SMRTR Science & Engineering

Science & Engineering stories

Get hand-picked daily summaries of the best, most informative science and engineering articles from around the web. Browse recent summaries, then jump to the original source when you want the full article.

Latest story• Mar 18, 2026

To make a ‘Snowball Earth,’ sci-fi moves fast. Geology is far slower

Earth experienced at least five ice ages, including severe "Snowball Earth" events 720-635 million years ago when glaciers covered the planet pole-to-pole due to slow geological processes like tectonic shifts and reduced atmospheric carbon dioxide. Science fiction stories accelerate these natural freezing mechanisms for dramatic effect, compressing timescales from geological eras to mere weeks or years.

Read summary Original source

Latest stories

Platypus Anatomy Just Got Weirder

Belgian researchers discovered that platypus fur contains hollow, spherical melanosomes—pigment structures previously found only in birds and never before seen in mammals. Scientists believe these unique structures may have...

Read summary Original

Nvidia-powered, wheeled humanoid robot for smart factories unveiled by Taiwan firm

Techman Robot's TM Xplore I humanoid uses wheels instead of legs for factory stability and Nvidia's Jetson Thor for smart manufacturing in semiconductor and automotive industries.

Read summary Original

How Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Is Solving the Battery Waste Crisis in Industrial IoT

Industrial IoT deployments face a growing battery waste crisis, with projections showing 1.4 million metric tons of battery materials needing recycling by 2030. Piezoelectric energy harvesting offers a solution by converting...

Read summary Original

NASA's Secret Plan To Rescue Astronauts If The Apollo Moon Landings Went Wrong

NASA developed an extraordinary backup rescue plan for Apollo missions that involved launching a second spacecraft to retrieve stranded astronauts near the Moon. This contingency strategy was significantly more dangerous and...

Read summary Original

6,800 feet-deep solid-state detectors hunt dark matter at temperatures colder than space

Scientists successfully activated SuperCDMS, an underground dark matter detection experiment located 6,800 feet deep in a Canadian mine, by cooling 24 ultra-pure crystal detectors to temperatures hundreds of times colder than...

Read summary Original

SMRTR Science & Engineering

Get the next batch of curated stories in your inbox.

This archive is built from SMRTR newsletter stories. Subscribe for hand-picked stories without the extra noise.

More recent stories

The Comedy of Errors That Was the First-Ever Space Walk

Sixty-one years ago, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first human to walk in space, but his historic 10-minute spacewalk quickly turned into a life-threatening crisis. His spacesuit ballooned from pressure differences,...

Read summary Original

New thermal routing design lets next-gen wearable devices finally run on body heat

Researchers created a flat, flexible wearable device that generates electricity from body heat using embedded copper nanoparticles. This breakthrough enables thin thermoelectric designs for self-powered health monitors and smart...

Read summary Original

New sodium-ion cathode resists air damage, keeps 80% capacity after 200 cycles

Researchers at Central South University created a sodium-ion battery cathode with a radial gradient structure that resists air damage, addressing a major obstacle preventing widespread adoption of this low-cost energy storage...

Read summary Original

There might be less water on the moon than we’d hoped

New satellite data from NASA's ShadowCam instrument reveals that water ice in the moon's permanently shadowed polar craters makes up less than 20-30 percent of surface material by weight, with many craters possibly containing no...

Read summary Original

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover discovers even older lost rivers at Jezero Crater

NASA's Perseverance rover used ground-penetrating radar to discover an ancient river system buried 35 meters beneath Jezero Crater's surface, formed 4.2 billion years ago. This finding extends Mars's potentially habitable period...

Read summary Original

Hubble catches rare view of a comet crumbling

Hubble accidentally captured extremely rare footage of Comet K1 breaking apart into at least four pieces over three days in November as it exited the solar system. The 5-mile-wide comet wasn't the original target of study, but...

Read summary Original

A static electricity mystery comes to the surface

Scientists found that removing carbon contamination from surfaces allows them to predict and control static electricity charging. This breakthrough explains the mysterious mechanics behind static electricity in industrial and...

Read summary Original

Brain implant allows people who are paralyzed to type using their thoughts at speed of texting

Twenty-two words per minute might sound leisurely for most typists, but for two people with near-total paralysis, it represents a breakthrough that brings them tantalizingly close to normal conversation speeds. Scientists have...

Read summary Original

Spyder: Your IDE for Data Science Development in Python

Spyder is an open-source Python IDE designed for data scientists, featuring built-in plotting, profiling, and interactive capabilities. It offers a Python-focused approach with quick setup through standalone installation,...

Read summary Original

A 100-year-old theory might explain what’s wrong with quantum mechanics

Physicist Antony Valentini argues that Louis de Broglie's century-old "pilot wave theory" could resolve quantum mechanics' biggest mysteries by proposing that particles have definite positions guided by accompanying waves,...

Read summary Original

China's Largest Solar Farm Is Quietly Changing The Desert Around It

China's largest solar farm is transforming desert conditions by creating microclimates that reduce temperatures and increase humidity, leading to unexpected vegetation growth beneath and around the solar panels. This massive...

Read summary Original

CNSplots: A Python library for Cell, Nature, and Science quality plots

Cnsplots is a Python visualization library built on matplotlib that creates publication-ready scientific figures for top-tier journals like Cell, Nature, and Science. The library offers over 25 plot types from basic statistical...

Read summary Original

China’s DEEP Robotics unveils robot horse with 110-lb payload carrying capacity

DEEP Robotics unveiled a limited-edition robot horse for the 2026 Year of the Horse, featuring bionic legs and hoof-like feet that mimic natural equine movement while maintaining industrial-grade capabilities. The $50,000 machine...

Read summary Original

Scientists probe the dynamic Cocoon of a nearby pulsar

Scientists used the Australia Telescope Compact Array to study Vela X, a pulsar wind nebula containing a mysterious structure called the Cocoon that stretches from the Vela pulsar southward. The detailed observations revealed...

Read summary Original

China opens ‘robot schools’ to train humanoids for factory and logistics work

China has established specialized robot schools across multiple provinces to train humanoid robots for factory and logistics work, moving beyond demonstrations toward commercial deployment. These training centers house dozens of...

Read summary Original

'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images

Niantic used 30 billion Pokémon Go player images to train a visual positioning system that helps Coco Robotics' delivery robots navigate city streets where GPS signals fail.

Read summary Original

100 years later, where is Robert Goddard's first liquid-fuel rocket?

Robert Goddard's liquid-fueled rocket "Nell" flew for 2.5 seconds on March 16, 1926, traveling 41 feet high and 184 feet forward before crashing into snow in Auburn, Massachusetts. Goddard collected the pieces and reused...

Read summary Original

Japan’s nuclear fusion firm begins construction of first demonstration device

Japanese fusion startup Helical Fusion has begun construction of its first demonstration device, using the unique stellarator approach rather than the more common tokamak design for magnetic plasma confinement. The company plans...

Read summary Original

Back to all archives Load more stories