Desalinating Seawater With Solar And No Brine

June 7, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

Although desalination is very commonly used these days to convert seawater into fresh water, one of the major disadvantages of current approaches is that commercial desalination plants produce a lot of brine, which has to be dumped somewhere ideally without causing major environmental issues. A new solar-thermal method as demonstrated by [Luheng Tang] et al. was published in Light: Science and Applications, with accompanying PR article.

This method is claimed to require no pre-treatment or leave brine, using special panels that wick water across their surface and then use solar radiation to distill this water. This differs from previous similar methods through a special surface treatment that prevents build-up of salts which would require cleaning or replacement.

The salts and other contaminants that would normally end up in the brine slough off these cells and can then be further processed to recover everything from plain table salt to lithium as well as gold, uranium and other substances of interest that are prevalent in seawater.

So far these self-cleaning cells have been tested with water from a number of oceans with a claimed 74% solar-to-vapor conversion efficiency and nearly 100% salt extraction. As always the challenge will be in scaling this up to industrial levels, but so far it looks promising.

Apparently what a fusion power plant should look like

Less Than 10 Years? Commonwealth Fusion Systems Applies To Plug Into Grid In 2030s

June 7, 2026 by Tyler August 43 Comments

Whenever the topic of fusion power comes up, someone will say it’s only 10 years away from commercialization in an excited tone, and someone older or more cynical will point out that it’s been 10 years away since Eisenhower was president. So it’s with a certain-sized crystal of sodium chloride that we share the news here that the US-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems is applying to feed 400MWe into the grid there by the early 2030s.

The early 2030s is, notably, less than ten years from now.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems isn’t a bunch of nobodies out to suck up venture capital; they’re a talented group of researchers from MIT’s well-known plasma laboratory out to suck up lots of venture capital and hopefully build reactors along the way. So far, the second part is going better than the first: they’ve raised a couple billion dollars, which has let them make great strides in building their SPARC reactor– like crafting the big magnet we told you about in 2021. As that article describes, SPARC is the precursor to the later, larger ARC reactor they hope to hook to the grid in slightly under a decade. Alas, SPARC remains under construction as of this writing. ARC is evidently in the final planning stages, with a physical location determined and grid-tie applied for at the “Fall Line Fusion Power Station” in Virginia.

CFS’s reactors are of the Tokamak type that has been favoured at universities since the 1970s. From China to Europe’s ITER who are also planning to produce power before another decade passes— though not, notably, into a power grid. While promising, Tokamaks aren’t the only game in town, either– steampunk startup General Fusion started making plasma last year, though while if it works it has some big advantages, that one is probably the traditional “ten years away” still.

What do you think? Will fusion power be in the grid before humans make it back to the moon? Add the flying-car potential of eVTOL and we might finally get close to the future we were promised.

Building A Gifford-McMahon Cryocooler With 3D-Printed Parts

June 6, 2026 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

Although cryocoolers are capable of pretty impressive cooling, for many of them the underlying working principle is simple enough that you do not need any special skills or a big budget to make your own version. Take the Gifford-McMahon cryocooler for example, which works using nothing more than some kind of coolant gas and a piston in a cylinder that you can even 3D print, as demonstrated by [Hyperspace Pirate] in a recent video.

The lowest temperature reached across the two prototypes was only -84°C, but this was mostly due to some sub-optimal design choices, such as the use of regular air and a clear acrylic tube to get a good glimpse at the inner workings. The trickiest part of this type of cryocooler is probably that you need to move the piston containing the regenerator between both ends of the cylinder to get a cool and a hot side.

That particular problem was solved by using magnets to move the piston externally, which worked beautifully until the problem of using regular compressed air from the shop compressor caused massive ice formation that jammed up the piston. Obviously this was not an unexpected issue, and for the next step the coolant gas will be replaced by helium, as making that gas freeze up requires quite a bit more effort.

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Using Electrolysis For More Than Just Generating Hydrogen

June 5, 2026 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

When the topic of ‘electrolysis’ is mentioned, people typically think of just splitting plain old dihydrogen monoxide (hydric acid: H₂O) into its constituent atoms, but this barely scratches the surface of what is going on during electrolysis. Once you understand the full picture it also becomes obvious how electrolysis can be used for other tasks, including metal refining, flow batteries and more, as covered in a recent video by [NightHawkInLight].

On a fundamental level electrolysis is what it says on the tin: a way to lyse (i.e. split apart) using electrons, which is what the anode and cathode provide or remove. This can be used to break down the bonds between hydrogen and oxygen, but also those of iron ore, like Fe₃O₄. Stripping the oxygen from the iron atoms is commonly done in a reduction process using the CO from coke or hydrogen,

Setup for electrolysing iron ore. (Credit: NightHawkInLight, YouTube) — Setup for electrolysing iron ore.

By instead dissolving the iron ore in acid, electrolysis can then be used to separate the two. In the example, the acid is created by one side of the electrolytic cell, with both electrodes separated by an ion-exchange membrane barrier that prevents the chemical processes on each side of the cell to affect the other side while still enabling the cell to work. How to make these membranes is also demonstrated in the video.

Through a careful arrangement of these membranes and the electrodes, you can guide which reactions can occur where, and which – negative or positively charged – ion can pass through which membrane, giving a lot of control. It can also be used to prevent undesirable reactions from happening, such as in this case the generating of chlorine gas from the NaCl being lysed.

Acidity indicator dye is used to show in great detail how the cell works, including its preparation of getting the acidity just right before the crushed iron ore is mixed with some of the generated acid and the resulting liquid added to the cell. Following this you get a closed-loop chemical process to which only fresh iron ore slush has to be added and electrodes swapped out for fresh ones as the build-up of iron becomes sufficiently thick. In addition to supplying the cell with electricity, naturally, though you can even invert the cell and use it as a chemical battery akin to a lead-acid one if that’s more your thing.

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Microsoft Claims 20 Second Qubits

June 4, 2026 by Al Williams 19 Comments

While it might seem that your computer malfunctions every few minutes, the reality is that modern computers are usually quite robust. Not so much for quantum computers, where qubit life is often measured in milliseconds. Now, the company claims to have qubits that last for about 20 seconds.

For example, Microsoft’s Majorana 1 quantum chip, which, incidentally, was mired in controversy, provided 8 qubits that were stable very briefly. This second-generation chip provides 12 qubits that average 20-second lifespans.

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AMOC And The Planet-Wide Impact Of Ocean Currents

May 27, 2026 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

Although it can be hard to tell from looking at the often placid waters of the Earth’s oceans, their currents carry immense amounts of water around the globe on a daily basis, underlying a dynamic system that – much like the Earth’s atmosphere – plays a major role in everything from weather systems to local climates and ecosystems.

Of all these ocean currents the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is perhaps the most famous, as it is basically the sole reason why Europe has the mild climate that it does today, courtesy of it carrying thermal energy from the equator all the way to the coast off Scandinavia.

Although collapsing an ocean current seems as improbable as stopping the jet streams in the upper atmosphere, it’s actually significantly easier due to how much ocean currents rely on factors that we can fairly easily influence. Over the past decades we have seen worrying signs that the AMOC is indeed weakening, with the million-dollar question being what scenario we’ll be looking at.

While collapsing the AMOC within a decade may be theoretically possible, current models seem to point towards a weakening by about half by the end of this century, with a recent research article by Valentin Portmann et al. in Science Advances going over the various statistical models to come to this conclusion.

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Hunting Submarines Via Gravity Is A Tough Errand

May 27, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 58 Comments

Among so many other technological advances, the Cold War saw the advent of the ballistic missile submarine. The concept was simple—pack enough nuclear warheads to destroy a small civilization into a compact metal tube, and then hide it underwater. The oceans would act as a cloak for your fleet of world-enders, and keep your enemies forever on their toes. A terrifying machine that could both start and end a war with the push of a button.

Most nation states are populated by humans with the will to live. Thus, there has been a great incentive to find ways to keep tabs on these sunken doombringers. Great efforts have gone into improving sonar and magnetic detection methods over the decades, which are the bread and butter of sub hunting to this day. However, military researchers have also explored the prospect of whether submarines could be detected via their effect on the gravitational field alone.

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