Physicists at the ARC Centre for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) have fabricated a new way to make wire-grid polarisers at a fraction of the cost of current options on the market – using an ordinary sheet of aluminium kitchen foil and a nanosecond laser with precisely controlled pulses.

Researchers from the University of Osaka have developed a new class of chiral semiconducting polymers that can generate highly spin-polarized electrical currents. The team’s unique molecular design allows the polymers to self-assemble into helical structures that efficiently filter electron spins, offering a promising platform for future spintronic devices and clean-energy technologies.

Before people can mine resources on the Moon, asteroids, or Mars, they need to answer a few key questions: What is there? How much is there? And where can it be found?

A team led by SETI Institute research scientist Pablo Sobron is looking into a new way to answer these questions without having to land, drill, or bring samples back to Earth. Supported by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, the project is testing whether Raman spectroscopy—a technique already used in planetary exploration at close range—could be used from orbit or during fast flybys to identify minerals, water, and other materials.

The idea, called Interworld Slingshot Resource Surveys, suggests using a small spacecraft with one remote-sensing tool to study several places, such as the Moon, a near-Earth asteroid, and Phobos, which is one of Mars’s moons.

“The thing most likely to stop space mining may be that we cannot afford to prove there is anything worth mining. Land in the wrong place and you can lose an entire exploration program or a company, and nobody has enough money to keep sending spacecraft and hoping for the best. We are asking whether Raman can give us an affordable way to put an X on the map before anyone commits to landing. And if the physics works, this may become much more than a mining tool; it could give us a new way to explore places like Europa and Enceladus for science.” -Pablo Sobron

Lithium titanate (LTO, Li₄Ti₅O₁₂) is a well-established battery material that, in its pristine state, is a poor conductor of lithium ions. It develops high ionic conductivity only during charging, when additional lithium ions and electrons are incorporated into the material. Bernhard Gadermaier and Martin Wilkening from the Institute of Chemistry and Technology of Materials at TU Graz have now taken an entirely different approach: they transformed pure, non-lithiated LTO in its original composition, Li₄Ti₅O₁₂, into a significantly better ion conductor by deliberately introducing defects into the crystal lattice. Specifically, they removed individual oxygen atoms, thereby creating oxygen vacancies that activate a previously blocked migration pathway for lithium ions. “This diffusion pathway is already pre-formed in the LTO structure, but is only activated by the defect structure,” explains Wilkening. The results of the experimental study have been published in the journal Science Advances.

Researchers at the University of Utah and The University of Texas at Austin have demonstrated a new method of 3D printing that avoids the leaky seams that come with the layer-by-layer process. Using a nanoscale “mask” that diffracts laser light into a holographic pattern of the desired shape, it fuses its print material solid in one shot much faster than other printing methods.

SAN ANTONIO — August 19, 2026 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has developed a new framework for early detection of wildfires with real-time modeling that combines various datasets with complex remote sensing capabilities. Understanding real-time wildfire growth patterns and fire dynamics, while accounting for environmental and atmospheric variables, can help emergency officials make life-saving decisions about when to inform an at-risk community or where to stage resources.

Researchers have developed a method for determining the accuracy of quantum simulations. The new method not only reconstructs the dynamics of a quantum system from experimental data, but can also quantify the uncertainty of the predictions derived from it. The verification method was demonstrated in Innsbruck, Austria, on an ion-trap quantum computer with up to 51 qubits.