On December 2, 1942, scientists at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction using the Chicago Pile, a 20-foot stack of graphite blocks and uranium built under Stagg Field. The reactor ran for about 30 minutes before being shut down, with cadmium control rods as its only safety mechanism, and the experiment was conducted without informing university or city officials.
newyorker.com
· 2026-09-28
Researchers led by James Buchen at the University of Delaware have developed an electrochemical carbon-capture device that uses a battery-like setup instead of conventional filters. Hydroxide generated at the cathode reacts with CO2 to form carbonate, which crosses a membrane to the anode where a lower pH reverses the reaction, releasing pure CO2 gas.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-28
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a motion asking a state court to block OpenAI from developing new AI models without independent safety oversight and to bar minors from using ChatGPT. The move follows a lawsuit filed in June and a criminal investigation opened in April tied to a mass shooting at Florida State University, in which the suspect allegedly interacted with ChatGPT beforehand. OpenAI has not yet responded to the latest filing but previously said ChatGPT is a general-purpose tool not responsible for the crime.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-28
Researchers, including Ying Zhang at Wuhan University and Shannon Miller at Scripps Research, are developing a range of genome-editing technologies that go beyond standard CRISPR-Cas9, some building on it and others operating independently. These newer methods are designed to insert or replace larger stretches of DNA, a task CRISPR-Cas9 struggles with, though the field remains in early stages.
nature.com
· 2026-09-28
Graham Farmelo's book 'Hawking: His Life and Work' (John Murray, 2026) chronicles the physicist's scientific achievements alongside his personal struggles, including his motor neuron disease diagnosis, two marriages ending, and his relationships with students and colleagues. The review, written by a physicist who was a close friend of Hawking's from 1996 while working together at the University of Cambridge, praises the book's research and readability.
nature.com
· 2026-09-28
A new study in The Astrophysical Journal argues Venus once had a natural moon that gradually spiraled inward and collided with the planet, explaining why Venus is moonless today. Lead author Stephen Kane, an astrophysicist at UC Riverside, says the moon's demise didn't require a violent impact event, but resulted from the interplay between Venus's gravity and its slow rotation rate.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-27
Researchers at the University of Groningen, led by Maria Antonietta Loi with Koster and PhD student Tim Faber, found that tin-based perovskite solar cells keep 'hot electrons' energetic for nanoseconds instead of picoseconds, a thousandfold slowdown in heat loss. Computer simulations of the material's quantum behavior matched the lab results and revealed a double-action mechanism behind the effect, linked to the material's unusually low electron mass.
hardware.slashdot.org
· 2026-09-27
A study published in PLOS One by Gabriel Budel of Delft University of Technology and colleagues found that more than 3,000 academic article titles across disciplines borrow from Beatles song titles and lyrics. Using the Scopus database, the researchers identified 2,237 exact references and 963 instances of wordplay, spanning fields from medicine to computer science, economics and the humanities. The top 10 Beatles songs alone appeared in 1,584 article titles, far outpacing similar counts for Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley.
phys.org
· 2026-09-26
Francesco Romano, a PhD researcher at the University of Stuttgart, has designed a plasma engine that ingests thin atmospheric gases at very low Earth orbit altitudes and converts them into thrust, detailed in a paper posted to arXiv. The concept, known as atmosphere-breathing electric propulsion, aims to let satellites stay in orbit without carrying conventional propellant such as xenon. So far the design has only been tested in laboratory conditions and simulations, not on an actual spacecraft.
scitechdaily.com
· 2026-09-26
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.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-26
A team from Harvard and the University of Oregon report detecting radio emissions directly traced to beta Pictoris b, a gas giant roughly 11 times Jupiter's mass located 64 light-years away, using South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope. In their yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, they describe rapid, recurring, highly circularly polarized bursts and persistent emission between 0.85 and 3.5 GHz, which they attribute to naturally occurring auroras from charged particles along the planet's magnetic field.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-26
The IEEE Computer Society announced that Terry Benzel, its current vice president, has been elected president-elect for 2027, meaning she will serve as the organization's president in 2028. Benzel is managing director of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California and an IEEE Fellow.
wpcms.computer.org
· 2026-09-25
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