had found a box, and the bag was inside it. As documented by The Hutchinson News, Ary was ordered to pay more than $132,000 in restitution for the space artefacts he had taken, a mix of property belonging to NASA and the museum itself. He always maintained he had simply muddled his own collection with theirs.

His forfeited property went to auction to cover the bill. That is where the mix-up happened. Per the Associated Press, government officials later said two lunar bags had been merged into a single entry when their inventory numbers were combined on spreadsheets. One was from Apollo 17. The other had been to the Sea of Tranquility, and nobody caught the difference before the gavel came down.

What the fabric was hiding

Carlson did the sensible thing and posted the pouch to NASA’s Johnson Space Center for authentication.

Terrible idea, as it turned out. Curators tested the cloth, found lunar material embedded in the fibres, and established that the pouch had served as the outer decontamination bag around the first rocks Neil Armstrong scooped up during the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Then NASA kept it, arguing the bag was government property that should be on public display, not sitting in someone’s living room, and asking the Justice Department to reverse the forfeiture.

Carlson sued. Twice, in two states.

The ruling nobody at NASA wanted

In December 2016, Judge J. Thomas Marten of the US District Court for Kansas ruled that Carlson was “a good faith purchaser, in a sale conducted according to law,” as reported by Robert Pearlman at collectSPACE. Marten went out of his way to say NASA had done nothing wrong here, and that the bag only mattered at all because of what NASA’s own people had pulled off in 1969. He also said he had no power to unwind a sale that had already gone through. Space.com later reported that NASA handed the bag back in February 2017.

Sold at Sotheby’s, well short of the estimate

Sotheby’s offered the pouch on 20 July 2017, 48 years to the day after Armstrong used it. NPR put the hammer price at $1.5 million, or $1,812,500 once Sotheby’s premium was added, which sounds enormous until you notice the house had estimated $2 million to $4 million. The buyer stayed anonymous.

Plenty of people thought the sale should never have happened at all. Michelle Hanlon of For All Moonkind, a group campaigning to protect the Apollo landing sites, said in a statement carried by Smithsonian magazine that the bag belonged in a museum where the world could share in the achievement it represents. Carlson told CBS News she decided to sell because she no longer felt it was safe in her home.

The dust went on to have its own career

NASA’s testing had lifted particles off the bag onto carbon tape mounted on aluminium stubs, and the agency held on to them after returning the pouch. collectSPACE reported that Carlson sued again in January 2019, claiming the testing had damaged the bag, dragged down its market value and caused her real distress, and demanding the return of the lunar material itself. That dispute settled out of court, and the samples went to her.

Which is how, in April 2022, five aluminium stubs, each topped with a 10-millimetre disc of carbon tape, came up in a New York saleroom. Bonhams sold them for $504,375, well under a pre-sale estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million. Bidding opened at $220,000, seven bids came in, and the hammer fell at $400,000. Independent testing found four of the five stubs carried particles matching Armstrong’s first sample.

NASA still holds almost all of the 382 kilograms of rock, dust and core material brought home by the six Apollo landings. Its position on the rest hasn’t shifted in half a century: this material belongs to the public, not to private collectors. That stance holds up fine, right until two rows get merged on a spreadsheet.

Somewhere out there is a collector nobody can name, holding a cloth bag worth more than most houses, backed by a government receipt for $995 confirming the sale was done by the book.

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A sailor burst into a small wooden railway station in the north end of Halifax on the morning of 6 December 1917 and told everyone inside to run.

Vince Coleman, the dispatcher on duty, walked back to his telegraph key instead. As the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic recounts, he was thinking about the overnight passenger train from Saint John, roughly 300 people aboard, due in at 8:55am on a line that ran straight past a burning munitions ship. He tapped out a warning to hold the train, then signed off: “Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye, boys.”

Minutes later the French cargo ship Mont-Blanc, packed with explosives bound for the war in Europe, detonated in Halifax Harbour.

A city with 2,000 dead and no spare hospital beds

Almost every building within half a mile of the water came down, and records held by the Massachusetts State Library put the immediate toll at 1,800 killed, 3,000 seriously wounded and another 10,000 needing medical attention. Later counts settle at close to 2,000 dead.

Halifax was in no position to absorb that. It was a wartime port, and as the medical journal Proto has documented, local hospitals were already carrying soldiers sent home to recover. Doctors worked through the first night and kept going.

Then it started to snow.

Boston did not wait to be invited

News crossed the wires and landed on the desk of Massachusetts governor Samuel McCall around 11am. What he had was fragmentary at best, a few lines about some sort of catastrophe up the coast. Writing in its account of that day, the Massachusetts Historical Society notes that McCall wired back a promise that his state would go the limit, and called an emergency meeting of the Committee of Public Safety.

By 10pm, twelve hours after the blast, a relief train loaded with doctors, nurses and supplies pulled out of Boston. Nobody in Halifax had yet told them what was needed.

A blizzard caught the train en route, hardly a surprise for Maine and New Brunswick in December. It did not turn back. Staff wired ahead for extra supplies while they were still stuck in the drifts, and the Halifax Municipal Archives documents the first American medical train arriving on 8 December, having pushed through snow for most of the trip.

The help kept arriving for years

That first train turned out to be the opening instalment. Author John U. Bacon, speaking to WBUR about his book on the disaster, counted two trains, two ships, 100 doctors, 300 nurses and about a million dollars in supplies, enough to stand up several temporary hospitals.

The medical unit went home on 14 December and formed the Massachusetts-Halifax Relief Committee on the journey back. The same archive shows it raised half a million dollars, refurnished more than 1,800 homes and set aside $25,000 for the care and education of people blinded by flying glass. Halifax named a block of temporary housing the Governor McCall Apartments, on a newly laid-out Massachusetts Avenue.

One tree in 1918, then a gap of fifty-odd years

Nova Scotia sent Boston a Christmas tree the following December as a thank you, and the tradition quietly lapsed.

It came back in 1971, and not purely out of sentiment. As reported by The Signal, the Lunenburg County Christmas Tree Producers Association revived the gift with one eye on the export market for Nova Scotian spruce. The provincial government took the job over a few years later and has handled it ever since, which is how a one-off act of gratitude became a line item.

What it takes to qualify as the tree

Anyone can nominate one. Criteria published by the Government of Nova Scotia ask for a white spruce, red spruce or balsam fir standing 12 to 15 metres, healthy, good colour, medium to heavy density, uniform and symmetrical, and easy to get a truck near. Officials narrow the field before checking their shortlist with Boston.

Boston’s 2025 tree was a 45-foot white spruce nominated by Ronald and Claire Feener of Lunenburg County. It reached the Common by flatbed truck under police escort, the City of Boston confirmed. Mayor Michelle Wu flew up for the cutting and, as CBC News reported, took a turn with the chainsaw herself on a 42-year-old spruce while a certified tree-felling instructor supervised.

That was a year of tariff threats and cross-border sniping, and the tree went south anyway.

Most international goodwill exists as paperwork nobody reads. This one gets scouted for months, felled in front of a crowd, driven hundreds of kilometres and switched on in a public park every December, all because a train once left Boston into a blizzard for a city that had barely had time to explain what was wrong.

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The women walked home at night and glowed.

Radium dust settled in their hair and on their coats, so a dial painter leaving the plant in Orange, New Jersey, trailed a faint shimmer down the footpath. Plenty of them thought this was marvellous. They painted their fingernails with it and dabbed it on their teeth before a dance. Nobody in management suggested they stop.

The paint was branded Undark, a mix of radium and zinc sulfide developed by Dr Sabin von Sochocky. In its account of the digitised company files, the National Archives describes how the Radium Luminous Material Corporation opened its Orange factory in 1917, selling the glow to watchmakers and instrument firms. Radium dials were prized in the trenches of the First World War and fashionable everywhere else.

How the paint got into their bones

Brushes were the whole problem.

Camel-hair bristles lose their point after a few strokes, and the numerals on a wristwatch face are minute. So the painters were taught to roll the brush between their lips before each dip. Lip, dip, paint, several hundred times a shift. The Science Museum Group notes that the New Jersey women worked on paper dials with a water-based paint, applied with fine camelhair brushes rather than the metal stylus used elsewhere in the industry. A trace of radium went down the throat with every dial.

Radium behaves chemically like calcium, so the body lodges it in bone and leaves it there, decaying quietly, for a life that just got much shorter.

The doctor who worked it out

Dentists noticed first. From about 1922 they were pulling aching teeth from young women in Orange, finding that pieces of jawbone came away too. A dentist, Theodor Blum, described the condition in 1924 and named it radium jaw.

Harrison Martland, the Newark pathologist who became Essex County’s first medical examiner, took it further. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1925, he measured radioactivity in the tissue of dead dial painters and in the exhaled breath of living ones. A retrospective in Brain credits that work with pioneering the measurement of radioactivity inside contaminated human tissue.

U.S. Radium hired its own experts to challenge his findings. Reasonable enough in 1925, when one man’s diagnosis was still just one man’s diagnosis, though the company kept denying any link to radium for another decade.

Five women, one settlement, no admission

Grace Fryer needed two years to find a lawyer who would take her case. Katherine Schaub, Edna Hussman, Quinta McDonald and Albina Larice joined her, and by the first hearing in January 1928 none of the five could lift an arm to swear the oath.

They settled that June for $10,000 each, an annuity of $600 for life and their medical bills covered. The company admitted nothing, and most dial painters received no compensation at all, the National Archives notes. In 1936, a federal court in New Jersey ruled that U.S. Radium had not fraudulently hidden the danger, a decision that pushed surviving claims outside a two-year limitation period and effectively ended them.

What happened in Ottawa

Meanwhile, in Ottawa, Illinois, the Radium Dial Company assured its painters that the Orange trouble had nothing to do with them, since the radium over there was impure. The firm had been medically screening its own workers since 1925 and keeping the results to itself. As History.com documents, Illinois workers lost in court through the mid-1930s, after which the state passed the Illinois Occupational Diseases Act, effective 1936, requiring employers to carry cover for industrial poisoning.

Catherine Donohue led fifteen women in a fresh suit in 1937. By a hearing the following February she weighed around 32 kilograms and had to be carried into the room, and, as Northern Public Radio reported, she arrived with a box of what she said were pieces of her own jawbone. Local papers took to calling the group the society of the living dead, NPR Illinois reports, and their lawyer, Leonard Grossman, took the case for free because his clients had nothing to pay him. Later hearings moved to Donohue’s home, where she testified from a couch because she could no longer travel.

The Illinois Industrial Commission ruled for Donohue in April 1938 and confirmed the award that July. She died on 27 July, three weeks later. Radium Dial fought on regardless. The Illinois Supreme Court threw out the company’s petition to overturn the award in June 1939, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined a further appeal that October, more than a year after Donohue’s death.

That refusal to intervene left the award standing, and with it the principle that an employer could be held liable for a disease that surfaced years, sometimes a decade or more, after the job ended. Grossman’s son, three decades a Department of Labor lawyer, traces a line from those hearings to the federal OSHA Act, which he dates to 1971.

The measurements they left behind

Many surviving painters later volunteered their bodies to researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, whose review of the radium cases sets out how those measurements shaped radiation protection limits for the nuclear age.

Radium-226 has a half-life of roughly 1,600 years, so the women are still faintly radioactive in their graves and will be long after everyone reading this is gone. A surprising amount of modern workplace law rests on that fact. None of them were trying to found a legal doctrine. They wanted someone to pay the dentist.

The post American employers told young women painting luminous watch dials that radium was harmless and instructed them to shape the radioactive brushes with their lips — the lawsuits that followed helped establish that employers could be held financially responsible for harm caused by their work appeared first on Space Daily.

America’s first professionally managed forest finished its first year in the red, and the man running it called that a good result.

The shortfall was $392.40. It sits in a table near the back of Gifford Pinchot’s account of the first year’s work at Biltmore Forest, a slim pamphlet printed in Chicago in 1893 as an exhibit for the World’s Columbian Exposition. Pinchot opened by pointing out that the attempt was the first practical application of forest management in the United States.

What Vanderbilt bought

George Vanderbilt had been assembling land south of Asheville since the late 1880s for a house the size of a small village. The ground came cheap because it was wrecked. As the Special Collections Research Center at NC State University documents, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted advised that the soils and terrain would never support a grand park, and suggested growing timber instead.

Pinchot’s survey put the estate at 7,282 acres, a little over half of it woodland. The families who had farmed the land before Vanderbilt bought it cut anything sellable as fuel, fencing or saw-logs, grazed cattle through the young growth, and burned the woods off for pasture. Asheville had been heating itself on those hillsides for years.

Pinchot summed up the condition of much of it in three words: “deplorable in the extreme.”

A card catalogue for a forest

Pinchot arrived on 2 February 1892, aged 26, trained in Europe because there was nowhere in America to train. NCpedia records that Olmsted put his name forward, and that he and Vanderbilt agreed on three objectives: sell timber at a profit, produce a steady yield every year, and leave the forest healthier than it was.

Then he counted. Crews broke the woods into more than 600 sections of about 5.7 acres each, describing every one in shorthand on a postcard-sized card and filing the cards as a catalogue of the whole property. He grouped the forest into 92 numbered compartments bounded by ridges, streams and old wood roads, then set a rotation of 150 years, meaning the second crop would be ready for the axe a century and a half after the first came out. Nobody involved expected to see it.

What the first year’s books showed

Labourers earned between 90 cents and a dollar a day, mules 75 cents.

The forest sold cordwood to the estate brickworks, ties to the railroad and lumber to anyone who wanted it, at open market prices. Expenses ran to $9,911.76. Receipts and stock on hand came to $9,519.36. Pinchot kept his own salary out of the accounts and conceded that supervision costs for fewer than 4,000 acres were far too high, arguing the same effort would have covered ten times the area.

Two findings mattered more than the balance. Large old trees could be dropped out of dense young growth with very little damage to the crop underneath, and the additional cost of careful work over ordinary destructive logging was small enough to be beside the point. Both were arguments about money, the case Pinchot had to make in a country that still treated trained forestry as a European specialty.

The German who built a school

Pinchot left in 1895 and went on to become the first chief of the US Forest Service. His replacement came from Germany. Biltmore’s own history of the estate credits Carl Alwin Schenck with running and expanding the plan over the next 14 years, and founding the Biltmore Forest School in 1898, the country’s first forestry school, which trained more than 300 of America’s earliest professional foresters before closing in 1913.

How a private estate became public land

In 1894 Pinchot came across the Pink Beds, a valley of rhododendron and mountain laurel in Transylvania County, and told Vanderbilt to buy it. That purchase and others became Pisgah Forest, and the holdings eventually stretched to roughly 125,000 acres.

Vanderbilt died in March 1914. Per NCpedia’s history of Pisgah National Forest, his widow Edith offered the federal government 86,700 acres at $5 an acre, around $200,000 below the price the family had asked a year earlier, and completed the sale in 1915. Combined with other purchases made under the Weeks Act, that land became Pisgah National Forest on 17 October 1916, the first national forest created under the act, as the Forest History Society documents.

Congress went further in 1968, setting aside 6,540 acres around the Pink Beds as the Cradle of Forestry in America, a site built around the remains of Schenck’s school.

The slow part of the work was never the trees. Pinchot enlarged his crews carefully, because the men he hired had only ever cut wood one season at a time, and the idea of protecting a crop nobody present would live to harvest had to be taught one foreman at a time. It took. More than half a million acres of North Carolina now run on a principle that began as a line item somebody had to justify to a very rich man.

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A wind turbine blade is basically glass fibre set in hardened resin. The fibres give it strength, the resin holds them in place, and the two are bonded so tightly that a blade can survive wind, rain and stress.

That same toughness is the problem once the blade comes down. Thermoset epoxy does not melt back into a workable liquid, and its stable chemical bonds are difficult to break. So retired blades are typically cut into sections and sent to landfill.

That is the waste a group of researchers decided to work with. In a 2026 study published in ACS Applied Engineering Materials, a team at Xi’an Shiyou University, with collaborators at the Beijing Institute of Technology and Monash University, ground old blade material into powder and turned it into a lightweight, sponge-like insulation.

Here is what came out of the lab, and how it stacks up against the size of the problem.

It squashes to a fifth of its thickness and springs back

The most surprising thing about the material is how far you can crush it without wrecking it. The team reports it took a squeeze of over 80 percent and recovered, meaning you can press it down to roughly a fifth of its height and it bounces back. That matters because conventional silica aerogels are famously fragile. They insulate well but can be brittle. A material that can take a squeeze and spring back is far easier to handle and install.

The trick is in the structure. Instead of a solid block, the composite is a network full of tiny connected pores, with the blade powder stiffening a soft, springy scaffold. 

It combined low density with unusually high compressibility

Weight is where the main result sits. The material reached a density of 0.184 grams per cubic centimetre while sustaining more than 80 percent compressive strain. The authors say the composite showed “a superior combination of low bulk density (0.184 g cm–3) and high compressive strain (>80%), outperforming a wide range of reported silica-based or organic aerogels and composites.”

A caution is warranted: that line is the researchers describing their own work, not an outside verdict. “Outperforming” is their framing, and the comparison is against numbers from other published papers rather than a head-to-head test by a neutral lab. The figures themselves are measurable; whether the material performs as well in practice is the kind of thing other labs and larger-scale testing would need to settle.

It holds heat in about as well as ordinary insulation

Being light and squishy would not count for much if heat poured straight through it. It doesn’t. The composite measured a thermal conductivity of 0.068 watts per metre-kelvin, and lower is better here because it means less heat gets across. For comparison, ordinary glass wool building insulation sits around 0.04. So the blade composite is not a record-setting insulator, but it is in a sensible range for the job while remaining highly compressible.

It self-extinguishes instead of feeding a flame

Insulation lives inside walls and roofs, so how it behaves near fire matters. The team reports enhanced flame self-extinguishing capability, meaning it tended to stop burning once the flame source was removed rather than carrying the fire along. Again, this is one lab result on lab samples, though, and real fire-safety ratings require standardised testing. Read it as promising, not certified.

It turns a landfill problem into the raw material

The reason any of this is interesting is the sheer number of blades headed for the ground. Worldwide, the mass of blades expected to be discarded by 2050 may reach about 43 million tonnes. Right now, around 12,000 blades are retired across Europe and the US each year, and they are typically cut up and sent to landfill. A process that takes that same material and makes something useful flips the equation.

As the authors put it, reusing the blade waste “not only helps to reduce environmental burdens and resource waste but also opens up avenues for generating high-performing, useful materials.”

Where this actually sits

This is one study and one set of lab measurements. The chemistry is clever and the numbers look good, but the gap between a lab composite and a pallet of insulation shipped to a building site is wide. The paper doesn’t answer the questions that fill that gap: cost, batch-to-batch consistency, how the material holds up over years inside a wall, and whether grinding and processing old blades at scale actually makes economic sense.

That last question is the real hinge. Something has to make the recycled route cheaper or required before a lab result becomes a real supply chain.

None of that takes away from what the team built. This is a good answer to a narrow question, which is whether hard-to-recycle blade waste can be turned into a useful, light, tough insulating material at all. The evidence here says yes. The bigger question, whether it can be done by the tonne cheaply enough to matter, is still open.

The post In 2025, researchers ground retired wind turbine blades into powder, stirred it into a gel and set it into an insulation composite. The composite combined low density with much greater compressibility than many of the insulating aerogels and composites it was compared with, squashing to a fifth of its thickness without breaking apart. appeared first on Space Daily.

Fourteen adult whooping cranes wintered on the Texas coast in 1941. In the winter of 2024–2025, biologists flying the marshes and tidal flats around Aransas National Wildlife Refuge estimated 557 of them, including at least 41 tawny juveniles, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s survey announcement. The agency’s 2024–2025 whooping crane status report gives the estimate as including 193 adult pairs. It was the first time the agency had estimated the Aransas–Wood Buffalo population above 550 individuals.

The number is an estimate, not a hand tally. Whooping cranes are five feet tall and white enough to read against green cordgrass from a thousand feet up, but they move, they hide behind live oak motts, and no aerial pass catches every bird in every acre. What the Service publishes is a statistical estimate with uncertainty attached, and the 2024–2025 figure of 557 carries a 95% confidence interval of 478.7 to 645.1 birds, with a coefficient of variation of 0.137.

What the January flights measured

The survey work happened in a narrow window. Crews flew a Quest Kodiak over roughly 170,500 acres of primary survey area six separate times between January 22 and January 31, 2025, then covered about 85,250 acres of secondary area twice on February 1 and 2. The underlying Butler et al. survey report says abundance was estimated from the aerial surveys using hierarchical distance sampling, with the confidence interval expressing the uncertainty around that estimate rather than a simple difference between repeated passes.

Inside that estimate, the age and pairing structure matters as much as the total. The survey put the population at 193 adult pairs, with a 95% confidence interval of 167.5 to 221.4, and at least 41 juveniles, birds hatched in summer 2024 and still carrying rusty cinnamon feathering across the head and neck. Recruitment worked out to 8.1 chicks per 100 adults, with an interval of 6.3 to 10.5. Juveniles are the part of the count that cannot simply be carried over from an earlier winter estimate. Each one is a bird that hatched, fledged, and completed a first southbound migration.

The Canadian Wildlife Service reported at least 33 chicks fledged on the northern breeding grounds in summer 2024. The winter estimate of 41 juveniles sits above that. The joint status report says the discrepancy is likely caused by differences in survey methodology and detectability of young between the breeding-ground and wintering-ground surveys; the Butler report also notes that juvenile plumage can become less distinct by late January.

From 14 adults to a 4.33% climb

The 1941 low is the baseline against which the recovery is often described. Service biologist Matthew Butler, lead author on the survey, makes the point plainly in the agency’s announcement: today’s whooping cranes descend from the 14 adults that remained on the Texas coast that year. The species had been reduced to a single wild migratory flock wintering on a strip of Gulf coast marsh, with its northern breeding grounds not identified until later.

Those breeding grounds were in and around Wood Buffalo National Park, roughly 2,500 miles north in Canada. The Aransas–Wood Buffalo flock makes that roughly 2,500-mile migration twice each year, north toward the nesting grounds and south toward the Texas coast, threading the Central Flyway through the Great Plains.

Measured from the winter of 1938–1939 to the winter of 2024–2025, the population has grown at an average rate of 4.33% per year. That figure summarizes the long recovery record; it is an average across eight decades, not a claim that the flock grew at exactly 4.33% every year. Kevin McAbee, the Service’s Whooping Crane Recovery Coordinator, credits the long climb in the announcement to decades of cooperative work across the flyway rather than to any single intervention.

Beyond the survey box

Cranes do not restrict themselves to the polygons drawn on a survey map. During the 2024–2025 effort, observers documented 68 additional whooping cranes outside the designated primary survey area. Those birds are not simply added to 557, and the Service is careful about why. Some may represent birds not otherwise counted; some may have moved in and out of the survey boundary. The overlap is unknown, which is exactly the reason the 68 stays separate from the primary-area estimate.

What the beyond-area observations do suggest is that wintering whooping cranes are using ground beyond the refuge core, a pattern the Service has tracked as the population has grown. The annual survey itself is a cooperative operation, drawing on the Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Wildlife Refuge System Region 2, the Migratory Bird Program and Ecological Services, the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority in Texas, and the Canadian Wildlife Service.

The recovery record still runs through a very narrow gate. Every one of the estimated 557 birds in the primary survey area in winter 2024–2025, every one of the 193 adult pairs, and every one of the at least 41 juveniles counted after arriving from Wood Buffalo traces back to the tiny remnant flock represented by those 14 adults on the Texas coast in 1941. Eight decades later, the same wild migratory population was being measured again from the air, with six passes over 170,500 acres between January 22 and January 31, 2025.

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What does it actually cost to throw away the future? For a retired solar panel in the United States, the answer is surprisingly small, and that small number is deciding where the panel ends up.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimates it costs roughly $1 to $5 to landfill a silicon module and $15 to $45 to recycle one. Faced with that spread, most panel owners do the obvious thing. Fewer than 10% of decommissioned US panels are recycled.

That gap is worth naming, because it isn’t really about whether recycling is possible. It plainly is. The gap is about who pays, and when, and that turns out to be a very different kind of problem.

Why the cheap option keeps winning

A solar panel is not a mysterious object. Roughly 75% of a crystalline silicon panel by weight is glass, with an aluminum frame, a junction box, silicon cells, and small amounts of copper and silver threaded through it. The trouble is that the parts worth money are the parts hardest to get at, and the part that’s easy to handle, the glass, is worth almost nothing on its own.

So the economics run backwards from what you’d hope. NREL’s own behavioral modeling of US modules through 2050 found that, under baseline conditions, about 80% end up landfilled, 1% reused, and 10% recycled. Landfilling wins not because anyone prefers it, but because it’s the option that clears at the lowest price on the day the panel comes down.

Contrast that with the European Union, where producer-responsibility mandates fold the cost of end-of-life handling into the product from the start. Under those rules, recycling a panel has been put at about $0.75 per panel, and EU recycling rates reach 95%. Same physics, same materials, wildly different outcome. The variable is policy, not chemistry.

What actually costs money when you take a panel apart

Pulling the aluminum frame and the junction box off a panel is straightforward. The expensive step is what comes after: cleanly separating the glass from the silicon cells, then extracting the tiny quantities of silver and copper that sit inside. Those metals are where the recoverable value lives, and they are present in vanishingly small amounts. Silver sits at well under a tenth of a percent of a panel’s weight, yet it drives the recycling math.

Because clean separation is hard, many operations skip it. They shred the whole panel and sell the low-value glass cullet, capturing a fraction of what’s there. And the prize for doing the harder work isn’t large: an electrical engineer writing in The Conversation estimates the recoverable silver and copper in a single panel are worth only about $10 to $12, which is why recycling loses money under current processes. Layers glued together make the glass reclamation harder still.

The field’s own practitioners have been candid about the limits. As of 2022, Arizona State University’s Meng Tao, who works on PV recycling, told Chemical & Engineering News that “The recycling technologies we have today are still rudimentary.” That was an assessment of a young field, and the field has moved since. The same Conversation piece notes that advanced methods like salt etching can now recover over 99% of silver and 98% of silicon at high purity. The capability is arriving. Whether the economics arrive with it is the open question.

The Georgia plant’s bet

Which brings us to Cedartown. On January 29, 2026, SOLARCYCLE began commercial operations at a 255,000-square-foot plant that the company says recovers 96% of a panel’s material value and achieves 100% landfill diversion. According to CEO Suvi Sharma, the ” recycling facility in Cedartown represents a step-change in how we’re delivering end-of-life infrastructure.”

The more interesting move, to our eye, is what’s planned next door. SOLARCYCLE intends to feed the recovered glass into an adjacent solar-glass factory, with more than 80% of that plant’s planned 5 GW capacity already committed and first glass production slated for 2028. That vertical integration matters because it changes the value of the least-valuable material. If the glass has a buyer waiting rather than a landfill, the whole equation shifts. Sharma frames the ambition plainly: “The next phase of our growth is all about bringing solar recycling to industrial scale and delivering winning economics for our customers.” That’s a stated aim, not a demonstrated result, but it names the actual barrier: scale.

Not everyone is sold on the crush-and-separate approach. Terry Ko, chief operating officer of PV Circonomy, whose company markets a layer-by-layer alternative, has argued that “Once glass, silicon, metals, and polymers are reduced into mixed particles, contamination becomes a significant challenge regardless of the subsequent separation technology employed.” Ko has a commercial stake in that critique, and the trade coverage it appeared in noted the absence of industry-wide purity standards. Worth hearing, not yet settled.

The retirement wave that’s already loading

All of this would be an academic argument if the panels weren’t coming. They are.

NREL’s Garvin Heath put the timing plainly: “Installations two decades ago are nearing their end of life, and that becomes a challenge for the waste industry.” Roughly one million tons of US panel waste is expected by 2030, and NREL’s global assessment projects the volume of retired modules could reach up to 80 million metric tons by 2050. That’s a forecast, not a certainty, but the trend line under it is firm: US utility-scale solar is set to add 70 GW of new solar capacity across 2026 and 2027. Every panel installed is a panel that will one day retire.

There’s also a supply-chain angle that reframes the whole thing. Several of the metals inside panels appear on US critical-minerals lists and are largely imported. Recovered silver, copper, and silicon are not just waste avoided; they’re domestic material that didn’t have to be dug up or shipped in. Heath’s argument is that the lead time here is long, so the work has to start early: “Because it takes a long time to develop technology and policy and solutions to dealing with end-of-life products, this is something we need to start to address today.”

Incentive, not inevitability

The technology to recover most of a panel exists, salt etching hits high-purity numbers, and a plant in Georgia is now claiming near-total value recovery. What keeps most panels in the ground is that landfilling is cheap on the day the decision gets made, and the cost of recycling lands on whoever is holding the panel at end of life rather than on whoever profited from it at the start.

The EU’s $0.75-per-panel figure is the tell. When the cost is built in early and the value chain is closed, the same object that looks like expensive waste in one system looks like feedstock in another. Cedartown’s bet on selling its recovered glass next door is a private-sector version of the same logic: make the low-value material worth something, and the math stops fighting you.

The $1-to-$5 number isn’t telling us that recycling is too hard. It’s telling us who currently pays for the easy way out. Change that, through mandates, through scale, or through a buyer waiting on the other side of the shredder, and the cheap option stops being the only rational one.

The post Dropping a dead solar panel into a U.S. landfill costs $1 to $5, while recycling the same panel has been estimated at $15 to $45. That gap helps explain why most go into the ground, even though a plant that opened in Georgia this year says it recovers 96 percent of a panel’s material value. appeared first on Space Daily.

A man who died in a Romanian cave about 40,000 years ago carried more Neanderthal DNA than any other human ever sequenced, ancient or modern. His jawbone turned up in Peștera cu Oase, and when geneticists analysed it the result was startling: between six and nine per cent of his genome came from Neanderthals. Because those segments were still long and unbroken in his chromosomes, researchers reporting in Nature could work out that he’d had a Neanderthal ancestor only four to six generations back.

He was simply closer to the event than anyone alive today.

What the first Neanderthal genome settled

For most of the twentieth century the textbook story was replacement. Modern humans left Africa, Neanderthals died out, end of chapter. Anatomists had spent decades staring at skull shapes and reaching opposite conclusions from the same fossils. That held until 2010, when a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome, assembled by Richard Green, Svante Pääbo and a large team from bones found in Vindija Cave in Croatia, showed that Neanderthals shared more genetic variants with living Eurasians than with living sub-Saharan Africans. Their estimate put the Neanderthal contribution to non-African genomes at one to four per cent.

Sixteen years of better data have tightened that figure rather than overturned it. Most current estimates sit closer to one or two per cent, with East Asians carrying about a fifth more than Europeans.

The meeting had a duration

How long did the two species actually overlap before Neanderthals disappeared? Two papers published on the same day in December 2024 finally gave a precise answer. A study in Science, led by Leonardo Iasi and Manjusha Chintalapati, compared 58 ancient Eurasian genomes against 275 present-day ones and dated the average moment of mixing to about 47,000 years ago, with gene flow continuing for some 7,000 years. A companion analysis, published in Nature, examined 45,000-year-old remains from Ranis in Germany and Zlatý kůň in Czechia and traced the archaic stretches in those genomes to a single admixture event between 45,000 and 49,000 years ago, shared by every non-African sequenced so far.

Seven thousand years is a long time to call an encounter. It is longer than everything that has happened since the first cities of Mesopotamia.

The parts that did not make it

“These deserts may have formed very rapidly after the gene flow,” Leonardo Iasi, one of the authors on the Nature paper, told UC Berkeley. He was describing what he and his colleagues call Neanderthal deserts, long stretches of the modern genome where archaic DNA is completely absent. Ancient human genomes from roughly 40,000 years ago already show no ancestry in those deserts, which is what led him to that conclusion. Read plainly, it means certain Neanderthal variants were harmful enough in a modern human body to be scrubbed out within a few thousand years.

The Oase man makes a similar point from the other end.

For all his recent Neanderthal ancestry, his population left little genetic trace in later Europeans.

What the surviving fragments do

Picture Neanderthal DNA as a jigsaw dropped and scattered across a crowd. No single person holds more than a sliver, but the crowd between them is still carrying a fifth of the picture. That is roughly what Benjamin Vernot and Joshua Akey found, writing in Science in 2014, when they sifted the genomes of 379 Europeans and 286 East Asians and recovered Neanderthal sequence covering roughly twenty per cent of that species’ entire genome.

There is a second archaic contributor in the mix too. Priya Moorjani of UC Berkeley, a senior author on the 2024 Science paper, is now studying people of East Asian descent, who carry both a larger Neanderthal share and up to 0.1 per cent of their genome from the Denisovans, a population known mainly from a handful of bone fragments and an enormous quantity of statistics.

Some of the surviving Neanderthal DNA is doing useful work. The variants that reached high frequency cluster around immune function, skin pigmentation and metabolism, which fits a group that had spent a few hundred thousand years adapting to Europe’s winters and its pathogens before anyone else showed up.

Some of it is a liability. In a paper published in Nature in 2020, Hugo Zeberg and Svante Pääbo showed that the strongest genetic risk factor then identified for severe COVID-19 was a stretch of roughly 50,000 bases on chromosome three, inherited from Neanderthals and carried by about half the population of South Asia and around sixteen per cent of Europeans. One paper, one chunk of chromosome, and the biology behind it is still being argued over. The provenance, though, is not really in dispute.

What to call an ending like that

Extinction normally means a line stopping. Neanderthals did stop existing as a distinct population, around 40,000 years ago, and no amount of genetics changes that. What the genetic evidence changes is the shape of the ending. A population that dies out and a population that gets absorbed look much the same in the fossil record and nothing alike in the genome.

That leaves an odd little fact sitting in the middle of human prehistory. The last Neanderthals were not necessarily childless. Some of them had children, those children had children, and the arithmetic has been running quietly ever since, through a few hundred million bedrooms, down to whoever happens to be reading this.

The post Modern humans interbred with Neanderthals before they disappeared, and most people of non-African ancestry still carry roughly 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA today — meaning part of the human population we once thought we simply replaced never actually vanished appeared first on Space Daily.

Kiruna’s church went for a walk in August 2025, at half a kilometre an hour, on 224 wheels.

The trip took two days and included a daily stop for fika, the Swedish afternoon coffee break, because some traditions outrank engineering schedules. One driver steered the entire building with a handheld control box across roughly twelve hours of travel, along a route crews had spent months preparing. The Associated Press, in coverage carried by CTV News, reported that a main road was widened from nine metres to 24 and a viaduct was dismantled to clear a new intersection. State-owned mining company LKAB, which paid for the whole performance, lists the church at 672.4 tonnes and 40 metres across. Thousands of people stood in the wind to watch a building do the one thing buildings are designed never to do.

Norwegian contractor Veidekke built the road the church rolled along and the foundations waiting at the far end, as documented by Dezeen. It was not the first tenant to make the trip. By July, AP counted 25 buildings already jacked onto beams and wheeled east, with 16 still queued behind them.

Why the ground is giving way

Beneath the town sits the largest underground iron ore mine on the planet. White Arkitekter, the practice behind the masterplan for the new city, describes daily extraction as the equivalent of six Eiffel Towers of ore, and notes that two thirds of Kiruna’s residents depend on the mine for work. Digging began in 1910. The church was completed two years later, a gift from the company, built on a hill so the congregation could look out over the town the company had also built.

Take enough rock out from under a place and the rock above fractures, sags and follows the hole down. Crews are now working towards a main level 1,365 metres deep, and the surface has been reporting back for years in split walls and buckled roads. In 2004 LKAB told the municipality that the centre would have to be picked up and shifted east, since the alternative was to stop mining.

Sweden chose the mine.

What it costs to relocate a town centre

The company’s own accounting is blunt about the scale. LKAB estimates that at least 3,000 dwellings are affected, 6,000 residents must move and 450,000 square metres of floor space stands in the way, with roughly a third of the urban centre inside the affected zone. The replacement centre opened in September 2022. Per France 24, shifting the church alone carried a price tag of 500 million kronor, about 52 million US dollars.

Then came the sequel. LKAB has since published an expanded impact area that adds a further 6,000 people and 2,700 homes to the queue over the next decade, and CNBC has put the company’s estimated compensation costs across that period at 22.5 billion kronor, roughly 2.4 billion dollars.

Not all of it reads as loss. The Institution of Civil Engineers treats the relocation as a rare chance to redraw a city from scratch: a denser centre planned around good lighting through the long polar dark, 3,000 new homes, and streets arranged so nobody lives more than three blocks from open country. The same assessment records that the rebuild has squeezed Sami reindeer herders, who were working the land long before LKAB arrived.

The residents who cannot be loaded onto trailers

Lars-Marcus Kuhmunen chairs Gabna, the reindeer-herding Sami community whose grazing corridors have already been carved up by the mine, the railway and the town. Speaking to Swedish public broadcaster SVT, he said a new mine at the Per Geijer deposit would mean the end of reindeer herding as they know it, because the ore sits beneath the last narrow passage his herds use between seasonal pastures.

Per Geijer is the reason the arithmetic keeps changing. A report by the Stockholm Environment Institute, covered by ArcticToday, found the project carries significant risk of breaching the Indigenous rights of Sami community members, in the words of senior research fellow Rasmus Kløcker Larsen. That is one institute’s assessment rather than a court ruling, and permitting has years to run. The deposit holds 1.2 billion tonnes of mineral resources including 2.2 million tonnes of rare earth oxides, which is why the European Union has flagged it as strategically important for cutting its dependence on Chinese supply.

Reindeer, unhelpfully, cannot be rerouted by memo.

What happens to the building

Henning Larsen’s circular town hall anchors the relocated core, and the church is due to reopen at its new address, between the cemetery and the new town centre, in 2026. Parts of the stone wall that ringed the old site will be moved across to join it. Where it used to stand becomes a mining town park, kept as a quiet green space until the ground beneath it is needed, at which point the fences go up and the park goes the way of the neighbourhood.

Kiruna has become very good at a peculiar skill: treating permanence as a logistics problem with a budget attached. Beams, jacks, 224 wheels, a control box and a coffee break. A church can be lifted onto a trolley and driven down the road. A migration route cannot.

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A single gram of crushed oyster shell pulled in up to around 1.5 grams of rare earth metal, more than the shell’s own weight, out of water spiked with the kind of contamination you would expect from severe industrial pollution. A throwaway material, the sort of thing you might crunch underfoot on a beach, holding more than its mass in metals that the electronics and clean-energy industries fight over.

That’s the finding a Trinity College Dublin team reported in early 2026. Below, we walk through what they actually did, why oysters won and mussels and cockles fell short, and how much of this holds up once you leave the lab bench.

What the researchers actually did

The setup was low-tech at the front end. As reported in The University Times, the team collected oyster, mussel and cockle shells from beaches around Dublin, cleaned them, dried them, and crushed them into small grains. Then they dropped those grains into solutions carrying three rare earth elements and watched what happened over time. The three metals were lanthanum, neodymium and dysprosium, at concentrations chosen to mimic badly polluted water.

The chemistry underneath is where it gets interesting. Shells are mostly calcium carbonate, and in the rare-earth-rich water that calcium carbonate dissolves and is replaced, more or less on the spot, by new solid minerals built around the rare earth metals. In the peer-reviewed paper, published in Science of the Total Environment, the crushed shells were reacted with the metal-rich solutions across a wide range of temperatures, 25 to 205 degrees Celsius for up to three months. What you end up with is not the original shell soaking up metal like a sponge, but the shell being rebuilt, mineral by mineral, into something new.

As principal investigator Juan Diego Rodriguez-Blanco put it, “the process is entirely mineral-driven – the shells naturally transform dissolved rare earth elements into new solid minerals, so this isn’t a process that is difficult to drive, or one that requires much financial outlay or technical equipment.” That last part is a lab-based expectation rather than a proven cost sheet, but the appeal is easy to see: no exotic reagents, no elaborate rig, just waste shell and time.

Why oysters won and the others didn’t

All three shells are made of the same basic stuff, so why did oysters run away with it? The answer is structure. Oyster shell has a porous, layered microstructure, and that lets the dissolve-and-replace reaction work its way right through the grain rather than stalling at the surface. That’s how oyster grains reached uptake of up to roughly 1.5 grams per gram.

Mussels and cockles behaved differently, and the reason is more physical than chemical. A crust of new mineral formed quickly on the outside and then sealed the grain off, so the reaction couldn’t reach the inside. In those shells, the study reports that more than half of the original shell was left unchanged once that crust became impermeable. Same starting material, very different outcome, decided by how the shell is put together.

Why pull rare earths out of water at all

Rare earth elements are the unglamorous ingredients in a lot of modern hardware, from the magnets in wind turbines and electric motors to phone components. Mining them is expensive and messy, and industrial processing can leave behind runoff carrying dissolved metals. Two problems are tangled together here: recovering a valuable resource, and cleaning up water that carries it.

The shell angle is attractive partly because the raw material is a nuisance to begin with. As first author Rémi Rateau described it, “every year, the global aquaculture industry generates millions of tonnes of shell waste, much of which is discarded or sent to landfill.”  Rateau also noted that “relatively small amounts of shell waste could remove substantial quantities of rare earth metals from contaminated water.” 

What this is, and what it isn’t

This is one study, and it is a lab result. The concentrations were high by design, the conditions were controlled, and real industrial wastewater is a far messier soup of competing ions, organics and pH swings than a prepared solution in a flask. The team is upfront that the work still needs pilot-scale testing under genuine conditions before anyone talks about a deployable cleanup system. A promising lead is not a finished product, and this sits firmly in the former category.

Our read lands roughly where the team’s does. The measured uptake is striking, the input material is cheap and otherwise wasted, and the driving chemistry looks simple. Rodriguez-Blanco frames the ambition plainly: “we can start designing” low-cost strategies to remove critical metals from contaminated waters while giving new value to a major waste product. Start designing is the honest verb. On the strength of these numbers, it’s a lead worth taking out of the beaker and testing against the real, dirty water it was built to handle.

The post Researchers picked oyster, mussel and cockle shells off Irish beaches, crushed the 3 kinds of shell into grains, and dropped them into water carrying rare earth metals at concentrations similar to badly polluted industrial runoff. The oyster grains took up as much as roughly 1.5 grams of metal for every gram of shell. appeared first on Space Daily.

Bar soap moved a lighthouse. Crews smeared ordinary Ivory soap along the steel beams the tower rode across, because it turned out to be the ideal lubricant for a job involving thousands of tons of creeping brick, a detail recorded at the time by the Lighthouse Directory.

Everything else about the job was considerably less homely.

Why a lighthouse ends up in the surf

When Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was finished in 1870, it stood a comfortable 1,500 feet from the Atlantic. Then Hatteras Island did what barrier islands do, which is travel. Storm tides strip sand off the ocean side and dump it on the sound side, and the whole island shuffles westward, a process the National Park Service traces back at least 10,000 years.

The island moved. The lighthouse stayed exactly where the builders left it.

Underneath sat yellow pine timbers resting in fresh water on compacted sand, a floating foundation improvised because pilings could not be driven through hard sand barely eight feet down. Ingenious for 1870, and considerably less reassuring once the surf reached the door. By the late 1990s the ocean had closed to within 60 feet of the base, per the park service’s account of the light station, and decades of groins and sandbags had mostly made the erosion worse.

How to move five thousand tons of brick

Very slowly, and with an enormous amount of hydraulics.

Crews cut the tower free of its foundation, all 4,830 tons of it by the park service’s own retrospective, and replaced it with a grid of seven main beams, each 70 feet long and weighing 11 tons, fitted with 100 hydraulic jacks, as documented by Island Free Press. Those jacks raised the lighthouse 5.34 feet, just enough to slide roll beams underneath and give it a road. Horizontal push jacks then nudged the tower forward about five feet, backed off, shifted position along the beams, and pushed again, a sequence the park service sets out in its move FAQs. Each shove took about a minute, in coverage by the National Parks Conservation Association, and beams the tower had already passed over were carried round to the front to extend the track.

Progress ran to roughly 100 feet a day, with crowds cheering pushes that were barely visible to the naked eye, as Our State magazine later described the scene.

Twenty-three days, 2,900 feet, $11.8 million, and one American Society of Civil Engineers award the following year. International Chimney Corp of Buffalo held the contract. Expert House Movers of Maryland did the shoving.

The argument that came first

None of this was settled quietly. Relocation had been on the table since the National Academy of Sciences recommended it in the late 1980s, and North Carolina State University reached the same conclusion in a review published in January 1997, as Coastal Review later recounted, but plenty of locals were convinced the tower would shake itself to rubble halfway down the track. Congress funded the move anyway in 1998. The lawsuit that followed now sits in an administrative record held by the State Archives of North Carolina, a tidy paper monument to a very loud argument.

What the ocean has done since

The tower now stands about 1,500 feet from the water, the same margin it enjoyed in 1870, and should not be threatened again for something like a century, according to the State Library of North Carolina’s history project on the relocation.

Nearby property has fared worse. At least 32 privately owned beach homes have collapsed onto Cape Hatteras National Seashore since 2020, most of them at Rodanthe and Buxton, with the latest counted by National Parks Traveler in June. Each one brings a notice from Cape Hatteras National Seashore warning visitors about nail-studded debris drifting for miles down the beach. Superintendent David Hallac has pointed out that earlier generations built smaller and shifted buildings when the surf came for them, which is a polite way of saying the island never agreed to stay still.

Cracks the sea did not cause

Scaffolding went up in 2024 for what was meant to be an 18-month restoration costing $19.2 million, and the work has turned up something awkward. Crews expected 30 to 40 cracks in the cast-iron brackets carrying the gallery deck near the top. They found 116, spread across all 16 brackets, Stone & Lime superintendent Josh Brundige told a media tour in July, in reporting by Outer Banks Insider. Most were hidden under seven layers of brick, and the documentation of them predates the 1999 move.

Nobody can say what caused the cracking. Brundige offered thermal expansion and water damage as candidates, with generations of whale oil flame heating the lantern room and winter cooling it down again.

So the lantern room is currently missing from the tower altogether, a temporary beacon is doing the work, and the repair has added about a year and $10 million, taking the project to roughly $30 million. Moving a lighthouse five feet at a time was, in the end, the easy part. Whatever quietly split the ironwork at the gallery deck was already there, decades before anyone thought to look.

The post When Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was built in 1870, the Atlantic sat about 1,500 feet away, but by 1999 the ocean had crept to within 60 feet — engineers lifted the entire lighthouse and moved it 2,900 feet inland, five feet at a time appeared first on Space Daily.

Lake Peigneur, in the Cajun country of southern Louisiana, was a modest body of water with an unusual basement. The lake itself was about 1,300 acres and only ten or eleven feet deep — a placid fishing spot beside the Rip Van Winkle Gardens. Beneath it, however, rose the top of a salt dome, and inside the dome the Diamond Crystal Salt Company had been mining since 1919, carving out cathedral-sized galleries that by 1980 descended fifteen hundred feet, some of them running directly under the lake bed.

Two industries, stacked vertically, each aware of the other. Everything depended on the maps.

On the morning of November 20, 1980, a crew contracted by Texaco was probing for oil from a drilling rig floating on the lake. At around 430 feet down, their 14-inch drill bit stuck, the rig began to tilt, and the drillers — suspecting nothing worse than a collapsing borehole — evacuated to shore.

By most accounts, their position was off by roughly 400 feet. The bit had gone through the lake floor and into the third level of the mine.

The drain plug

What followed remains one of the most surreal industrial accidents ever recorded, and it unfolded with the logic of a bathtub.

A 14-inch hole should not drain a lake quickly. But water pouring into a salt mine does not just fill space — it dissolves the walls, and the pillars of salt deliberately left behind to hold up the ceiling. The puncture widened itself by eating its own edges, the flow compounded, and within a couple of hours the entire lake was corkscrewing down through the mine in a whirlpool hundreds of feet across.

The vortex took the drilling rig first — a derrick 150 feet tall, sucked under in minutes. Then it took eleven barges from the adjacent canal, a tugboat, trucks, a parking lot, greenhouses, and about 65 acres of Jefferson Island itself, as the shoreline calved into the spinning hole. Sixty-five-foot oaks went down whole. On the far side of the lake, a fisherman’s small boat was dragged toward the drain until he grounded it and ran.

Underground, the day’s shift — around 50 miners — was at work when the water arrived. Their escape is the disaster’s miracle chapter: warned by a fuse-blowing short and then by the sight of water where water could not be, they evacuated level by level, some riding out in mine carts, the last men lifted up the shaft in an elevator built for eight as diesel smoke and rising water chased them. Every miner surfaced. So had every driller. In an accident that swallowed a lake, a rig, a fleet and a chunk of Louisiana, not one person died.

The backwards canal

The lake, once empty, had to refill from somewhere, and here the disaster produced its most famous image. The Delcambre Canal had always carried Lake Peigneur’s overflow south to the Gulf of Mexico. With the lake now a mud crater far below sea level, the canal reversed, and salt water from the Gulf came pouring backward and down into the basin — over a drop that, for two days, formed the tallest waterfall in Louisiana’s history, some 150 feet of it, on terrain otherwise famous for being flat. Compressed mine air blasted back up through the drain as 400-foot geysers.

When the refilling ended, nine of the eleven barges popped back to the surface like bath toys. The rig and the tug never reappeared. And the lake itself had been transmuted: a shallow freshwater pond had become a deep, salty, stratified lake with a new ecosystem to match — the fastest limnological conversion on record, performed in one afternoon.

The bill, and the blur

The aftermath settled the way American disasters do. Diamond Crystal’s mine was destroyed; the company took $32 million from Texaco and its drilling contractor in settlement, with another $12.8 million to the ruined botanical gardens, and the mine closed for good a few years later, ending six decades of salt work. The precise cause was never officially pinned down — the evidence, inconveniently, had dissolved — but the settlements spoke, and the working explanation has never been seriously rivaled: a surveying error of a few hundred feet, on a map where a few hundred feet was the entire margin between two industries.

That is the durable lesson floating over Lake Peigneur, which today looks placid again and is, incidentally, much deeper than any map from 1979 says. The drillers did everything right by the coordinates they had. The mine was exactly where its own maps said it was. The catastrophe lived entirely in the gap between the two sets of paperwork — about 400 feet of it — and when the gap closed, it closed with a whirlpool. Nobody drowned, but a lake did: pulled down its own drain, through a hole the width of a dinner plate, into the space where men had been mining salt that morning.

The post In 1980, a Texaco crew drilling over Louisiana’s Lake Peigneur missed their mapped position by about 400 feet and punched into a working salt mine below, and within hours the entire lake had drained into the hole, swallowing 11 barges and briefly reversing a canal that ran to the Gulf appeared first on Space Daily.

Concrete is the second most-used substance on Earth after water, and the cement that holds it together is one of the biggest headaches in climate policy.

Making cement means heating limestone until it breaks down, a process that accounts for around 8 percent of global CO2 emissions. And we are not slowing down. Concrete production is projected to climb from roughly 14 billion cubic metres a year toward 20 billion by mid-century. So anything that lets you use less cement per wall, without the wall getting weaker, is worth a close look.

That is the claim in a new paper out of India, and it comes with an unusual ingredient: human waste. A team turned treated sewage sludge into a fine black powder, swapped it in for a tenth of the cement, and got concrete that ended up harder to crush, not softer.

It’s one study, and an early-access version still subject to edits, so treat what follows as a promising result, not a settled fact.

Why cement is the part worth fixing

The problem with concrete is not the gravel or the sand or the water. It is the cement paste that binds them together. Estimates of cement’s climate footprint vary a bit depending on how you count, landing somewhere between 5 and 8 percent of global human-caused CO2 emissions each year. Most of that comes from the chemistry of making cement, not the fuel in the furnace. That is why switching to cleaner energy alone will not fix it.

One line of research has spent years asking whether you can replace some of that cement with biochar. Biochar is a carbon-rich char made by heating organic matter with very little oxygen. The appeal is twofold: you use less cement, and the carbon in the char, which the original plant or waste pulled out of the air, gets locked inside the building instead of released. The open question has always been whether the concrete survives the swap.

What the Warangal team actually did

The material here started at a sewage-sludge treatment plant in Warangal, in the Indian state of Telangana, a facility set up as a public-private partnership to tackle the city’s sewage problem. Human solid waste that would otherwise be dumped or burned gets processed there.

V Srinivas Chary, whose institution is a partner on the project, praised the operation, saying that “From the toilet to the final conversion of the biochar, the process is scientific and comprehensive.” 

The research team, led by civil engineer Raghuvesh Tiwari of Manipal University Jaipur with colleagues at Louisiana Tech University, took that sludge, dried it, and heated it to between 350 and 450 degrees Celsius with very little oxygen. That heating step drives off gases and leaves char behind. They ground the char into a powder, then replaced 5, 10, and 15 percent of the cement in test concrete with it and ran the usual checks: how well it resisted crushing and bending, how much it shrank, how much water it soaked up, how many gaps it had inside.

Dumped waste versus a carbon sink in the wall

The study sets up a pointed contrast. Normally a city’s sewage sludge is a liability to be disposed of, and a builder’s cement is a material whose production loads the atmosphere. Both are problems flowing toward waste and emissions. The first is bigger than you might think: a single person produces up to around 400 grams of faeces a day, which across a city becomes a constant stream that has to go somewhere.

The idea here is to route that stream into the wall. The waste replaces some of the cement, and the carbon in the char stays put instead of being burned off. It is a tidy story on paper: two problems that might cancel out a slice of each other. The caveat is that this study did not actually measure the carbon side of that ledger, so the climate benefit is still an argument rather than a number the paper delivered.

Why it got stronger, not weaker

The surprise is that adding a char to concrete made it tougher. The study reports this clearly for the middle dose. As the authors put it, “After a 91-day curing period, concrete with a 10% biochar substitution demonstrated a 21% increase in compressive strength and a 42% increase in flexural strength.” The 5 percent mix was close behind, gaining about 20 percent in crushing strength and 36 percent in bending strength over the same period. Those gains are measured against this study’s own plain concrete, not a universal benchmark.

There is a limit, though, and the study found it. The 15 percent mix did worse. Past a certain point, the char stops helping and simply dilutes the cement, a useful reminder that the good result here depends on getting the dose right. The authors’ own summary is careful: the results indicate that biochar at the 5 and 10 percent levels “yields significant improvements in concrete properties.”

The catch, and what still has to be proven

A strong lab result is not a paving slab. Several things stand between this and a real building site, and the paper is upfront about the biggest one. Sewage sludge can carry heavy metals, and whether those slowly leak out of the finished concrete over time is an open question. That is not something you can wave away when the material might end up in a school foundation or a water channel.

How long it lasts is the other unknown. The tests ran to 91 days in controlled conditions. Real structures face decades of freezing and thawing, wetting and drying, weight and vibration, and nobody has shown yet how this concrete holds up over that span. The researchers say themselves that more work is needed to assess how it performs under real-world conditions such as freeze-thaw cycles and extreme temperatures. 

What the study earns, we think, is attention rather than adoption. The explanation is plausible, the numbers are real for the mix that was tested, and the idea that a waste stream and a carbon-heavy material might each solve part of the other’s problem is worth chasing. 

The post Researchers took biochar made from human waste at a treatment plant in Warangal, India, ground it into a fine black powder and mixed it into concrete in place of a tenth of the cement. After 91 days the concrete was 21 percent harder to crush. appeared first on Space Daily.

The universe’s “missing matter” was never thought to have vanished. Cosmologists could infer how much ordinary, atom-building matter should exist, but direct inventories of stars, cold gas and the hot gas in galaxy clusters did not recover all of it in the nearby universe. The discrepancy pointed instead to matter that is real, widespread and exceptionally difficult to see.

A census built from 69 precisely located fast radio bursts now places most of that elusive material in the thinnest part of the cosmic web. In a study published on 16 June 2025 in Nature Astronomy, Liam Connor and colleagues estimate that 76 per cent of ordinary matter lies in the intergalactic medium, with an uncertainty of plus 10 and minus 11 percentage points. About 15 per cent lies in extended galactic halos, while 9 per cent is in stars and cold galactic gas.

This is one study, not settled consensus. Its fractions are a statistical inference from a modest sample, foreground estimates and a model of where electrons reside. They are not a direct count of individual particles. Even so, the work makes a more discriminating partition of the late-universe baryon budget than earlier fast-burst measurements could provide.

The missing matter was ordinary

In cosmology, baryons are the family of ordinary particles that includes protons and neutrons, the ingredients of atomic nuclei. Measurements of the early universe, including the Planck cosmic microwave background analysis, tightly constrain how many baryons the cosmos contains. Big Bang nucleosynthesis reaches a compatible answer through the primordial abundances of light elements.

Yet stars are bright rather than abundant. Add stellar mass, cold galactic gas, hot cluster gas and other detectable reservoirs, and the local tally historically came up short of that early-universe prediction. The leading expectation was that much of the difference occupied the warm-hot intergalactic medium, spread through filaments so thinly that its emission and absorption signatures were hard to assemble into a complete census. Individual detections existed, but extrapolating them across an inhomogeneous cosmic web left substantial room between locating some of the reservoir and measuring its global share.

The 76/15/9 division is therefore not a breakdown of everything in the universe. It partitions ordinary matter alone. Dark matter is a separate, non-baryonic component, and dark energy belongs to the wider mass-energy budget. Ordinary matter makes up only about one-sixth of all matter, so 76 per cent of baryons is not 76 per cent of all cosmic matter.

How a millisecond burst weighs invisible gas

A fast radio burst, or FRB, is a brief flash of radio energy from a distant galaxy. Its physical source may differ from event to event, but that uncertainty does not prevent an FRB from working as a probe. What matters for the census is the signal’s journey through intervening plasma.

Ionized gas contains free electrons. When a burst passes through it, lower radio frequencies arrive slightly later than higher ones. The size of this frequency-dependent delay yields the dispersion measure, which is proportional to the column of free electrons integrated along the full sightline. Gas that is far too faint to photograph can still leave a measurable timing signature.

Distance turns that electron column into a cosmological tool. Once astronomers identify a burst’s host galaxy and measure its redshift, they can compare how far the signal travelled with how much plasma it encountered. They must also estimate the contributions from the Milky Way, the host galaxy and intervening galactic halos before attributing the balance to intergalactic space.

Why localization mattered

A burst without a securely identified host is much less useful because its distance remains uncertain. Thirty-nine of the 69 events in the study came from the Deep Synoptic Array-110 at California’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory. The array was designed not merely to detect FRBs, but to pinpoint them accurately enough for follow-up observations of their host galaxies.

The other 30 bursts came from telescopes around the world, primarily the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder. Optical observations from facilities including the Keck and Palomar observatories helped establish host redshifts. That combination, a radio dispersion measure tied to a known cosmic distance, is the essential unit in the analysis.

According to Caltech’s account of the project, the 69 localized bursts ranged from about 11.74 million to 9.1 billion light-years away. The most distant was FRB 20230521B. The long baseline supplied both nearby and remote probes of the accumulated electrons between galaxies rather than relying on a narrow slice of cosmic history.

The 76 per cent is an inference with error bars

The team’s intergalactic category means gas outside virialized galaxy halos, combining filaments and voids. The published estimate assigns 76 per cent of baryons to this reservoir, with a plus 10 and minus 11 percentage-point uncertainty. The central value is memorable, but the interval is part of the result and should travel with it.

The same analysis describes this gas as highly ionized and extremely diffuse. Its density is below roughly 0.001 particles per cubic centimetre, and its neutral fraction is below one part in 10,000. Those limits explain the observational problem: the gas can dominate the ordinary-matter inventory while producing little light of its own.

The remaining shares are about 15 per cent in the extended halos around galaxies and 9 per cent in stars and cold galactic gas. These are fitted population fractions, not three piles weighed independently. The open preprint record describes how simulations help calibrate the statistical fingerprints of the different components, including the uneven contributions from intervening halos.

What changed after the first FRB census

The crucial groundwork was the 2020 Macquart relation, named for the late astronomer J. Xavier Prochaska Macquart. Using a smaller set of localized bursts, that study showed that dispersion increases with redshift in a way consistent with the expected cosmic density of baryons. FRBs could recover the missing total.

Recovering the total was not the same as assigning matter to environments. The average dispersion-redshift trend mainly constrains how many baryons exist along the line of sight. Separating smooth intergalactic gas from the clumpier material around galaxies requires information in the distribution and scatter of individual measurements, plus knowledge of which foreground halos a sightline crosses.

The 69-burst analysis combines those clues. Diffuse gas produces a relatively smooth accumulation with distance, while halos add irregular contributions on selected sightlines. A previous SpaceDaily report on a record-distance localized FRB explains why reaching farther into the universe extends the lever arm for this kind of measurement.

A clue about galaxy feedback

If roughly three-quarters of baryons are outside halos, galaxies have not retained all the gas that gravity drew toward them. Supernovae, stellar winds and accreting supermassive black holes can heat gas and drive it outward. In simulations, the strength of that feedback determines how much material remains near galaxies and how much is expelled into the broader web.

The study argues that relatively efficient feedback is needed to reproduce the inferred split. That gives galaxy-formation models a new observational constraint: matching the number and appearance of galaxies is not sufficient if a simulation stores too much ordinary matter inside their halos. The baryon census tests the otherwise faint aftermath of billions of years of outflows.

Redistributed gas also changes how matter clusters on intermediate scales. The authors note that stronger baryonic feedback could reduce part of the S8 tension, a mismatch between some early- and late-universe estimates of clustering amplitude. That is a possible implication rather than a demonstrated resolution, and it depends on whether the inferred gas distribution survives larger and more varied FRB samples.

A census, not a map of every particle

The method is powerful precisely because electrons that are almost invisible in emission still delay radio waves. Its limitations follow the same line of reasoning. Each burst mixes contributions from the Milky Way, intergalactic space, foreground halos and its host. Errors in any of those components can shift the inferred partition even if the measured dispersion itself is precise.

Selection also matters. Only localized bursts with usable host information enter this kind of census, and that subset may not perfectly represent the full FRB population. The conversion from observed scatter to environmental fractions depends on halo prescriptions and on simulations such as IllustrisTNG. The quoted uncertainties reflect the statistical model, but no error bar can guarantee that every modelling assumption is complete.

Sixty-nine events are enough to sharpen the fractions, not enough to erase every degeneracy. Future arrays should supply thousands of localized sightlines, allowing the budget to be tested across redshift, galaxy type and foreground environment. The clearest conclusion for now is deliberately bounded: most ordinary matter long missing from visible inventories is consistent with very diffuse, ionized gas between galaxies.

The post Astronomers used 69 fast radio bursts as cosmic backlights to complete the clearest census yet of the universe’s missing ordinary matter, finding that roughly 76% resides as extremely diffuse ionized gas in the vast spaces between galaxies — while only 9% remains inside galaxies as stars and gas. appeared first on Space Daily.

The apparatus for one of the year’s most celebrated student experiments was paper and gym equipment.

Miles Wu, 14, of New York City, spent his project folding the same origami pattern over and over — 54 systematic variations of it — and then crushing his own handiwork, loading dumbbells onto each folded structure until it gave way and writing down the number.

Last October, that stack of creased paper and weights won him the $25,000 top prize at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge, the national middle-school competition run by Society for Science — the junior sibling of the storied Science Talent Search.

The fold with a space career

The pattern Miles chose wasn’t decorative. The Miura-ori is the most famous crease pattern in engineering: a tessellation of parallelograms, invented by Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura, that collapses a large sheet into a compact block and — its signature trick — unfolds in one smooth motion, pulled open from two corners. Japan flew it to space in 1995 to deploy a solar array; it lives on in maps, satellite panels and stent designs.

What made Miles’s project science rather than papercraft was treating that famous fold as an unexplored parameter space. A Miura-ori isn’t one pattern but a family — panel size, crease angle, row count can each be tuned — and the structural consequences of those choices are exactly the kind of thing a kid with patience, paper and a weight bench can map exhaustively.

So he mapped it: 54 variants, each loaded with dumbbells until failure.

What the crushing revealed

The dataset produced a clean design law. Folds with smaller panels and steeper crease angles weren’t just stronger — they were remarkably resilient, holding their integrity rather than failing suddenly. Tighter, sharper folding packs more load-bearing geometry into the same footprint — more walls per square inch, effectively — and the best of his configurations supported more than 9,000 times their own weight before collapse.

For scale: a structure with that ratio, weighing as much as a bag of flour, would carry a car. And it started as a flat sheet.

The application Miles has named is the one the geometry begs for: strong, lightweight shelters that ship flat and deploy fast in disaster zones. Emergency shelter is a logistics problem before it is a housing problem — the structures are needed by the thousand, immediately, at the end of broken supply chains — and a Miura-based building would fly as a dense stack and open like a map, its strength coming from crease geometry rather than heavy framing. His prize-announcement plans point exactly there, putting him in step with a genuine research frontier: origami engineering is currently one of the busiest corners of structural design, from NASA solar arrays to foldable bridges.

The shape of a proper experiment

It’s worth pausing on the method, because it’s a miniature of how materials science actually works.

Miles didn’t invent the Miura fold, and didn’t need to. He took a known structure, varied it systematically along its natural parameters, tested every variant to destruction under identical conditions, and extracted a generalizable rule — smaller panels, steeper angles, more strength — that someone else could now apply at shelter scale without repeating the 54 experiments. One variable at a time, failure as data, the answer as a design principle rather than a single artifact. Plenty of graduate work follows a looser protocol.

And the equipment list is the story’s quiet punchline. The competition he won celebrates access to STEM, and his project is the proof of concept: no lab, no fabrication budget, no instrument more specialized than the family’s dumbbells. The expensive part was the discipline — folding the same pattern 54 times with controlled precision, and being willing to destroy every one of them.

The origami masters have always said the crease pattern is the real object; the paper is just where it lives. Miles Wu’s version of that idea now has numbers attached, a five-figure prize, and a possible future as the roof over someone’s worst week: fold it right, and a flat sheet will hold nine thousand of itself.

The post A 14-year-old in New York folded 54 variations of the same origami crease pattern and stacked dumbbells on them to see which collapsed — the winning fold held more than 9,000 times its own weight, the design is aimed at flat-pack disaster shelters, and it took the $25,000 top middle-school prize appeared first on Space Daily.

A solar telescope in New Mexico is being torn down, and the reason is a pool of liquid mercury hidden inside it. The mercury was the clever trick that made the telescope work. It is now the thing that dooms it.

The telescope’s optical system weighs 250 tons, and it had to turn smoothly all day. You can’t spin something that heavy on ordinary wheels. So instead the whole thing floated on a sealed pool of liquid mercury. Mercury is dense and flows easily, so the load rode on the fluid and turned with almost no friction. That is how the 250-ton optical system of the Richard B. Dunn Solar Telescope was designed to move.

However, on January 5, crews found some of that mercury where it wasn’t supposed to be.

We are not engineers, chemists, or occupational-safety specialists, and nothing here is guidance for handling mercury or any other hazardous material. This is our reading of a public engineering story and the agency documents around it, not advice.

Why a telescope floated on liquid metal

The Dunn sits at about 9,200 feet on Sacramento Peak, inside the Lincoln National Forest. The Air Force built it, and it opened as the Vacuum Tower Telescope on October 15, 1969. From the start it was one of the best high-resolution instruments in the world for studying the Sun.

As sunlight comes through the telescope, the Sun’s image slowly rotates over the course of a day. To keep that image lined up with the instruments studying it, you have to turn the whole optical assembly to match. Not just the tube, but the observing room, the lab, and the floor people stand on. That is where the 250 tons comes from. The mercury float let crews rotate the image of the Sun by turning the entire instrument.

The amount of mercury involved surprises people. The system floated on roughly 120 gallons of the liquid metal, sealed in the bearing. Mercury is so dense that this much weighs around 18,000 pounds on its own. And the bearing carrying the full load hung, according to the observatory, on just three bolts, each three inches across.

The result was a turn so smooth it sounds made up. Dave Dooling, a science writer who served as the site’s education officer, described it this way: the bearings “make rotation so smooth that a person could stand with one foot on the main floor and one on the turntable and slowly rotate all 250 tons” of it. That captures what the mercury bought: a huge instrument you could nudge by hand.

What crews found on January 5

On January 5, 2026, two New Mexico State University staff members found liquid mercury on a platform inside the tower. The site closed, along with its visitor center.

A puddle of mercury is a serious problem because of what the metal does. It is a neurotoxin, it gives off vapor at room temperature, and once it escapes a sealed system it doesn’t stay put. The real question became whether the bearing could be trusted to hold 18,000 pounds of a poison for years to come. The National Science Foundation brought in the engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti to assess that, and the answer shaped everything that followed.

Why removing the mercury ends the telescope

The mercury isn’t a part you can swap out. It is the thing the entire optical system stands on. Take it away and the telescope can’t rotate, which means it can’t do the one job it was built for. Removing the hazard and keeping a working telescope turned out to be the same decision pointing in opposite directions.

On February 24, 2026, the NSF announced it would remove the mercury, leaving the telescope permanently unusable, then demolish it. In its own words, “After assessing the engineering challenges, anticipated repair costs and safety and environmental risks, NSF determined that removing and safely disposing of the telescope’s mercury is the most prudent course of action.” That is the agency defending its own call, and worth reading as such. Preservation advocates in New Mexico dispute that demolition was the only option, and residents and lawmakers have pushed to save the wider observatory campus.

The Dunn was already near the end of its working life. The Air Force transferred it to the NSF in 1976, and in its final years it ran only in a limited mode since 2019. Much of what it once did best has moved to the NSF’s newer, far larger Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii. 

What comes down with it

Demolition is scheduled to begin as early as September 2026, and the NSF has said it will contribute up to $100,000 toward an exhibit about the observatory. What ends is more than a building: more than half a century of solar science from a machine that, for a long stretch, was the best in the world at what it did.

The post After more than 50 years, a solar telescope in New Mexico is being pulled down, after liquid mercury from the bearing that let its 250-ton optical system turn was found inside the tower. Crews found the metal on January 5. appeared first on Space Daily.