Figured

The spectacular, hexagonal shapes texturing salt deserts such as the Badwater Basin in Death Valley, California, and Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia have long mystified travelers and scientists alike.Considered by some to be the result of cracks forming as the briny surface dries out or pushes against itself as the salt precipitates and expands, no one explanation satisfies the uniform size and arrangement of the ridged cells.A new study provides the most plausible explanation yet. Based on a mix of field research and…

Image via Marvel Studios Now that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has come and gone, we’re getting more and more inside info about how it was made, and not all of it good. Now we’re getting some more information about one of the more peculiar characters that made their MCU debut: MODOK, or Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing, aka the coolest name ever. MODOK was never going to be an easy character to seriously portray in a Marvel movie. He’s a huge head and well, mostly just a huge head. Bless them,…

Researchers at Stanford University and the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have identified what causes lithium metal batteries to short circuit and fail – and this could help avoid the problem in future battery production. As the result of this discovery, energy-dense, fast-charging, non-flammable lithium metal batteries that last a long time could overcome the main barriers to their use in EVs, among other benefits. Lithium metal batteries with solid…

Scientists have proven that an ultrathin protective coating can protect a perovskite solar cell in space, according to newly published research from the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Perovskite solar cells in space Space-based solar power – collecting solar power in space using solar power satellites and sending that power back to Earth – is being investigated by the US, China, the UK, France, Japan, and other countries. (Check out this infographic…

A new study explains the reason behind the emotional “blunting” that affects around half of people who take SSRIs, a family of common antidepressant medications. The research shows that the drugs impact reinforcement learning, a crucial behavioral process that enables us to learn from our surroundings.Scientists have worked out why common anti-depressants cause around half of users to feel emotionally ‘blunted’. In a study published today, they show that the drugs affect reinforcement learning, an important behavioral…

The origin of Earth's water has been an enduring mystery. There are different hypotheses and theories explaining how the water got here, and lots of evidence supporting them.But water is ubiquitous in protoplanetary disks, and water's origin may not be so mysterious after all.A research article in GeoScienceWorld Elements shows that other young solar systems have abundant water. In solar systems like ours, water is along for the ride as the young star grows and planets form. The evidence is in Earth's heavy water…

Scientists at ETH Zurich have developed a special coating that prevents the lenses in glasses from fogging up. Apparently, not all heroes wear capes. This has been a problem since the advent of optical lenses, but it’s fair to say it reached a peak during the pandemic when everyone wearing glasses found out the hard way that most face masks vent your breath up towards your eyes. You’d think someone would have fixed this by now, but it’s harder than you might guess. The difficulty of the…

Microsoft is seemingly teasing the next Xbox Game Pass release, and fans believe it could be Lego Star Wars. Microsoft posted a cryptic teaser puzzle asking fans to guess what the title might be.The game title is three four-letter words, and many believe it's Lego Star Wars, given the clues Microsoft has released so far. The replies to the tweet are a delight, with people taking advantage of the situation to crack jokes about what the game might be. People guessed things like "Metal Gear Sald," "Yeet Your…

Ancient Venus may have looked more like Earth than previously imagined. New research suggests that Earth’s neighbor may have once looked more like our own planet and less like the hellish landscape we now know it to be. Though technically closer to our Sun than Earth, Venus may have once been in the Sun’s habitable zone – the area around a star where liquid water can exist – when our Sun was much dimmer. As such, ancient Venus may have had oceans spanning across its surface. But, its proximity to the Sun…

A team of researchers at the University of Sofia in Bulgaria may have figured out a novel method for detecting wormholes — assuming, of course, they exist at all. Wormholes are theoretical shortcuts through space and time. Supposedly, if you were to fly a spaceship into one, you could travel massive distances in a relatively short amount of time. This is quite different from a typical black hole — an object from which not even light can escape. The problem with trying to detect wormholes is…