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.

The post Sweden is moving parts of an Arctic city because decades of iron mining are deforming the ground beneath it — in 2025 a 672-ton church was placed on giant transporters and rolled five kilometers to the new city center appeared first on Space Daily.

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.