A pencil thin jet of dilute acid strips about 97 percent of the silver from a retired solar cell in roughly four minutes and leaves the silicon wafer beneath it intact
OCT 11, 2026
Tech Editor & Advisor
Hugo Rojas
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise and deep knowledge of the space industry. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
—Latest by Hugo Rojas
A wind turbine in southwest Nova Scotia burned for hours atop a 256 foot tower, and the same wind farm had a similar turbine fire about seven years earlier
OCT 10, 2026
School buses retired from American routes after about ten years and 150,000 miles sell at auction for less than 2,000 dollars and return to the road in Guatemala as brightly painted chicken buses
OCT 10, 2026
A rubber catheter pushed more than two feet up an arm vein reached a beating heart in a small German hospital, and the x-ray that proved it later earned medicine’s highest honor
OCT 10, 2026
A block of retired wind turbine blade no bigger than a deck of cards dissolves in a salt bath, and the plastic it makes tests nearly three times stronger than nylon alone
OCT 10, 2026
A magnitude 5.6 rupture 10 miles under an Oregon farm town cracked the capitol dome in Salem and shut a highway bridge, and the fault that moved was not the one everyone watches offshore
OCT 10, 2026
Painting red stripes on 4 turbines at a South African wind farm cut bird collisions by about 83 percent, and birds of prey gained as much as smaller species
OCT 10, 2026
Sewage ash heated with chlorine gas and carbon near 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit released 75 percent of its phosphorus as a gas, the nutrient that incineration normally locks into a form plain heat cannot release
OCT 9, 2026
A harbor tug spun through 180 degrees to take its escort position beside a moving tanker in the Corpus Christi Ship Channel, and the turn drew it into the ship’s propeller at 11.6 knots
OCT 9, 2026
Ginger candy and acupressure bands have thin evidence behind them for motion sickness, but volunteers in Japan who heard a one minute low pitched tone before a swing, a simulator and a car ride felt steadier
OCT 9, 2026
Boone, Iowa workshop recovers 500 pounds of rare earth magnet from one retired turbine generator, and the process uses no acid at all
OCT 9, 2026
Hidden GPS trackers rode inside 205 old printers and monitors dropped at American recycling counters, and 69 of them crossed a national border, with 37 ending up in scrapyards across Hong Kong’s New Territories
OCT 9, 2026
A bladeless wind generator that sways instead of spinning now sits on the roof of a Spanish bird conservation group, which plans to watch what the shaking pole means for passing birds
OCT 9, 2026
Inside a 10-acre plant outside Dallas processing one panel per minute, crews can pull 96 percent of the silver, copper and silicon out, but the plastic film bonding it all together still has nowhere to go
OCT 8, 2026
Across 22 waterways tested in the Delaware watershed microplastics turned up in every one, and about a third of the aquatic insects in the Schuylkill headwaters carried plastic particles inside their bodies
OCT 8, 2026
Volunteers sealed inside a French Pyrenees cave for 40 days with no clocks came out thinking about 30 days had passed, and one put the total at 23 days
OCT 8, 2026
Crews pulled two levers on a derelict 120-foot torpedo retriever stuck for years in a South Carolina marsh and sank it about 32 miles offshore, where spotted dolphins circled the site within minutes
OCT 8, 2026
Along 60 miles of central New York, an excavator on a flatbed struck more than a dozen interstate overpasses in one run, and troopers stopped the truck near Syracuse
OCT 8, 2026
Wild great tits tested against 4 blade designs hesitated longest and took far more time to approach the spinning blade painted in wasp-like red, yellow and black bands than plain white
OCT 8, 2026
A 317 manatee count at one Florida warm water outflow beat every earlier tally that winter, where what the number tracked was the cold front rather than the size of the population
OCT 8, 2026
Around 75,000 recycled concrete cubes stacked at one turbine base off Sussex replaced standard rock armor and more than doubled the potential habitat space for marine life on that seabed patch
OCT 7, 2026
A battery recycling plant in Georgia can shred up to 30,000 metric tons of battery material a year and has produced lithium carbonate at 99 percent purity from entirely recycled feedstock
OCT 7, 2026
A navy diver lost off the New Zealand coast stayed alive for 75 hours in 61 to 63 degree water, far longer than cold water survival models predict for anyone adrift in that sea
OCT 7, 2026
A milk tanker carrying 275 gallons of diesel rolled into an Oregon creek above a mountain reservoir, and no fish were found harmed after thousands of gallons of dairy fluid entered the water
OCT 7, 2026
Crews removed the center of a 186-year-old mill dam on the Brandywine in Delaware, but American shad still face four standing barriers downstream before they can reach the freed water
OCT 7, 2026
Paid twenty dollars a day to lie still in a cubicle with frosted goggles, student volunteers began seeing fully formed scenes and most quit within hours
OCT 7, 2026
Sown with native prairie plants across 77 acres beneath 2 southern Minnesota solar arrays, retired cropland saw native bee abundance climb about twentyfold while total insect numbers tripled
OCT 6, 2026
Spread 3 inches of wood chips over bare ground and the soil beneath runs as much as 30 degrees cooler, and tree crews often give them away free
OCT 6, 2026
Volunteers spent 40 days inside a sealed Massachusetts chamber losing air, and the oxygen their working muscles could use fell to less than a third of the sea level figure
OCT 6, 2026
Crushed across 97 percent recovery in minutes, retired solar panels hold silver at concentrations matching mined ore and researchers used only water, air bubbles and standard flotation reagent
OCT 6, 2026
Buried samples of a 3-ingredient packaging film lost mass every day for 9 days straight, and researchers project full disintegration in about 13 weeks, far faster than ordinary plastic
OCT 6, 2026
A tanker rollover put nearly 3,000 gallons of fuel into Indian Creek on the Olympic Peninsula, and the creek feeds a salmon river that spent a century behind two dams
OCT 6, 2026
A 240-foot turbine blade struck a railroad trestle over Route 1 in Maine and overturned its truck, and the only workable fix was a new trailer and a slow ride back to the port
OCT 5, 2026
Trucks struck a Houston overpass 73 times in a single year despite three infrared detectors wired to flashing exit signs, and the span clears legal height by only 3 inches
OCT 5, 2026
An Iowa recycler ground 3 retired turbine blades into concrete blocks and installed them as a retaining wall, fitting a whole turbine’s worth of fiberglass into one small parking lot
OCT 5, 2026
Packed into molds in upstate New York, 2 students’ hemp and fungal foam blocks grow rigid in 5 days and compost in a backyard in 45
OCT 5, 2026
At a plant near Sacramento, 45 million pounds of old carpet a year are split dry into nylon, polypropylene and limestone filler, and none of it goes into the ground
OCT 5, 2026
Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30 over the full marathon distance in London, and the two hour barrier fell for the first time in a race that counts toward the official world record
OCT 5, 2026
Scientists built an 9-meter blade from a resin made with plant sugars, and about 80 percent of its materials came back out clean in six hours
OCT 4, 2026
A swaying bladeless wind mast roughly 31 inches tall and 26 inches wide reaches about 460 watts in modelling, several times more than working prototypes have so far delivered
OCT 4, 2026
Five healthy men in 3 days of a weightlessness tank showed liver fat up 21 percent, and post-meal insulin climbed 90 percent while muscle and fitness also slipped
OCT 4, 2026
A prawn trawler on day 4 of a Scottish fishing run grounded on rocks near Ullapool while the skipper slept alone in the wheelhouse, and no watch alarm was fitted on board
OCT 4, 2026
Around 5 billion pounds of old carpet go into American landfills each year, and the thin latex layer glued to the backing is what keeps the nylon above it out of standard recycling lines
OCT 4, 2026
Ultrasonic recorders left running over Midwestern solar farms picked up about 50 percent more bat activity than over the neighboring crop fields through the first half of the season
OCT 4, 2026
Workers ground 3 retired wind turbine blades into concrete blocks for a Des Moines retaining wall, and the finished product weighs about 30 percent less than conventional concrete
OCT 3, 2026
With 672 driverless cars recalled after a Phoenix taxi pressed its bumper into a utility pole at walking pace, a second software flaw pulled in 1,212 more
OCT 3, 2026
A Scottish man who set out to lose weight under medical supervision went 382 days without food, and his blood sugar stayed at a level that should have left him unable to stand
OCT 3, 2026
A rebuilt fish ladder at Bonneville Dam gives Pacific lamprey smooth curved walls and small resting holes along a stretch where only about half of the ancient fish were getting past each dam
OCT 3, 2026
Solar recycling plant outside Dallas recovered up to 96 percent of each retired panel’s materials, including the silver and copper that American recyclers mostly send to landfills
OCT 3, 2026
During 205 days alone in a Texas cave with no clock, a French geologist slipped twice into a roughly 48-hour cycle he experienced as an ordinary day
OCT 2, 2026
