“The recent instability in rare-earth supplies is a much bigger threat to automakers than in the past. It has given new urgency to the search for motors that don’t need rare earths or for materials that would replace them.

BMW’s electric vehicles already use motors that operate without rare earths. Researchers at Northeastern University and other institutions are working to synthesize materials that have promising magnetic properties and are found only in meteorites.

Start-ups have begun developing new kinds of motors and other technologies. And the Department of Energy is encouraging that work, despite the Trump administration’s rollback of other forms of support for electric vehicles.”

From New York Times.

“Scientists have detected some of the oldest signs of life on Earth using a new method that recognizes chemical fingerprints of living organisms in ancient rocks, an approach that also holds promise in the search for life beyond our planet.

The researchers found evidence of microbial life in rocks about 3.3 billion years old from South Africa, when Earth was roughly a quarter its current age. They also found molecular traces left by microbes that engaged in oxygen-producing photosynthesis – conversion of sunlight into energy – in rocks about 2.5 billion years old from South Africa.

The scientists developed an approach, harnessing machine learning, to distinguish in ancient rocks between organic molecules with a biological origin – like from microbes, plants and animals – and organic molecules with a nonliving origin at greater than 90% accuracy. The method was designed to discern chemical patterns unique to biology.”

From Reuters.

“We estimated the number of agricultural drones operating in some of the world’s leading agricultural countries by scouring online news and trade publications in many different languages. This effort revealed where agricultural drones have already taken off around the world.

Historically, most agricultural technology – tractors, for example – has spread from high-income countries to middle- and then lower-income ones over the course of many decades. Drones partially reversed and dramatically accelerated this pattern, diffusing first from East Asia to Southeast Asia, then to Latin America, and finally to North America and Europe. Their use in higher-income regions is more limited but is accelerating rapidly in the U.S. 

China leads the world in agricultural drone manufacturing and adoption. In 2016, a Chinese company introduced the first agriculture-specific quadcopter model. There are now more than 250,000 agricultural drones reported to be in use there. Other middle-income countries have also been enthusiastic adopters. For instance, drones were used on 30% of Thailand’s farmland in 2023, up from almost none in 2019, mainly by spraying pesticides and spreading fertilizers.

In the U.S., the number of agricultural drones registered with the Federal Aviation Administration leaped from about 1,000 in January 2024 to around 5,500 in mid-2025. Industry reports suggest those numbers substantially underreport U.S. drone use because some owners seek to avoid the complex registration process. Agricultural drones in the U.S. are used mainly for spraying crops such as corn and soy, especially in areas that are difficult to reach with tractors or crop-dusting aircraft.

In countries such as China, Thailand and Vietnam, millions of smallholder farmers have upgraded from the dangerous and tiring job of applying agrochemicals by hand with backpack sprayers to using some of the most cutting-edge technology in the world, often using the same models that are popular in the U.S.”

From The Conversation.

“In a paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers at the ALPHA experiment at CERN’s Antimatter Factory report a new technique that allows them to produce over 15 000 antihydrogen atoms – the simplest form of atomic antimatter – in a matter of hours.

“These numbers would have been considered science fiction 10 years ago,” said Jeffrey Hangst, spokesperson for the ALPHA experiment. “With larger numbers of antihydrogen atoms now more readily available, we can investigate atomic antimatter in greater detail and at a faster pace than before.”

To create atomic antihydrogen (a positron orbiting an antiproton), the ALPHA collaboration must produce and trap clouds of antiprotons and positrons separately, then cool them down and merge them so that antihydrogen atoms can form. This process has been refined and steadily improved over many years. But now, using a pioneering technique to cool the positrons, the ALPHA team has increased the rate of production of antihydrogen atoms eightfold.”

From CERN.