Engineers at CERN have begun removing some of the Large Hadron Collider's most important magnets, the start of the hardest phase of the machine's High-Luminosity upgrade. The 27-kilometre ring is offline for the work. The replacement superconducting magnets produce fields about 40 percent stronger, which lets operators squeeze the particle beams into a tighter focus and raise the number of collisions per second. The upgrade is meant to multiply the total data the collider collects over its lifetime, making rare processes measurable. The new magnets are manufactured in series and tested individually before installation, along with upgraded cryogenics and vacuum systems.
A team led by Worcester Polytechnic Institute has won a $3.3 million National Science Foundation award to test whether biological tricks used by diatoms, sea sponges and plants can pull rare earth elements and silica out of coal ash, red mud and mine tailings. One estimate puts 11 million tons of rare earth elements in US coal ash, worth $8.4 billion, or nearly eight times current domestic reserves. The five-year project also aims to turn the leftover silica into useful products, cutting energy use and harsh chemicals. The project brings together biology, geochemistry, materials science, metallurgy, engineering, computational chemistry and artificial intelligence.
Refineries separate crude oil by heating it above 350C and cooling the vapour, a process that consumes roughly 1,100 terawatt-hours a year worldwide, about the output of 130 large nuclear plants. A team led by KAIST with Georgia Tech has shown that a bare, inexpensive polyacrylonitrile membrane can fractionate real crude at room temperature: heavy hydrocarbons settle on the pore walls and narrow them into channels under 2 nanometres, letting naphtha, gasoline and kerosene through while holding the rest back. Simulations put energy savings at 32% as a distillation pre-treatment.
A Stanford Medicine-led study published in Nature Neuroscience on 18 September reports that the human brain forms from two separate populations of progenitor cells rather than one. The forebrain and midbrain come from one group, while the hindbrain develops from a distinct second group. The team traced the same two-origin pattern across 550 million years of evolution, finding it in chickens, zebrafish and acorn worms. Jellyfish, which split from the human line 600 to 700 million years ago, carry two nervous systems at opposite ends of the body. The authors say the finding may help research into neurological disease.
The AnWj antigen was identified in 1972 and named after two patients, Anton and Wj, but nobody could say which gene produced it. Researchers at NHS Blood and Transplant's International Blood Group Reference Laboratory in Bristol, with the University of Bristol and international partners, have now found the answer on the MAL gene. That created MAL, the 47th blood group system, registered as ISBT 047 and ratified in the society's 2026 terminology report alongside ER, CD36 and ATP11C. AnWj-negative people do not carry the full-length Mal protein on their red cells. The practical gain is a genetic test that helps reference laboratories find compatible blood faster for patients who would react to AnWj-positive transfusions.
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a one-pot process that converts polyethylene into gasoline- and diesel-like fuels using cheap molten aluminium-based salts that act as both catalyst and solvent. The reaction runs below 200 degrees Celsius and needs no added hydrogen, no extra solvent and no precious-metal catalysts. It produces liquid alkanes, the same class of molecules refineries already handle, which raises the prospect that waste plastic could displace some refinery feedstock instead of being burned or buried. The work was reported on September 21. The open questions are continuous-flow behaviour, tolerance of contaminated plastic feed and long-run energy balance.
NASA awarded SpaceX a 946 million dollar contract modification to fly three more astronaut missions to the International Space Station. The flights, labeled Crew-15, Crew-16 and Crew-17, extend the company's Commercial Crew Transportation Capability agreement to 17 missions and a total value of 5.92 billion dollars, with a performance period running through 2030. SpaceX is flying Crew-12 and expects to launch Crew-13 in early October. Boeing's Starliner has still not flown an operational crew rotation after its 2024 test flight ended with astronauts returning on another vehicle. NASA says the deal keeps access to the station through two commercial partners.
Engineers at the Robotics and AI Institute have built a two-armed robot that trades stiffness for speed, aiming to catch, throw and hand over objects the way people do. AthenaZero is about 1.6 metres tall with 22 actuators across 27 joints, and uses quasi-direct drive motors with the heavy transmission parts moved away from the joints. Reflected inertia is about an order of magnitude lower than a conventional high-stiffness arm, giving an effective hand mass comparable to a human's. The team says dynamic manipulation needs hardware that can be pushed around by the world, not arms that fight contact.
Anak Krakatau erupted for more than 24 hours in early September, sending volcanic ash as high as 50,000 feet into the atmosphere, according to ScienceDaily. The ash cloud shut eight airports, disrupted nearly 3,000 flights and affected air quality as far away as Jakarta. The volcano sits in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, in the caldera left by the 1883 eruption of Krakatau, one of the deadliest in recorded history. Ash is dangerous to jet engines because the particles melt and stick to turbine blades, which is why authorities close airspace instead of flying through a plume.
A study led by the Southwest Research Institute offers the first evidence that liquid nitrogen has recently flowed on Pluto's surface. Researchers used images from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to examine dark, narrow features along the northern edge of Sputnik Planitia, the huge nitrogen glacier that forms the western lobe of Pluto's heart-shaped region. The features resemble patterns on Greenland's ice sheet where liquid water darkens snow and ice. The team suggests nitrogen melts near the base of the glacier and rises through cracks. The paper was published in The Planetary Science Journal.