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A new type of electric propulsion system has successfully fired in orbit, potentially opening the door to cheaper, simpler and more scalable propulsion for the growing satellite industry. Muon Space has announced the first successful in-space firing of a zinc-fueled Hall-effect thruster , marking a major milestone for electric propulsion technology. The company’s Starlight thruster used solid zinc as its propellant and successfully completed its maiden orbital firing aboard SERT-III, a spacecraft built specifically to test the technology. The historic test took place on July 1, 2026 , and the thruster worked successfully on its very first attempt. According to Muon Space, telemetry collected during the firing closely matched predictions from ground testing, while orbital tracking confirmed that the spacecraft experienced measurable thrust. The demonstration could be especially important for the rapidly expanding satellite-constellation industry, where companies are looking for propuls...

Humanoid robots are designed to look and move like people, with human-like bodies, arms, legs and joints. In the future, these machines could help humans perform physical tasks in homes, factories, hospitals, warehouses and other real-world environments. But there is one major challenge: making robots move naturally and handle many different movements. Although modern humanoid robots have become increasingly capable, most can reliably perform only a limited number of movements. Teaching a robot to walk is one thing. Teaching it to run, jump, spin, kick, crawl, balance and perform a cartwheel is much harder. Now, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and Stanford University have developed an artificial intelligence framework called BeyondMimic that could help change this. The system is designed to give humanoid robots a much broader movement repertoire without requiring engineers to separately train and fine-tune the robot for every new movement. The r...

Imagine a material whose mechanical behavior can be changed simply by shining a blue light on it. Instead of replacing the material or physically rebuilding its structure, you could use light as a kind of control knob to switch its properties from one behavior to another. That idea is becoming possible with a new generation of mechanical metamaterials —artificial materials whose unusual properties come mainly from their carefully designed internal structures rather than the substance they are made from. A team led by Alexander Münchinger has demonstrated a particularly striking example. They created microscopic, three-dimensional metamaterials from liquid-crystal elastomers and used blue LED light to dramatically change how the structures respond to mechanical forces. In two different designs, light was able to flip the sign of an effective mechanical property , turning one type of behavior into its opposite. What Makes Metamaterials Different? Ordinary materials get most of their p...

Scientists have developed a new type of cellular metamaterial inspired by the ancient art of origami. Built from repeating Miura-ori folding patterns, the material can undergo large changes in shape, show unusual mechanical behavior, and even lock itself into a strong load-bearing structure . The work by Kamrava and his team demonstrates how origami principles can be used not just to create interesting folding shapes, but to engineer materials with mechanical properties that are difficult to achieve with conventional structures. The researchers combined analytical modeling with experiments to understand how their origami-based cellular material folds, deforms and eventually locks into position. Their findings could open new possibilities for lightweight structures, deployable systems, protective materials and advanced mechanical designs. What Is a Cellular Metamaterial? A metamaterial is an engineered material whose unusual properties mainly come from its internal structure and geome...

Imagine a normal star, much like our Sun, trapped in a tight orbit around a supermassive black hole millions of times more massive than the Sun. Every orbit brings the star closer to the black hole. As it moves through this extreme environment, it begins to lose material to the black hole—not in one explosive event, but slowly over millions of years. This unusual process could produce gravitational waves that future space observatories such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) may be able to detect. A recent study by Sandomirsky and collaborators examines what happens when a main-sequence star gets extremely close to a supermassive black hole (SMBH) and begins transferring its mass. Their calculations reveal that the star does not simply disappear. Instead, it passes through four distinct stages , changing its size, structure and gravitational-wave signal along the way. A Star Living Dangerously Close to a Black Hole Most galaxies are believed to contain a supe...

Astronomers have discovered two unusual clouds of hydrogen near the famous Whirlpool Galaxy that appear to contain almost no stars. The objects, detected using China’s powerful Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), could provide an important test of how galaxies form and how some dark-matter structures remain almost completely invisible. The two objects, called Cloud N and Cloud S , contain roughly 3 million times the mass of the Sun in hydrogen each . Yet astronomers have found no obvious stars associated with either cloud at optical wavelengths. Their discovery, described in a paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics on August 4, 2026, may represent a rare example of a predicted type of object known as a reionization-limited H I cloud , or RELHIC . How Can a Huge Cloud Have Almost No Stars? At first, the idea seems strange. Stars form when clouds of gas become sufficiently cold and dense for gravity to pull the material together. Over time, these collapsing ...

Robots are traditionally built from rigid materials such as metal, plastic, gears, hinges and bolts. These components are useful for precise mechanical tasks, but they can make robots less flexible when they need to move through complicated environments or interact gently with people and delicate objects. Nature uses a very different strategy. Animals and plants can bend, stretch, twist and change their shapes continuously without relying on conventional mechanical joints. Inspired by these natural movements, researchers led by Jones have developed a new approach to creating soft robots from flexible elastomer materials . Their method combines advanced fabrication, bubble-based structures and pneumatic actuation to produce complex robotic movements from a single integrated structure. The technology could eventually help create artificial muscles, adaptive robotic grippers and highly complex soft machines. What Makes Soft Robots Different? Soft robotics focuses on building machines that...