New research from RMIT University found confined and isolating environments changed the way people smelled and responded emotionally to certain food aromas.

The research, published in Food Research International, builds on previous work by the team and aims to help explain why astronauts report meals taste different in space and struggle to eat their normal nutritional intake over long missions, which has been reported in the news recently.

International scientists, including a team from Heriot-Watt University in Scotland, has announced plans to develop a revolutionary new way of harvesting solar energy in space. The new technology would directly convert sunlight into laser beams, facilitating the transmission of power over vast distances such as between satellites, from satellites to lunar bases, or even back to Earth. Their approach is inspired by the way bacteria and other plants and organisms convert light energy into chemical energy - a process known as photosynthesis. Repurposing natural photosynthetic structures from nature will form a key component in the new laser technology.

Military and civilian emergency thermochromic applications require rapid visible-light stealth (VLS); however, concurrent smart solar transmission and rapid VLS is yet to be realized. Inspired by squid-skin, a new mechanism of biomimetic thermal phase transformation coupled with forced-induced morphology transformation to regulate full-dimensional (frequency, space and angle) thermal radiation was constructed. It has solved the difficulty of compatibility between smart photothermal regulation and rapid VLS, and shortened the response time from traditional 180 seconds to 1 second.

NASA researchers Guan Yang, Jeff Chen, and their team received the 2024 Innovator of The Year Award at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for their exemplary work on a lidar system enhanced with artificial intelligence and other technologies.