The United States formally withdrew from the World Health Organization on Thursday, making good on an executive order that President Trump issued on his first day in office pledging to leave the international organization that coordinates global responses to public health threats. The New York Times: While the United States is walking away from the organization, a senior official with the Department of Health and Human Services told reporters on Thursday that the Trump administration was considering some type of narrow, limited engagement with W.H.O. global networks that track infectious diseases, including influenza.

As a W.H.O. member, the United States long sent scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to participate in international decision-making about which strains to include in the flu vaccine. A W.H.O. meeting on next year's vaccine is scheduled for February. The official said the Trump administration would soon disclose how or whether it will participate.

On Thursday, the administration said that all U.S. government funding to the organization had been terminated, and that all assigned federal employees and contractors had been recalled from its Geneva headquarters and its offices worldwide.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A systematic review of 85 studies has now found good reason to differentiate between 'active' sitting, like playing cards or reading, and 'passive' sitting, like watching TV. [...] "Total sitting time has been shown to be related to brain health; however, sitting is often treated as a single entity, without considering the specific type of activity," explains public health researcher Paul Gardiner from the University of Queensland in Australia. "Most people spend many hours sitting each day, so the type of sitting really matters ... These findings show that small everyday choices -- like reading instead of watching television -- may help keep your brain healthier as you age."

Across numerous studies, Gardiner and colleagues found that active sitting activities, like reading, playing card games, and using a computer, showed "overwhelmingly positive associations with cognitive health, enhancing cognitive functions such as executive function, situational memory, and working memory." Meanwhile, passive sitting was most consistently associated with negative cognitive outcomes, including increased risk of dementia. The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

Ancient Slashdot reader erice shares the findings from a recent study showing that while AI helped researchers publish more often and boosted their careers, the resulting papers were, on average, less useful. "You have this conflict between individual incentives and science as a whole," says James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who led the study. From a recent IEEE Spectrum article: To quantify the effect, Evans and collaborators from the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology trained a natural language processing model to identify AI-augmented research across six natural science disciplines. Their dataset included 41.3 million English-language papers published between 1980 and 2025 in biology, chemistry, physics, medicine, materials science, and geology. They excluded fields such as computer science and mathematics that focus on developing AI methods themselves. The researchers traced the careers of individual scientists, examined how their papers accumulated attention, and zoomed out to consider how entire fields clustered or dispersed intellectually over time. They compared roughly 311,000 papers that incorporated AI in some way -- through the use of neural networks or large language models, for example -- with millions of others that did not.

The results revealed a striking trade-off. Scientists who adopt AI gain productivity and visibility: On average, they publish three times as many papers, receive nearly five times as many citations, and become team leaders a year or two earlier than those who do not. But when those papers are mapped in a high-dimensional "knowledge space," AI-heavy research occupies a smaller intellectual footprint, clusters more tightly around popular, data-rich problems, and generates weaker networks of follow-on engagement between studies. The pattern held across decades of AI development, spanning early machine learning, the rise of deep learning, and the current wave of generative AI. "If anything," Evans notes, "it's intensifying." [...] Aside from recent publishing distortions, Evans's analysis suggests that AI is largely automating the most tractable parts of science rather than expanding its frontiers.

NASA Langley has initiated the U.S. government software approval process to install CapFrameX, a benchmarking tool popular among PC gaming enthusiasts, on its cockpit simulators used to train test pilots. The space agency reached out to CapFrameX, not the other way around, according to an X post from the company.

NASA builds custom flight simulators from scratch for experimental aircraft like the X-59, a supersonic jet designed to produce a quiet thump rather than the traditional sonic boom. The agency's simulator teams replicate every switch, dial and knob to match the actual cockpit layout, helping pilots build muscle memory before flying the real thing.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Moderna does not plan to invest in new late-stage vaccine trials because of growing opposition to immunizations from U.S. officials, CEO Stephane Bancel said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Thursday. "You cannot make a return on investment if you don't have access to the U.S. market," Bancel told Bloomberg TV on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Bancel said regulatory delays and little support from the authorities make the market size "much smaller."

An anonymous reader shares a report: An airport made of bamboo? A tower reaching 20 metres high? For many years, bamboo has been mostly known as the favourite food of giant pandas, but a group of engineers say it's time we took it seriously as a building material, too.

This week the Institution of Structural Engineers called for architects to be "bamboo-ready" as they published a manual for designing permanent buildings made of the material, in an effort to encourage low-carbon construction and position bamboo as a proper alternative to steel and concrete.

Bamboo has already been used for a number of boundary-pushing projects around the world. At Terminal 2 of Kempegowda international airport in Bengaluru, India, bamboo tubes make up the ceiling and pillars. The Ninghai bamboo tower in north-east China, which is more than 20 metres tall, is claimed to be the world's first high-rise building made using engineered bamboo.

At the Green School in Bali, a bamboo-made arc serves as the gymnasium and a striking example of how the material is reshaping sustainable architecture. The use of composite bamboo shear walls have proved to be resilient against earthquakes and extreme weather in countries such as Colombia and the Philippines, where sustainable, disaster-resilient housing has been built with locally sourced materials.

Blue Origin has unveiled an enterprise-focused satellite internet network called TeraWave, which promises up to 6 Tbps speeds via a mixed low- and medium-Earth orbit constellation. TechCrunch reports: The TeraWave constellation will use a mix of 5,280 satellites in low-Earth orbit and 128 in medium-Earth orbit, and Blue Origin plans to deploy the first ones in late 2027. It's not immediately clear how long Blue Origin expects it will take to build out the whole network. The low-Earth orbit satellites Blue Origin is building will use RF connectivity and have a max data transfer speed of 144 Gbps, while the medium-Earth variety will use an optical link that can achieve the much higher 6 Tbps speed. For reference, SpaceX's Starlink currently maxes out at 400 Mbps -- though it plans to launch upgraded satellites that will offer 1 Gbps data transfer in the future. "We identified an unmet need with customers who were seeking enterprise-grade internet access with higher speeds, symmetrical upload/download speeds, more redundancy, and rapid scalability for their networks. TeraWave solves for these problems," Blue Origin said in a statement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic have transformed millions of lives with easily administered treatments and quick results. Now it turns out the dropped pounds may have a surprising perk for airlines, too: lower fuel costs, as slimmer passengers lighten their aircraft's loads.

According to a study published last week by Jefferies, a financial services firm, the four largest U.S. carriers -- American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines -- could together save as much as $580 million per year on fuel thanks to weight-loss drugs, known as GLP-1s. One in eight U.S. adults said they were taking a GLP-1 in a November survey published by KFF, a nonprofit health research group. Fuel is among airlines' largest expenses. The Jefferies study estimates that the four airlines will together consume 16 billion gallons of fuel in 2026 at a total cost of $38.6 billion, nearly 20 percent of their total expenses.

The savings from skinnier passengers would amount to just 1.5 percent of fuel costs. But airlines and pilots must scrutinize even the smallest changes to a plane's weight and balance, and a lighter payload means each jet burns less fuel to generate the thrust necessary to fly. Investors could also stand to benefit: The researchers estimated that a 2 percent reduction in aircraft weight could boost earnings per share by about 4 percent. "Please note savings are before any lost snack sales," the Jefferies analysts added.

New research from Cornell University has tracked how households change their spending after someone starts taking GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy, and the numbers are material enough to explain why food industry earnings calls keep blaming everything except the obvious culprit.

The study analyzed transaction data from 150,000 households linked to survey responses on medication adoption. Households cut grocery spending by 5.3% within six months of a member starting GLP-1s; high-income households cut by 8.2%. Fast food spending fell 8.0%. Savory snacks took the biggest hit at 10.1%, followed by sweets and baked goods. Yogurt was the only category to see a statistically significant increase.

As of July 2024, 16.3% of U.S. households had at least one GLP-1 user. Nearly half of adopters reported taking the medication specifically for weight loss rather than diabetes management. About 34% of users discontinue within the sample period, and when they stop, candy and chocolate purchases rise 11.4% above pre-adoption levels.

Further reading: Weighing the Cost of Smaller Appetites.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from U.S. News & World Report: U.S. health officials plan a new study investigating whether radiation from cellphones may affect human health. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said the research will examine electromagnetic radiation and possible gaps in current science. The initiative stems from numerous concerns raised by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has linked cellphone use to neurological damage and cancer.

"The [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] removed webpages with old conclusions about cell phone radiation while HHS undertakes a study on electromagnetic radiation and health research to identify gaps in knowledge, including on new technologies, to ensure safety and efficacy," HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said. He added that the study was directed in a strategy report from the president's Make America Healthy Again Commission.

Some webpages from the FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say current research does not show clear harm from cellphone radiation. The National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, says that "evidence to date suggests that cellphone use does not cause brain or other kinds of cancer in humans.".

He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who served three years in prison after creating the world's first gene-edited babies in 2018, is now preparing for another attempt at germline editing -- this time to prevent Alzheimer's disease. In an interview, He said he has established an independent lab in south Beijing and raised $7 million from private donors to fund research into introducing a protective genetic mutation found in Icelandic populations.

The three girls born from his original experiment are now in primary school and healthy, according to He. Since germline editing remains banned in China, He said he plans to conduct future human trials in South Africa and has already spoken with contacts there. He estimates he needs two more years to complete mouse and monkey studies before seeking regulatory approval abroad. He said his lab is developing techniques to make 12 simultaneous genetic edits in a single embryo, targeting genes associated with cancer, cardiovascular disease, HIV, and other conditions. He is currently working on human cell lines and has not yet begun embryo experiments.

A new study from Scripps Institution of Oceanography finds that factoring ocean damage into climate economics nearly doubles the estimated global cost of climate change, adding close to $2 trillion per year from losses to fisheries, coral reefs, and coastal infrastructure. "It is the first time a social cost of carbon (SCC) assessment -- a key measure of economic harm caused by climate change -- has included damages to the ocean," reports Inside Climate News. From the report: "For decades, we've been estimating the economic cost of climate change while effectively assigning a value of zero to the ocean," said Bernardo Bastien-Olvera, who led the study during his postdoctoral fellowship at Scripps. "Ocean loss is not just an environmental issue, but a central part of the economic story of climate change."

The social cost of carbon is an accounting method for working out the monetary cost of each ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. "[It] is one of the most efficient tools we have for internalizing climate damages into economic decision-making," said Amy Campbell, a United Nations climate advisor and former British government COP negotiator. Calculations have historically been used by international organizations and state departments like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to assess policy proposals -- though a 2025 White House memo from the Trump administration instructed federal agencies to ignore the data during cost-benefit analyses unless required by law. "It becomes politically contentious when deciding whose damages are counted, which sectors are included and most importantly how future and retrospective harms are valued," Campbell said.

Excluding ocean harm, the social cost of carbon is $51 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted. This increases to $97.20 per ton when the ocean, which covers 70 percent of the planet, is included. In 2024, global CO2 emissions were estimated to be 41.6 billion tons, making the 91 percent cost increase significant. Using greenhouse gas emission predictions, the report estimates the annual damages to traditional markets alone will be $1.66 trillion by 2100.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad. The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the end of its nearly 10-day tour through cislunar space, the Orion capsule on top of the rocket will exceed 25,000 mph as it plunges into the atmosphere to bring its four-person crew back to Earth. "This is the start of a very long journey," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. "We ended our last human exploration of the moon on Apollo 17."

[...] "We really are ready to go," said Wiseman, the Artemis II commander, during Saturday's rollout to the launch pad. "We were in a sim [in Houston] for about 10 hours yesterday doing our final capstone entry and landing sim. We got in T-38s last night and we flew to the Cape to be here for this momentous occasion." The rollout began around sunrise Saturday, with NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule riding a mobile launch platform and a diesel-powered crawler transporter along a throughway paved with crushed Alabama river rock. Employees, VIPs, and guests gathered along the crawlerway to watch the 11 million-pound stack inch toward the launch pad. The rollout concluded about an hour after sunset, when the crawler transporter's jacking system lowered the mobile launch platform onto pedestals at Pad 39B.

The rollout keeps the Artemis II mission on track for liftoff as soon as next month, when NASA has a handful of launch opportunities on February 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11. The big milestone leading up to launch day will be a practice countdown or Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR), currently slated for around February 2, when NASA's launch team will pump more than 750,000 gallons of super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the rocket. NASA had trouble keeping the cryogenic fluids at the proper temperature, then encountered hydrogen leaks when the launch team first tried to fill the rocket for the unpiloted Artemis I mission in 2022. Engineers implemented the same fixes on Artemis II that they used to finally get over the hump with propellant loading on Artemis I. [...] If the launch does not happen in February, NASA has a slate of backup launch dates in early March.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: It all started in 1927, when physicist Thomas Parnell at the University of Queensland in Australia filled a closed funnel with the world's thickest known fluid: pitch, a derivative of tar that was once used to seal ships against the seas. Three years later, in 1930, Parnell cut the funnel's stem, like a ribbon at an event, heralding the start of the Pitch Drop Experiment. From then on, the black substance began to flow. At least, that is, in a manner of speaking. At room temperature pitch might look solid, but it is actually a fluid 100 billion times more viscous than water.

It took eight years for the first droplet to finally hit the beaker below. Then, they dripped at a cadence of once every eight years or so, slowing down only after air conditioning was installed in the building in the 1980s. Today, 96 years after the funnel was cut, only nine drops in total have seeped out. The last was in 2014. Scientists expect another will fall sometime in the 2020s, but they are still waiting. No one has ever actually seen a droplet fall directly, despite all the watchful eyes. The experiment is now live-streamed, but various glitches in the past meant that each fateful moment has slipped us by.

"Astronomers are preparing to capture a movie of a supermassive black hole in action for the first time," reports the Guardian: The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) will track the colossal black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy throughout March and April with the aim of capturing footage of the swirling disc that traces out the edge of the event horizon, the point beyond which no light or matter can escape... The EHT is a global network of 12 radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Korea, which in 2019 unveiled the first image of a black hole's shadow. During March and April, as the Earth rotates, M87's central black hole will come into view for different telescopes, allowing a complete image to be captured every three days...

Measuring the black hole's spin speed matters because this could help discriminate between competing theories of how these objects reached such epic proportions. If black holes grow mostly through accretion — steadily snowballing material that strays nearby — they would be expected to end up spinning at incredibly high speeds. By contrast, if black holes expand mostly through merging with other black holes, each merger could slow things down. The observations could also help explain how black hole jets are formed, which are among the largest, most powerful structures produced by galaxies. Jets channel vast columns of gas out of galaxies, slowing down the formation of new stars and limiting galaxy growth. In turn this can create dense pockets of material that trigger bursts of star formation beyond the host galaxy...

While the movie campaign will take place in the spring, the sheer volume of data produced by the telescopes means the scientists will need to wait for Antarctic summer before the hard drives can be physically shipped to Germany and the US for processing. So it is likely to be a lengthy wait before the rest of the world gets a glimpse of the black hole in action.
In a correction, the Guardian apologizes for originally including an AI-generated illustration of black hole with a caption suggesting it was a photo from telescopes. They've since swapped in an actual picture of the Messier 87 galaxy black hole.

Last week a University of Arizona astronomy professor "watched anxiously...as an awe-inspiring SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried NASA's new exoplanet telescope, Pandora, into orbit."

In 2018 NASA had approached Daniel Apai to help build the telescope, which he says will "shatter a barrier — to understand and remove a source of noise in the data — that limits our ability to study small exoplanets in detail and search for life on them." Astronomers have a trick to study exoplanet atmospheres. By observing the planets as they orbit in front of their host stars, we can study starlight that filters through their atmospheres... But, starting from 2007, astronomers noted that starspots — cooler, active regions on the stars — may disturb the transit measurements. In 2018 and 2019, then-Ph.D. student Benjamin V. Rackham, astrophysicist Mark Giampapa and I published a series of studies showing how darker starspots and brighter, magnetically active stellar regions can seriously mislead exoplanets measurements. We dubbed this problem "the transit light source effect...."

In our papers — published three years before the 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope - we predicted that the Webb cannot reach its full potential. We sounded the alarm bell... Pandora will do what Webb cannot: It will be able to patiently observe stars to understand how their complex atmospheres change.

By staring at a star for 24 hours with visible and infrared cameras, it will measure subtle changes in the star's brightness and colors. When active regions in the star rotate in and out of view, and starspots form, evolve and dissipate, Pandora will record them. While Webb very rarely returns to the same planet in the same instrument configuration and almost never monitors their host stars, Pandora will revisit its target stars 10 times over a year, spending over 200 hours on each of them.
It's the first space telescope "built specifically for detailed multi-color observations of starlight filtered through the atmospheres of exoplanets," reports the Arizona Daily Star, noting the University of Arizona will serve as mission control: [T]echnicians will operate Pandora in real time and monitor its telemetry and overall health under a contract with NASA... The spacecraft will undergo about a month of commissioning before beginning science operations, which are scheduled to last for a year...

Pandora was selected as part of NASA's Astrophysics Pioneers program, which was created in 2020 to foster compelling, relatively low-cost science missions using smaller, cheaper hardware and flight platforms with a price cap of no more than $20 million. By comparison, the Webb telescope — the largest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever sent into space — carries a pricetag of about $10 billion.
Pandora is a joint mission NASA and California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Particles from Earth's atmosphere have been carried into space by solar wind and have been landing on the moon for billions of years, mixing into the lunar soil, according to a new study [published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment last month]. The research sheds new light on a puzzle that has endured for over half a century since the Apollo missions brought back lunar samples with traces of substances such as water, carbon dioxide, helium and nitrogen embedded in the regolith — the moon's dusty surface layer.

Early studies theorized that the sun was the source of some of these substances. But in 2005 researchers at the University of Tokyo suggested that they could have also originated from the atmosphere of a young Earth before it developed a magnetic field about 3.7 billion years ago. The authors suspected that the magnetic field, once in place, would have stopped the stream by trapping the particles and making it difficult or impossible for them to escape into space. Now, the new research upends that assumption by suggesting that Earth's magnetic field might have helped, rather than blocked, the transfer of atmospheric particles to the moon — which continues to this day.

"This means that the Earth has been supplying volatile gases like oxygen and nitrogen to the lunar soil over all this time," said Eric Blackman, coauthor of the new study and a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in New York.
Earth's magnetic field "somewhat inflates the atmosphere of Earth" when it's hit by solar winds, according to study coauthor Eric Blackman, a physics/astronomy professor at New York's University of Rochester. He told CNN the moon passes through this region for a few days each month, with particles landing on the lunar surface and embedding in the soil (because the moon lacks an atmosphere that would block them).

This also means the moon's soil could actually contain a chemical record of Earth's ancient atmosphere, according to the study — "spanning billions of years..."

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this report from Futurism: China has unveiled an extremely powerful "hypergravity machine" that can generate forces almost two thousand times stronger than Earth's regular gravity.

The futuristic-looking machine, called CHIEF1900, was constructed at China's Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility (CHIEF) at Zheijang University in Eastern China, and allows researchers to study how extreme forces affect various materials, plants, cells, or other structures, as the South China Morning Post reports... [Once up and running, it will allow researchers to recreate "catastrophic events such as dam failures and earthquakes inside a laboratory, according to the university."] For instance, it can analyze the structural stability of an almost 1,000-feet-tall dam by spinning a ten-foot model at 100 Gs, meaning 100 times the Earth's regular gravity. It could also be used to study the resonance frequencies of high-speed rail tracks, or how pollutants seep into soil over thousands of years.

The machine officially dethroned its predecessor, CHIEF1300, which became the world's most powerful centrifuge a mere four months ago... It can generate 1,900 g-tonnes of force, or 1,900 times the Earth's gravity. To put that into perspective, a washing machine only reaches about two g-tonnes.

European satellite operator Eutelsat "plans to launch 440 Airbus-built LEO satellites in the coming years to replenish and expand its constellation," Reuters reported Friday. And last week America's Federal Communications Commission approved SpaceX's request to deploy another 7,500 Starlink satellites, while Starlink "projects it will eventually have a constellation of 34,000 satellites," writes Fast Company, and Amazon's Project Leo "plans to launch more than 3,200 satellites."

Meanwhile "Beijing and some Chinese companies are planning two separate mega-constellations, Guowang and G60 Starlink, totaling nearly 26,000 satellites," and this week the Chinese government "applied for launch permits for 200,000 satellites."

But a small Texas-based company called AST SpaceMobile "believes it can provide better service with fewer than 100 gigantic satellites in space." AST SpaceMobile has developed a direct-to-cell technology that utilizes large satellites called BlueBirds. These machines use thousands of antennas to deliver broadband coverage directly to standard mobile phones, says the company's president, Scott Wisniewski. "This approach is remarkably efficient: We can achieve global coverage with approximately 90 satellites, not thousands or even tens of thousands required by other systems," Wisniewski writes in an email...

The key is its satellites' size and sophistication. AST's first generation of commercial satellite, the BlueBird 1-5, unfolds into a massive 693-square-foot array in space. Today, the company has five operational BlueBird 1-5 satellites in orbit, but its ambitions are much bigger. On December 24, 2025, AST launched the first of its next-generation satellites from India — called Block 2 — and this one broke records. The BlueBird 6 has a surface of almost 2,400 square feet, making it the largest single satellite in low Earth orbit. The company plans to launch up to 60 more by the end of 2026. "This large surface area is essential for gathering faint signals from standard, unmodified mobile phones on the ground," Wisniewski explains. It is essentially a single, extremely powerful and sensitive cell tower in the sky, capable of serving a huge geographical area...

To be clear, AST SpaceMobile's approach is not without its own controversies. The sheer size of the company's satellites makes them incredibly bright in the night sky, a significant source of frustration for ground-based astronomers. McDowell confirms that when it launched in 2022, AST's prototype satellite, BlueWalker 3, became "one of the top 10 brightest objects in the night sky for a while."

"It's a serious issue, and we are working directly with the astronomy community to mitigate our impact," Wisniewski says. The company is exploring solutions like anti-reflective coatings and operational adjustments to minimize the time its satellites are at maximum brightness...
AST SpaceMobile has already proven its technology works, the article points out, with six working satellites now transmitting at typical 5G speeds directly to regular phones.

As 2026 begins, MIT Technology Review publishes "educated guesses" on emerging technologies that will define the future, advances "we think will drive progress or incite the most change — for better or worse — in the years ahead."

This year's list includes next-gen nuclear, gene-editing drugs (as well as the "resurrection" of ancient genes from extinct creatures), and three AI-related developments: AI companions, AI coding tools, and "mechanistic interpretability" for revealing LLM decision-making.

But also on the list is sodium-ion batteries, "a cheaper, safer alternative to lithium." Backed by major players and public investment, they're poised to power grids and affordable EVs worldwide. [Chinese battery giant CATL claims to have already started manufacturing sodium-ion batteries at scale, and BYD also plans a massive production facility for sodium-ion batteries.] The most significant impact of sodium-Âion technology may be not on our roads but on our power grids. Storing clean energy generated by solar and wind has long been a challenge. Sodium-ion batteries, with their low cost, enhanced thermal stability, and long cycle life, are an attractive alternative. Peak Energy, a startup in the US, is already deploying grid-scale sodium-ion energy storage. Sodium-ion cells' energy density is still lower than that of high-end lithium-ion ones, but it continues to improve each year — and it's already sufficient for small passenger cars and logistics vehicles.
And another "breakthrough technology" on their list is commercial space stations: Vast Space from California, plans to launch its Haven-1 space station in May 2026 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. If all goes to plan, it will initially support crews of four people staying aboard the bus-size habitat for 10 days. Paying customers will be able to experience life in microgravity and conduct research such as growing plants and testing drugs. On its heels will be Axiom Space's outpost, the Axiom Station, consisting of five modules (or rooms). It's designed to look like a boutique hotel and is expected to launch in 2028. Voyager Space aims to launch its version, called Starlab, the same year, and Blue Origin's Orbital Reef space station plans to follow in 2030.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger for sharing the article.