Tibi Puiu

2 days ago | zmescience.com | Tibi Puiu |Zoe Gordon

In the heart of distant galaxies, astronomers have witnessed the most violent stellar death throes ever recorded. A massive star, several times heavier than our Sun, strays too close to the gravitational abyss of a supermassive black hole. It does not explode, not in the conventional sense. Instead, it unravels — shredded by tidal forces, stretched into a stream of stellar debris, and fed to the black hole like spaghetti into a maw.

2 days ago | zmescience.com | Tudor Tarita |Tibi Puiu

In the quiet before the whir of motion, a cube sits scrambled. Then, in the time it takes to blink—actually, even less—it’s done. Solved. Six uniform faces, each a solid hue. It took just 0.103 seconds. A mechanical blur and a new world record. That is the story of Purdubik’s Cube, a robot built not in a corporate lab but in a university workspace, by four students from Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

2 days ago | zmescience.com | Tudor Tarita |Tibi Puiu

One summer day in 1986, while digging at one of England’s most famous archaeological sites, a team of researchers uncovered fragments of an ornate bronze bucket. It had no obvious purpose. It didn’t look like a common container for food or water. And so for nearly four decades, it sat in the vault of mysteries—an artefact from a vanished world. Now, with the help of new excavations, scientific analyses, and a televised dig, archaeologists believe they’ve cracked the case.

2 days ago | zmescience.com | Tibi Puiu |Zoe Gordon

There’s a new type of LED in town. These light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are made from a material called perovskite, a calcium titanium oxide mineral that is more closely associated with cheap solar panels. The perovskite LEDs are not only highly efficient and cheap to make but could also be more environmentally friendly than their predecessors. “Perovskite LEDs are cheaper and easier to manufacture than traditional LEDs, and they can also produce vibrant and intense colours if used in screens.

2 days ago | zmescience.com | Tibi Puiu |Zoe Gordon

Mars is a frozen shadow of its former self. Its riverbeds are dry, its air is thin and chock-full of carbon dioxide, and its soil is soaked with salts hostile to life. Yet beneath the red dust lies planet-sized potential — a planet that once had lakes and skies and, perhaps, the right conditions for life to begin. Now, a team of researchers wants to nudge Mars back toward that lost possibility, not out of nostalgia, but to ask a deeper question: can a dead world be brought back to life?