Chong Liu is standing to the right, facing the camera, in a lab. She is wearing a navy jacket and blue nitrile gloves. She has long black hair and wears glasses.

A materials scientist seeks to extract lithium from untapped sources

Electric vehicles promise to help wean us off of fossil fuels, but they introduce a new problem: how to get enough of the lithium that EV batteries require (SN: 5/7/19). Materials scientist Chong Liu of the University of Chicago has some ideas. Existing technology can extract lithium only from sources with highly concentrated ions, like […]
A digital reconstruction of a single nerve cell, colored green, is dotted with smaller red areas.

A study in mice hints at a new way to treat spinal cord injuries

After a devastating spinal cord injury, mice’s nerve cells balloon up in size. Some of these neurons stay swollen longer than expected and begin to die, a study published September 25 in Science Translational Medicine shows. A drug that brought this swelling down improved the mice’s recovery, though it’s not yet known if the approach […]
A line of bright spots representing satellites are seen in the night sky above a home

Starlink satellites’ leaky radio waves obscure the cosmos

While SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are enabling internet access and cell phone communications around the globe, they’re also posing a threat to radio astronomy, a new study suggests. In some wavelength bands, unintended leakage of electromagnetic radiation from the latest generation of the satellites is more than 30 times brighter than emissions from previous versions, Cees […]
Nicole Yunger Halpern is looking at the camera while smiling widely. She has long brown hair and wears glasses.

Why this physicist is bringing thermodynamics to the quantum age

Picture Victorian London, but its skies are filled with airships. Steam-powered robots crowd the streets, mingling with people in top hats and petticoats. That type of retrofuturistic mash-up is the fantasy realm of steampunk, a genre of literature, film and other creative media. Theoretical physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern sees her specialty, the field of quantum […]
Bright points are scattered in a weblike pattern over a dark background in a computer simulation of the cosmic web.

A neutrino mass mismatch could shake cosmology’s foundations

As the youthful universe congealed under the pull of gravity, matter knotted itself into galaxies, galaxy clusters and filaments, weaving a dazzlingly intricate cosmic web. This web’s structure is thanks, in part, to the handiwork of neutrinos — lightweight, subatomic particles that surge through the cosmos in unimaginable numbers. Because they streak about at high […]
Bhavin Shastri stares into the camera while smiling widely. He

This engineer’s light-based computers take inspiration from the brain

Bhavin Shastri still gets excited when he sees a laser pointer, and he’s been fascinated by them since he was about 10 years old. “I was amazed that a light beam could maintain its brightness, centered in a tiny spot even after traveling a great distance,” Shastri says. “A laser pointer in my hand felt like a […]
A brain network linked to attention is larger in people with depression

A brain network linked to attention is larger in people with depression

Symptoms of depression fluctuate over time, but many brain imaging studies of the condition only study one point in time. That’s made it hard to connect networks of brain activity to various symptoms and mood changes. Now, a new study using long-term brain imaging data shows one brain network involved in guiding attention is nearly […]
Tracy Slatyer is staring at the camera, smiling. There is a black board with equations written on in the background. Slatyer is wearing a black jacket and silver watch. Her light brown (or dark blonde) hair is pulled back in a ponytail.

How did dark matter shape the universe? This physicist has ideas

At age 12, Tracy Slatyer felt sorry for a book. She read a newspaper article about how lots of people were buying A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. “But then … nobody was actually reading it,” she says. “People were just leaving it on their coffee tables.” Determined to rectify this wrong, Slatyer […]
Chong Liu is standing to the right, facing the camera, in a lab. She is wearing a navy jacket and blue nitrile gloves. She has long black hair and wears glasses.

A materials scientist seeks to extract lithium from untapped sources

Electric vehicles promise to help wean us off of fossil fuels, but they introduce a new problem: how to get enough of the lithium that EV batteries require (SN: 5/7/19). Materials scientist Chong Liu of the University of Chicago has some ideas. Existing technology can extract lithium only from sources with highly concentrated ions, like […]
A digital reconstruction of a single nerve cell, colored green, is dotted with smaller red areas.

A study in mice hints at a new way to treat spinal cord injuries

After a devastating spinal cord injury, mice’s nerve cells balloon up in size. Some of these neurons stay swollen longer than expected and begin to die, a study published September 25 in Science Translational Medicine shows. A drug that brought this swelling down improved the mice’s recovery, though it’s not yet known if the approach […]
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