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01 Jun 2026

01 Jun 2026 4:08am GMT

Slashdot

New Desalination System Turns Seawater Into Drinking Water and Useful Salts - Including Lithium

"Scientists have developed a solar desalination system that turns seawater into drinking water without creating environmentally damaging brine," reports ScienceDaily. "Special laser-textured metal panels use sunlight to evaporate water while automatically moving salt deposits away from the working surface, preventing clogging. The process was successfully tested with water from three oceans and can recover nearly all salts as solids. Those leftover materials could even become a source of valuable lithium for batteries." (The research team was led by University of Rochest professor Chunlei Guo and published their results in the journal Light: Science & Applications.) The University of Rochester has made an announcement: The technology uses solar panels made of black metal etched with femtosecond lasers to make the surface super light-absorbing and superwicking - or extremely attractive to water. The panels have a laser-treated active region that pulls a thin layer of water across the surface, absorbs nearly all solar radiation, distills the water, and deposits the leftover salts and minerals into the panel's untreated sides or "passive" region so that the salt does not clog the active region and disrupt continuous desalination... Guo's team precisely etched the black metal's grooves so the various salts and minerals in ocean water would simply slough off... [I]t extracts nearly 100 percent of the salts in solid form. This could not only produce an abundant supply of table salt, but it could also be used to extract more precious minerals, including lithium, which is used in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles and other electronics. In a related paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A, Guo and his colleagues show how they can use the same superwicking solar panels to separate lithium from the rest of other salts in desalination. Embedding nanoparticles made of hydrogen titanate in the tiny grooves of the black metal surface isolates the lithium from other salts and minerals...Using water samples from Great Salt Lake, the researchers extracted about 50 percent of the lithium from the salts left behind by the desalination process. Guo says now that the superwicking desalination technology has been demonstrated in proofs of concept on small-scale devices, he sees the technology inherently scalable, capable of improving global access to drinking water and building more sustainable supply chains for precious minerals. "The National Science Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Worldwide Universities Network supported this research."

Something Made Earth's Molten Core Reverse Direction In 2010

ScienceAlert reports: In the molten ocean of iron churning in Earth's outer core, a section deep beneath the Pacific Ocean suddenly reversed direction and started moving eastward against the planet's usual westward flow. This happened in 2010, according to satellite measurements of Earth's magnetic field, and scientists are still trying to figure out what caused it... [I]t seemed to have a large, wave-like structure - as though a chunk of molten core material suddenly thought better of where it wanted to go, surging in the other direction... This finding suggests that there are processes that can influence it strongly enough to alter its behavior in bulk - and that our planet's interior may be more dynamic and variable than we thought. A new analysis captures what we know so far - and "It's from the roiling, molten, conducting metal at Earth's heart that the planetary magnetic field is generated... vital to our continued existence. It helps keep the atmosphere we breathe in and harmful cosmic radiation out."

Hacker News

Shift from a leader-follower to a leader-leader approach

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01 Jun 2026 2:03am GMT

Slashdot

US, Australia, and UK Plan New Unmanned Vehicles to Protect Undersea Data Cables

"Around 570 cables (plus a further 80 planned) carry between 95% and 99% of the world's intercontinental telecommunications data," reports CNN (since fiber cables offer speeds of terabits per second, carry much more data than satellite links). And "networks of green energy cables carrying electricity are also starting to sprawl across the world's seabeds." Now to protect them, the U.S., Australia and the U.K. "are planning to develop new unmanned undersea vehicles" as part of their trilateral security partnership. Western governments see a growing risk of Russian and Chinese sabotage of undersea cables and are also concerned that Iran may seek to exploit the many data networks running through the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf. The "seabed is a battlefield" said Australia's Defence Minister, Richard Marles, in Singapore, calling for tougher action against so-called shadow-fleet vessels... The programme will improve the three nations' reconnaissance and strike capabilities, "and bolster superiority in anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare," as well as mine countermeasures, [according to a statement from their trilateral AUKUS partnership]... The new AUKUS project will sharpen all three countries' ability to respond to threats, including those targeting underwater cables and pipelines, through a range of "cutting edge sensors and weapons systems for undersea drones," UK Defence Secretary John Healey said. Marles said undersea internet cables - "the arteries of modern civilization" - were being cut at an unprecedented rate, with island nations like Australia acutely vulnerable. "Over the past 18 months, we have witnessed a series of attacks against subsea critical infrastructure at a scale and frequency that is historically unprecedented," he said. The UK government has also highlighted the vulnerability of the world's digital highways. "Every international payment, every cross-border trade executed in milliseconds, every flow of data between businesses here in the UK and markets overseas - all travel along the seabed," Telecoms Minister Liz Lloyd said Friday... Last month, the UK said it had tracked three Russian submarines covertly surveying undersea cables in the north Atlantic... A UK parliamentary inquiry warned last year that UK infrastructure might be targeted in a crisis, adding it was "not confident that the UK could prevent such attacks or recover within an acceptable time period." The UK Navy is already exploring the creation of a hybrid force that incorporates the widespread use of underwater drones to combat Russian threats in the Atlantic.

31 May 2026

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Chuwi Minibook X

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31 May 2026 10:59pm GMT

Linuxiac

Linuxiac Weekly Wrap-Up: Week 22, 2026 (May 25 – 31)

Linuxiac Weekly Wrap-Up: Week 22, 2026 (May 25 - 31)

Catch up on the latest Linux news: Rocky Linux 10.2, MX Linux 25.2, COSMIC Desktop 1.0.14, NVIDIA 610.43, Rust 1.96, Flatpak's future may leave non-systemd distros behind, and more.

31 May 2026 9:46pm GMT