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NASA has picked SpaceX, Amazon and four other American companies to develop the next generation of near-Earth space communication services meant to support its future missions. The agency started looking for partners under the Communication Services Project (CSP) in mid-2021, explaining that the use of commercially provided SATCOM will reduce costs and allow it to focus its efforts on deep space exploration and science missions.

“Adopting commercial SATCOM capabilities will empower missions to leverage private sector investment that far exceeds what government can do,” NASA wrote in the official project page. By using technology developed by commercial companies, the agency will have continued access to any innovation they incorporate into the system. At the moment, NASA relies on its Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system for near-Earth space communications. Many of its satellites were launched in the 80’s and 90’s, though, and it’s set to be decommissioned in the coming years.

The funded agreements under NASA’s Communication Services Project has a combined value of $278.5 million, with SpaceX getting the highest cut. NASA expects the companies to match and exceed its contribution during the five-year development period. SpaceX, which proposed a “commercial optical low-Earth orbiting relay network for high-rate SATCOM services,” has been awarded $69.95 million. Amazon’s Project Kuiper is getting the second-highest cut and has been awarded $67 million, while Viasat Incorporated has been awarded $53.3 million. The other three awardees are Telesat US Services ($30.65 million), SES Government Solutions ($28.96 million) and Inmarsat Government Inc. ($28.6 million).

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Researchers in Beijing have set a new quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) world record of 102.2 km (64 miles), smashing the previous mark of 18 km (11 miles), The Eurasian Times reported. Transmission speeds were extremely slow at 0.54 bits per second, but still good enough for text message and phone call encryption over a distance of 30 km (19 miles), wrote research lead Long Guilu in Nature. The work could eventually lead to hack-proof communication, as any eavesdropping attempt on a quantum line can be instantly detected.

QSDC uses the principal of entanglement to secure networks. Quantum physics dictates that entangled particles are linked, so that if you change the property of one by measuring it, the other will instantly change, too — effectively making hacking impossible. In theory, the particles stay linked even if they’re light-years apart, so such systems should work over great distances.

The same research team set the previous fiber record, and devised a “novel design of physical system with a new protocol” to achieve the longer distance. They simplified it by eliminating the “complicated active compensation subsystem” used in the previous model. “This enables an ultra-low quantum bit error rate (QBER) and the long-term stability against environmental noises.”

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A major challenge for producers of electricity from solar panels and wind turbines is akin to capturing lightning in a bottle. Both solar and wind increasingly generate electricity amid little demand, when market prices are too low to cover costs. At noon on sunny days, for example, wholesale power prices in areas with high quantities of solar and wind occasionally fall below zero.

Some renewable energy producers store their excess as green , using the electricity to produce hydrogen from water—labeled “green” because the process emits no . Used to create fuels, fertilizer, and other chemicals, the global hydrogen market is about $125 billion, and it’s growing briskly in part due to increased interest in hydrogen as a fuel for buses, trucks, and even ships. The problem is that producing hydrogen with electricity remains fairly expensive, so it’s only profitable to sell at the higher prices paid by lower-volume customers.

But now, researchers at Stanford University and at the University of Mannheim in Germany have found a possible solution: integrated reversible power-to-gas systems that can easily convert hydrogen back to electricity when power prices spike higher.

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Micronovae are about 1 million times less bright than a classical nova, says Scaringi, lasting just half a day, compared with several weeks for novae.

The brevity of the events meant they had previously been missed, but TESS was able to spot them during its around-the-clock observations of the galaxy in search of exoplanets. Three were seen up to 5,000 light years from Earth, with the white dwarfs brightening temporarily before dimming again.

The exact mechanism behind the explosions isn’t clear, but it is thought they may be caused by hydrogen accumulating at the poles of the star – perhaps as much as the mass of an asteroid in just 100 days. Eventually, the hydrogen reaches sufficient temperatures and pressures to ignite fusion and cause a localised thermonuclear explosion that releases as much energy as the sun would in a day.

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A 3D printer that uses lasers to build up an object in any order, rather than layer by layer, could produce more advanced designs than is currently possible.

Existing 3D printers work by depositing layers of a plastic filament from a nozzle or by curing layers of resin with UV light. In both cases objects are built up one layer at a time, meaning that overhanging parts of a structure – the outstretched arms of a model human, say – must be propped up by temporary supports until printing is complete. These supports must then be carefully removed manually.

To get around this, Dan Congreve at Stanford University in California and his colleagues created a 3D-printing system that involves focusing a red laser at a particular point in a pool of resin. The resin is impregnated with particles 80 nanometres wide that convert red light into blue once the light hits a certain energy threshold, which only occurs at the point where the red laser is precisely focused.

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