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As power utilities and industrial companies seek to use more renewable energy, the market for grid-scale batteries is expanding rapidly. Alternatives to lithium-ion technology may provide environmental, labor, and safety benefits. And these new chemistries can work in markets like the electric grid and industrial applications that lithium doesn't address well.

“I think the market for longer-duration storage is just now emerging,” said Mark Higgins, chief commercial officer and president of North America at Redflow. “We have a lot of… very rapid scale-up in the types of projects that we’re working on and the size of projects that we’re working on. We’ve deployed about 270 projects around the world. Most of them have been small off-grid or remote-grid systems. What we’re seeing today is much more grid-connected types of projects.”

“Demand… seems to be increasing every day,” said Giovanni Damato, president of CMBlu Energy. Media projections of growth in this space are huge. “We're really excited about the opportunity to… just be able to play in that space and provide as much capacity as possible.”

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Math teacher Ben Orlin writes and draws the (aptly named) blog Math With Drawings and is the author of a new book, Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language. To mark its publication, he devised this entertaining accompanying quiz. You can read the Ars interview with Orlin here.

Math, we like to say, is math. It often seems that mathematics is something beyond our control—something unyielding, universal, inhuman.

But is it really?

Enlarge / Following the 2022 Hunga volcano eruption, a nearby hydrothermal vent was seen coated with a white mat of bacteria and surrounded by a thick layer of ash. The vent usually supports animal life that survives using chemical energy from the vent fluid, but those creatures were almost entirely wiped out. (credit: Beinart, et. al.)

In January 2022, a placid patch of the ocean’s surface near the islands of Tonga suddenly exploded with activity. After a month or so of activity, an underwater eruption of unprecedented scale from the Hunga volcano blasted ash up through the water column and more than 30 miles into the air, where it quickly spread out in a billowing plume spanning hundreds of miles.

The blast was so powerful that it rang Earth like a bell; it produced a shockwave that circled the globe multiple times and released a sonic boom heard as far away as Alaska. The eruption also triggered a tsunami that affected coastlines across the Pacific Ocean and made waves recorded in Japan, North and South America, and Antarctica.

Quite by surprise, scientists discovered that the eruption also had an underwater aftermath, recently described in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment.

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There are no wild ligers. Indeed, hybrids were once thought to be rare in nature—and of little consequence in an evolutionary sense. But now we know they can play an important role in speciation—the creation of new, genetically distinct populations.

As it turns out, hybridization in nature is quite common. Some 25 percent of plant species hybridize and some 10 percent of animals do the same.

“Hybridization as an event is rare,” said Jeremie Fant, a conservation scientist with the Chicago Botanic Garden who has worked on plant hybridization. “But in evolutionary history, it's been very common. Hybrids in the plant kingdom are everywhere. They are scattered through most lineages. When hybridization does occur, it can have important evolutionary impacts.”

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Although US coal consumption has fallen dramatically since 2005, the country still consumes millions of tons a year, and exports tons more—much of it transported by train. Now, new research shows that these trains can affect the health of people living near where they pass.

The study found that residents living near railroad tracks likely have higher premature mortality rates due to air pollutants released during the passage of uncovered coal trains. The analysis of the San Francisco Bay Area cities of Oakland, Richmond, and Berkeley shows that increases in air pollutants such as small particulate matter (PM 2.5) are also associated with increases in asthma-related episodes and hospital admissions.

"This has never been studied in the world. There's been a couple studies trying to measure just the air pollution, usually in rural areas, but this was the first to both measure air pollution and trains in an urban setting," said Bart Ostro, author of the study and an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis.

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Is space-based solar power a costly, risky pipe dream? Or is it a viable way to combat climate change? Although beaming solar power from space to Earth could ultimately involve transmitting gigawatts, the process could be made surprisingly safe and cost-effective, according to experts from Space Solar, the European Space Agency, and the University of Glasgow.

But we’re going to need to move well beyond demonstration hardware and solve a number of engineering challenges if we want to develop that potential.

Designing space-based solar

Beaming solar energy from space is not new; telecommunications satellites have been sending microwave signals generated by solar power back to Earth since the 1960s. But sending useful amounts of power is a different matter entirely.

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In the early 2000s, local fossil collector Mohamed ‘Ou Said’ Ben Moula discovered numerous fossils at Fezouata Shale, a site in Morocco known for its well-preserved fossils from the Early Ordovician period, roughly 480 million years ago. Recently, a team of researchers at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) studied 100 of these fossils and identified one of them as the earliest ancestor of modern-day chelicerates, a group that includes spiders, scorpions, and horseshoe crabs.

The fossil preserves the species Setapedites abundantis, a tiny animal that crawled and swam near the bottom of a 100–200-meter-deep ocean near the South Pole 478 million years ago. It was 5 to 10 millimeters long and fed on organic matter in the seafloor sediments. “Fossils of what is now known as S. abundantis have been found early on—one specimen mentioned in the 2010 paper that recognized the importance of this biota. However, this creature wasn’t studied in detail before simply because scientists focused on other taxa first,” Pierre Gueriau, one of the researchers and a junior lecturer at UNIL, told Ars Technica.

The study from Gueriau and his team is the first to describe S. abundantis and its connection to modern-day chelicerates (also called euchelicerates). It holds great significance, because “the origin of chelicerates has been one of the most tangled knots in the arthropod tree of life, as there has been a lack of fossils between 503 to 430 million years ago,” Gueriau added.

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Advances in artificial intelligence are making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between uniquely human behaviors and those that can be replicated by machines. Should artificial general intelligence (AGI) arrive in full force—artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence—the boundary between human and computer capabilities will diminish entirely.

In recent months, a significant swath of journalistic bandwidth has been devoted to this potentially dystopian topic. If AGI machines develop the ability to consciously experience life, the moral and legal considerations we’ll need to give them will rapidly become unwieldy. They will have feelings to consider, thoughts to share, intrinsic desires, and perhaps fundamental rights as newly minted beings. On the other hand, if AI does not develop consciousness—and instead simply the capacity to out-think us in every conceivable situation—we might find ourselves subservient to a vastly superior yet sociopathic entity.

Neither potential future feels all that cozy, and both require an answer to exceptionally mind-bending questions: What exactly is consciousness? And will it remain a biological trait, or could it ultimately be shared by the AGI devices we’ve created?

Enlarge / Some of the waste material that ends up part of these bricks. (credit: Seamus Daniel, RMIT University)

Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia have developed special “energy-smart bricks” that can be made by mixing clay with glass waste and coal ash. These bricks can help mitigate the negative effects of traditional brick manufacturing, an energy-intensive process that requires large-scale clay mining, contributes heavily to CO₂ emissions, and generates a lot of air pollution.

According to the RMIT researchers, “Brick kilns worldwide consume 375 million tonnes (~340 million metric tons) of coal in combustion annually, which is equivalent to 675 million tonnes of CO₂ emission (~612 million metric tons).” This exceeds the combined annual carbon dioxide emissions of 130 million passenger vehicles in the US.

The energy-smart bricks rely on a material called RCF waste. It mostly contains fine pieces of glass (92 percent) left over from the recycling process, along with ceramic materials, plastic, paper, and ash. Most of this waste material generally ends up in landfills, where it can cause soil and water degradation. However, the study authors note, “The utilization of RCF waste in fired-clay bricks offers a potential solution to the increasing global waste crisis and reduces the burden on landfills."

Enlarge / NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveals the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.

In a feat of galactic archeology, astronomers are using ever more detailed information to trace the origin of our galaxy—and to learn about how other galaxies formed in the early stages of the Universe. Using powerful space telescopes like Gaia and James Webb, astronomers are able to peer back in time and look at some of the oldest stars and galaxies. Between Gaia’s data on the position and movements of stars within our Milky Way and Webb’s observations of early galaxies that formed when the Universe was still young, astronomers are learning how galaxies come together and have made surprising discoveries that suggest the early Universe was busier and brighter than anyone previously imagined.

The Milky Way’s earliest pieces

In a recent paper, researchers using the Gaia space telescope identified two streams of stars, named Shakti and Shiva, each of which contains a total mass of around 10 million Suns and which are thought to have merged into the Milky Way around 12 billion years ago.

These streams were present even before the Milky Way had features like a disk or its spiral arms, and researchers think they could be some of the earliest building blocks of the galaxy as it developed.

Enlarge / The Sky-Watcher HEQ5 Pro and the Unistellar Odyssey Pro. (credit: Tim Stevens)

It's been 300 years since Galileo and Isaac Newton started fiddling around with lenses and parabolic mirrors to get a better look at the heavens. But if you look at many of the best amateur telescopes today, you'd be forgiven for thinking they haven't progressed much since.

Though components have certainly improved, the basic combination of mirrors and lenses is more or less the same. Even the most advanced "smart" mounts that hold them rely on technology that hasn't progressed in 30 years.

Compared to the radical reinvention that even the humble telephone has received, it's sad that telescope tech has largely been left behind. But that is finally changing. Companies like Unistellar and Vaonis are pioneering a new generation of scopes that throw classic astronomy norms and concepts out the window in favor of a seamless setup and remarkable image quality.