Scientists Create Hexagonal Packed Ice At Extreme Pressures

October 6, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

One of the problems with planetary science is that you generally cannot easily investigate the exact conditions in their interior, so you’re left to extrapolate what is happening inside them based on surface scans. One of the resulting questions is what ice giants like Neptune and Uranus in Earth’s solar system have exactly at their core. We do know that it is mostly rocks and ice, but what kind of ice you end up with at these intense pressures is a good question that [Alexis Forestier] et al. set out to answer, with their results published in a Physical Review Letter paper (ArXiv preprint).

It’s noteworthy that there isn’t just water ice at these planetary cores, with this study only investigating water ice specifically. In order to get the water to the pressures it would experience courtesy of ice giant gravity, a diamond anvil was used, with synchrotron x-ray diffraction allowing for the changes to the sample to be observed.

The phase diagram of water includes a number of phases beyond what us Earth-dwellers would call ‘ice’, with at higher pressures above about 80 GPa the formation of ice X, featuring a body-centered cubic (BCC) oxygen sublattice. Subsequent discovered phases were face-centered cubic (FCC) and now hexagonal close-packed (HCP) ice, all differing in the packing of the oxygen sublattice.

In addition to extreme pressures, temperatures also had to be increased by using the laser heating feature of the diamond anvil. At around 2,000K and over 200 GPa the HCP phase was found, with a mixed FCC-HCP phase at intermediate pressures.

Although not immediately providing answers to questions pertaining to the aforementioned ice giants, it gives planetary scientists yet another clue that they can use in future investigations, as well as provide more insight into this most fascinating phase of water that’s actually its own little galaxy of phases.

3D-Printed Filter Removes Most Microplastics From Water

October 5, 2026 by Maya Posch 20 Comments

With the rise of synthetic polymers in everywhere from clothing, packaging and beyond, we have also seen a corresponding rise in fragments of these polymers in the environment. These micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) come in a wide variety of sizes, but have in common that they do not break down very easily, leaving filtration as an important way to keep them out of our potable water sources. A recent paper by [Ethan A. Crawford] et al. in Separation and Purification Technology details a way to use a low-cost, 3D-printed filtration mesh to filter out up to 90% of MNPs using their prototype.

This prototype uses a multi-layer filtration system printed in PLA, creating a flow-through system in which polyethylene glycol (PEG) acts as a sacrificial additive to the PLA. Whereas creating the fine pores required for filtration of MNPs is impossible using FDM printing, the spheres of PEG that form inside the printed filter can be subsequently etched away using nothing but hot (80°C) water, leaving behind a porous surface capable of trapping fine particles.

These pores are characterized in the paper, with the PLA-PEG10 sample showing the best porous structure while maintaining structural integrity of the PLA material. With 20 layers of these filters a filtration efficiency of 90% was achieved, though as the authors note aspects like improving the system and potential reusability still have to be investigated.

We have previously looked at MNPs, including how little we know about how many of them really are inside our bodies right now, and how lab gloves may be contaminating test results.

That’s No Moon… That’s An Exoplanet!

October 3, 2026 by Al Williams 6 Comments

It wasn’t that long ago that a science teacher would have told students that there was no evidence of planets around other star systems. Even more recently, they might have said that while we’ve seen evidence of extra-solar planets, we would never be able to see them directly. But that’s all changed. [Jason Wang] has several videos that use images taken over years to visualize the orbit of several large exoplanets.

Of course, some extrapolation is involved. According to [Jason]:

We unfortunately do not have the luxury of watching these planets every night and record them. However, these planets move slowly, with orbital periods at least decades long, and predictably following Kepler’s laws. We can use a technique called motion interpolation to reconstruct what the image should look like using images taken before and after the date we are interested in. Motion interpolation is a technique commonly found in video editing and in modern TVs.

You have to be a patient photographer, apparently. One video has 30 images taken over 17 years, for example. Another has 10 images from the Keck Observatory taken over 12 years.

The work has fed scientific papers like this one or this one. While it might be more fun to see these star systems from the bridge of your favorite starship, this is probably as close as you are going to get.

We find both the prospect of exoplanets and the technology used to find them exciting

Using Vibration To Make Stuff Stick Contact-Free To Ceilings

October 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

Generally making stuff stick to something like a ceiling requires resorting to suction cups, glue or something much more permanent, but [Steve Mould] starts his video featuring a playing card that is clearly defying gravity with no such measures. All that it seems to take is the small vibration motor placed on said playing card, with its vibrations making the card stick like a kind of magic trick.

Although the easy explanation would be that it creates a kind of Bernoulli grip – a common pneumatic, contactless gripping device – [Steve] explains how it’s more complex than that. This vibration adhesion effect doesn’t rely on the same constant pressure drop that a Bernoulli grip experiences within the small gap between the surface and the object. Although a gap is present, it’s much smaller in this case.

Of note is that this effect only occurs when the object is made of a flexible enough material that can vibrate along with the vibration source, in the form of a motor or transducer. As demonstrated in the video, this creates standing waves that affect the surrounding air. When pushed against a rigid surface, these standing waves change into travelling waves, which result in the air that enters this small gap constantly being pushed out and thus lowering the air pressure.

The air pressure between the rigid and flexible surfaces thus becomes lower than that of the surrounding air, creating the resulting suction effect without touching the surface as something like a suction cup would.

One can imagine practical uses for this effect much like with Bernoulli grips. These are especially common in the semiconductor industry for handling delicate items like silicon wafers with zero risk of contamination. In the video it’s shown how you can use the effect to even hold the weight of a person, though they failed to get past a few dozen kilograms with the used setup involving a 400 Watt transducer, possibly due to their ‘ceiling’ not being rigid enough, leading to energy loss.

There are also papers such as this 2025 one by [Siquan Li] et al. who suggest a ‘Micro-Vibration Adhesion’ (VBA) system to help small robots climb up walls for use in repairs and inspection. In their experimental setup they found an adhesion-to-weight ratio exceeding 51 times, making it an interesting way to have small robots defy gravitational pull without a complicated mechanism.

Continue reading “Using Vibration To Make Stuff Stick Contact-Free To Ceilings” →

Power It With Sodium (But Please Don’t)

October 1, 2026 by Al Williams 19 Comments

[Applied Science] has a new demo of an old 1970s patent for a portable generator that is both interesting and terrifying. The generator uses sodium and water, which, if you remember your old chemistry classes, will combust spontaneously. Turns out, though, it won’t if you draw power from it fast enough. Don’t draw enough power? BOOM, apparently. Check it out in the video below.

Of course, lithium-ion batteries might catch fire, too, but this looks a lot more likely. The patent made some wild claims about how much you could draw from the device, but the video shows that practical results are somewhat less.

Continue reading “Power It With Sodium (But Please Don’t)” →

Two diaphragm vacuum pump setups with high-tech jam jar vacuum vessel. (Credit: Maya Posch)

Vacuum Drying And Making Stuff Hot In A Vacuum

October 1, 2026 by Maya Posch 24 Comments

After previously exploring the impact of vapor pressure on the drying of desiccant and more, the conclusion was essentially that in order to drive moisture that’s not directly on a material’s surface out of it, you pretty much have to heat up said material to make the process not take forever. Of course, we’d still want to retain the vacuum while doing said heating, which raises the question of how you best heat something that is inside a vacuum.

Fortunately, this is a solved problem, with commentators to the previous article helpfully pointing to the existence of devices like vacuum ovens. Of course, you can either buy such a device and not worry your pretty little head about the finer details, or you can defy convention and build one yourself because you’re a rebel and really want to know how their internals work.

Thus in this article we’ll be taking a look at the finer details of generating thermal radiation and how to best heat up a sample inside a vacuum chamber without directly picking easy mode with microwaves.

Continue reading “Vacuum Drying And Making Stuff Hot In A Vacuum” →

Will Superconducting Transistors Help Quantum Computers?

September 30, 2026 by Maya Posch 25 Comments

Despite all the glamorous promises made about quantum computing, it’s hard to make the argument that today’s quantum computers hold a candle to the sheer practicality of classical computers, especially when qubits need to be cuddled at cryogenic temperatures inside a cryostat. This is worsened by the problem that regular semiconductor transistors do not really appreciate these same cryogenic temperatures, creating an awkward interfacing problem for the controlling electronics.

Now a new pitch here is to create superconducting transistors that will happily work at temperatures near absolute zero. In an article in IEEE Spectrum this start-up – called S-Transistors – and their concept are covered.

By being able to have the control circuits inside the same cryostat, one can forego the absolute mess of wiring that has to penetrate it, and with it one major failure point. Their proposed solution uses the same Josephson junctions (JJs) that are also used for qubits, using a high enough current to briefly make it non-superconducting, inducing a voltage pulse that can be detected.

In addition, JJ-based field effect transistors (JJFETs) are used, with this 2025 paper by [Yusheng Xiong] et al. detailing these structures. Here S–Transistors claims that they are now able to manufacture JJFETs at scale, which would be another major breakthrough that could bring quantum computing just a little bit closer.

They’d be competing with cryogenic CMOS (Cry-CMOS), which can use standard semiconductor production lines to create circuits that can withstand cryogenic temperatures, albeit not quite a the near-zero K level that these superconducting transistors and JJFETs would be capable of.