Harvests

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the company’s Dragon spacecraft aboard is seen on the launch pad at Launch Complex 39A ahead of Axiom Mission 3 launch. Credit: SpaceXAs part of NASA’s efforts to open access to space, SpaceX and Axiom Space now are targeting no earlier than 4:49 p.m. EST on Thursday, January 18, for the launch of the third private mission to the International Space Station. The date adjustment for Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) allows additional time for SpaceX to complete data analysis of the parachute system…

On a warm, blustery December afternoon outside the De Laurentis olive oil-producing co-op in the white hilltop town of Ostuni, Puglia, Luigi D'Amico holds out his palm, revealing an olive picked earlier in the day.Instead of resembling the plump, gleaming green and black fruit overflowing in bins around him, this one is half-consumed, dry and shrunken."That's what the olive fly does," he explained. "It lays its larvae, which then devours the olive."D'Amico lists off other pests and fungi — olive leprosy, peacock's eye…

The principle, structural design, and application of carbon fiber-reinforced polymer-enhanced piezoelectric nanocomposite materials. Credit: Tohoku UniversityResearchers have developed a device that turns environmental vibrations into electricity using piezoelectric composites and carbon fiber-reinforced polymer. The device, named C-PVEH, is durable, efficient, and a promising solution for powering IoT devices, heralding advancements in energy-efficient technologies.An international research group has engineered a new…

When you think of all the human hair that gets cut off and discarded every day in salons around the world … well, that's a lot of wasted hair. That said, scientists in India have devised a new technique for extracting compounds from it, for use in products like wound dressings and sunscreen.Among other things, human hair is composed largely of a protein known as keratin (as are our fingernails) along with a pigment called melanin, which gives it its color.Although both substances have numerous potential applications,…

Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have developed an unusual way to harvest wave power, with a gently rolling cylinder designed around the triboelectric effect that causes static shocks after you walk on certain carpets.The PNNL team has prototyped a new "frequency-multiplied cylindrical triboelectric nanogenerator," (FMC-TENG) specifically designed to draw power from low-frequency waves out in the open ocean. We're not talking megawatt-scale devices here capable of feeding energy back to the…

In November 2021, Facebook announced it would delete face recognition data extracted from images of more than 1 billion people and stop offering to automatically tag people in photos and videos. Luke Stark, an assistant professor at Western University, in Canada, told WIRED at the time that he considered the policy change a PR tactic because the company’s VR push would likely lead to the expanded collection of physiological data and raise new privacy concerns.This week, Stark’s prediction proved right. Meta, as the…

In 2019, Andrew Fleming-Brown realised that the venue he manages in Glasgow, called SWG3, a collection of industrial warehouses “designed for holding tobacco, not people”, was falling behind when it came to sustainability. Then he had an idea: “We realised that our audiences could be our source of energy.”He recruited inventor David Townsend and his company TownRock Energy to investigate greening the complex and, in just over a year, they developed and built Bodyheat: a system that provides carbon-free climate control by…

Hydrogen has huge potential as a clean fuel: it's abundant (mainly in compounds like water), it doesn't produce any damaging emissions, and it can also be used to store energy from solar, wind, and tidal sources.There are challenges in producing enough of the stuff in a practical and affordable way, however. Splitting hydrogen from water can require complicated technology and also relies on pure freshwater – not something that's plentifully available everywhere.Now, scientists have come up with a new prototype device…

British farmers have warned that the country's hot and dry conditions will inevitably lead to smaller harvests this year.Planet One Images | Universal Images Group | Getty ImagesIn a typical year, Rodger Hobson can expect to produce around 35,000 tons of carrots on his 880-acre farm in Yorkshire in northern England. But 2022 has been anything but typical.As an extreme heatwave and subsequent drought have wreaked havoc on European agricultural cycles, large swathes of Hobson's crop have blackened and died. He now expects a…

| At San Diego Comic-Con, writer/artist/editor/publisher Sina Grace announced his upcoming original young adult graphic novel Superman: The Harvests of Youth, on sale on the 3rd of October, 2023. Yup, that's next year, I had to check. I have lost all sense of time these days. The book looks at a young Clark Kent, in high school in Smallville, as he grapples with the mortality of his friends and family, teen isolation and the seductive nature of online subcultures built around hate and anger. It features characters…