capsules

Incredible footage released by Varda Space Industries gives us a first-person view of a space capsule’s return trip to Earth, from the moment it separates from its carrier satellite in orbit all the way through its fiery reentry and bumpy arrival at the surface. Varda’s W-1 capsule landed at the Utah Test and Training Range, a military site, on February 21 in a first for a commercial company. It spent roughly eight months leading up to that in low Earth orbit, stuck in regulatory limbo while the company waited for the…

A Paris-based startup called Capsule wants to transform the way users seek out their daily news. Instead of offering a standard news aggregator experience, Capsule’s mission is to become the “Spotify for news” by combining AI technology and human editorial curation to provide a news-reading experience that transforms news articles, newsletter snippets and even tweets (posts on X) and other social updates, into digestible information through its user-friendly app. The experience of using Capsule, meanwhile, feels much…

The International Space Station has a monopoly on in-space research, but the huge surge of interest in commercial space is starting to change that. Atmos Space Cargo, a German startup, is looking to open up the opportunities for life sciences research and manufacturing in orbit with its return capsules that will deliver cargo from space back to Earth. The company calls the opportunity “microgravity on demand,” a nascent market segment that has huge potential. Atmos’ service is tailored specifically for life sciences,…

Chinguetti once sat at the crossroads of trade and religious studies. Credit: © MARCO LONGARI / AFP Saif el Islam al Ahmed Mahmoud sat cross-legged on a sheepskin and gingerly turned the pages of an ancient manuscript. "What would the world be without poetry?" he asked, using cotton gloves to handle the thin paper document, written…

Insulin shots are no longer relevant thanks to a new robotic tablet, Robocap A novel medication capsule created at MIT will be able to replace insulin injections by delivering the treatment’s components through a robotic capsule that spins and tunnels through the small intestine’s mucus barrier. Protein medications would have to be administered intravenously since they cannot pass through the mucus lining of the digestive tract. Giovanni Traverso, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and development…

Concrete sewage pipes lead a hard life, constantly being exposed to corrosive acid produced by bacteria in wastewater. A new additive could allow such concrete to self-heal – and it would do so using water treatment sludge.Developed at the University of South Australia by a team led by Prof. Yan Zhuge, the additive takes the form of microcapsules filled with a mixture of calcium hydroxide powder and alum sludge, the latter of which is a byproduct generated by water treatment plants. Ordinarily, that sludge just ends up…

Technology that delivers insulin orally rather than via regular injections would be a game-changing advance in medical science, and MIT scientists have been working fervently toward this aim over many years. Their latest creation is a drug capsule that uses a robotic, tunneling head to burrow its way through the mucus in the small intestine, giving insulin a direct route to cells.The difficulty in orally administering large protein drugs like insulin is tied to the inhospitable environment in the digestive tract.…

We’re all pretty bored of plastic or aluminum capsules for coffee-making, and I guess buying pre-ground coffee, a beans-to-cup machine or just grinding your own beans is too much work for some folks. Swiss coffee brand Migros has launched the CoffeeB machine, which uses Coffee Balls instead of traditional capsules. It wants to carve out a space between the convenience of capsules and the green factor that the grind-your-own crowd has gotten used to. The Coffee Ball is part of a new coffee…

Microplastics are a growing environmental problem, but a new study could help cut out a decent chunk of them. The authors showed that silk could be a biodegradable replacement for microbeads and plastic particles that are often added to cosmetics, paints and other products.Studies continually show that there are few places on Earth untouched by microplastic pollution. These tiny fragments have been detected in oceans, rivers, farmland, ice and snow from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and from the top of Mount Everest to the…