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Two geologists from Australian National University analyzed zircon minerals in ocean sediments to trace the outlines of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana beneath Antarctica's ice sheet. Their findings, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, suggest Antarctica contained substantial material dating to Gondwana's formation between 650 and 450 million years ago.
Researchers publishing in Nature propose that gravitational interactions between Earth's inner core and mantle help explain decades-long changes in the length of a day. Because the inner core rotates at a slightly different rate than the rest of the planet, it becomes misaligned with mass irregularities in the mantle, and the resulting gravitational pull works against other core-mantle interactions. Geophysicist Mathieu Dumberry and colleagues say this tug-of-war produces small accelerations and decelerations in Earth's spin over time.
Muju Earth has built the Aeropod, a fingernail-sized device farmers plant alongside seeds that bursts open from soil temperature, pressure and moisture to loosen compacted soil without machinery. The startup, founded by Ifeoluwa Afolayan and Wangyang Hu at Imperial College London, says the device can match tilling's results at roughly a quarter of the cost. Muju Earth is running paid field trials with nine UK onion farmers this fall and will present at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield in October.
Researchers report that massive mountain ranges formed by continental collisions once existed in what is now Antarctica. As these supermountains eroded over millions of years, they released nutrient-rich sediment that scientists say coincided with periods of rapid biological expansion on Earth.
Google will launch a prototype satellite to test how its Tensor Processing Units perform in orbit, part of Project Suncatcher, a research effort first announced last year. The initiative explores whether satellites in low Earth orbit, which can access near-constant sunlight and generate far more solar power than on Earth, could eventually host machine learning infrastructure.
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside modeled how Venus' extremely slow rotation—243 Earth days per spin—combined with its gravity could have gradually dragged a hypothetical moon inward until it broke apart and was absorbed by the planet. Lead author Steven Kane says this process wouldn't have required a catastrophic collision, contradicting an earlier theory that Venus' moon was destroyed by an impact with another body. The team built a computer simulation of gravitational interactions to test this mechanism.
Researchers are monitoring the atmospheric drag experienced by SpaceX's more than 11,000 Starlink satellites to calculate a daily 'sink rate,' the altitude a typical satellite at 480 km would lose in one day without thruster corrections. In 2026 that figure has swung from 19.7 meters per day during quiet conditions to 127.6 meters per day during the year's largest geomagnetic storm in January.
Startup Modal Motors, founded by Michael Van Steenburg, is developing electric motors that avoid rare-earth magnets altogether, aiming to manufacture in the U.S. rather than rely on Chinese supply chains. The company is preparing two products—a small drone motor and a flat 'Hybrid Enigma Drive' motor—ahead of its appearance in Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt next month.
China dominates global processing of rare earth elements, materials essential to consumer electronics and US military hardware including F-35 jets and Virginia-class submarines. In 2025 China issued export controls on these materials, then agreed to suspend enforcement until at least November 10, 2026, according to the report.
Researchers Hao Zhang and Mathieu Dumberry report in Nature that gravitational coupling between Earth's solid inner core and its mantle explains multidecadal changes in day length of a few milliseconds. They combined seismological data on inner-core rotation with a model of outer-core flow derived from magnetic field measurements to reach this conclusion.
A study published in Nature reports that small variations in the length of Earth's day, on the order of milliseconds over decades, can be explained by competing gravitational, mechanical and electromagnetic forces between Earth's solid inner core, molten outer core and rocky mantle. Researchers, including geophysicist Mathieu Dumberry, had long suspected core-mantle interactions caused these fluctuations but lacked clarity on which specific forces were responsible.
Researchers analyzed length-of-day (LOD) records from 1964 to 2019, after removing known effects from the atmosphere, oceans, tides and surface mass changes, to isolate multidecadal variations. They modeled these residual variations using torque equations that account for gravitational pull from the inner core alongside electromagnetic and topographic coupling at the core-mantle boundary, finding that gravitational torque from the inner core contributes to the slow, multidecadal changes in how long a day lasts.