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Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup that was spun out of a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s research labs, announced plans this week to break ground on what it calls “the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant.” The plant which is expected to come online sometime in the early 2030s, according to the company, will be built in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

The plan is certainly an ambitious one, starting with how the energy will be generated. Nuclear fusion is a notoriously difficult process that involves fusing together two light atomic nuclei into a single heavier one, resulting in the release of a massive amount of energy—it’s estimated to produce four times as much energy as nuclear fission reactions. The reaction that nuclear fusion generates is the same kind of reaction that powers the sun.

It’s not hard to imagine why one would want to be able to harness the energy of the sun. It is hard to actually, ya know, do that, though. To date, nuclear fusion has proven elusive—at least in a way that would produce usable energy. In 2022, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California reached nuclear fusion “ignition” for the first time, meaning they successfully produced an excess of energy from the reactions. Prior to that breakthrough, which has since been replicated, it took more energy to produce the reaction than energy that came from it.

And it does not violate the laws of physics.

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Aging happens in distinct stages marked by synchronized cellular changes across organs, as shown in Rockefeller’s largest-ever mammalian aging atlas. Their findings offer clues for targeting aging processes and reveal key age and sex differences in cellular dynamics.

If you compared photos of a maple tree taken in July and December, the difference would be striking: a vibrant green canopy in summer versus bare, stark branches in winter. What those images wouldn’t reveal is how the transformation unfolded—whether it was gradual or sudden. In reality, deciduous trees usually wait for environmental cues, such as changes in light or temperature, before shedding all their leaves within a brief span of one to two weeks.

When it comes to aging, we may be more like these trees than we realized.

Talking to distant spacecraft and more might become a lot easier.

A Neptune-sized planet, TOI-3261 b, makes a scorchingly close orbit around its host star. Only the fourth object of its kind ever found, the planet could reveal clues as to how planets such as these form.

An international team of scientists used the NASA space telescope, TESS (the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), to discover the exoplanet, then made further observations with ground-based telescopes in Australia, Chile, and South Africa. The measurements placed the new planet squarely in the “hot Neptune desert”—a category of planets with so few members that their scarcity evokes a deserted landscape.

The team, led by astronomer Emma Nabbie of the University of Southern Queensland, published their paper on the discovery, “Surviving in the Hot Neptune Desert: The Discovery of the Ultrahot Neptune TOI-3261 b,” in The Astronomical Journal in August 2024.

To assist humans with household chores and other everyday manual tasks, robots should be able to effectively manipulate objects that vary in composition, shape and size. The manipulation skills of robots have improved significantly over the past few years, in part due to the development of increasingly sophisticated cameras and tactile sensors.

Researchers at Columbia University have developed a new system that simultaneously captures both visual and tactile information. The tactile sensor they developed, introduced in a paper presented at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2024 in Munich, could be integrated onto robotic grippers and hands, to further enhance the manipulation skills of robots with varying body structures.

The paper was published on the arXiv preprint server.

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have made tungsten disulfide nanotubes which point in the same direction when formed, for the first time. They used a sapphire surface under carefully controlled conditions to form arrayed tungsten disulfide nanotubes, each consisting of rolled nanosheets, using chemical vapor deposition.

The team’s technique resolves the long-standing issue of jumbled orientations in collected amounts of nanotubes, promising real world device applications for the exotic anisotropy of single nanotubes.

The study is published in the journal Nano Letters.

The cortex is filled with excitatory local synapses, but we know little about their role in brain function. New experimental tools, along with ideas from artificial intelligence, are poised to change that.