Future Martians may live in brick buildings made of Martian soil thanks to research from a team of engineers at the University of California, San Diego. The new technique would allow astronauts to cut back on the amount of cargo they carry by leaving raw materials and most construction machinery behind.
For years, NASA has sought proposals for using lunar and Martian soil (regolith) to build habitats. It is expensive to launch stuff into space, so by using resources found along the way (a principle called in situ resource utilization), agencies can cut back on transportation costs. Although previous proposals managed to create bricks out of regolith, they required kilns and complex chemistry to transform the soil into construction material. The new technique, on the other hand, needs little more than a hammer.
The engineers created the bricks out of a NASA-certified Martian soil simulant. While attempting to reduce the amount of binding polymers needed to shape the simulant into strong enough bricks, they realized the soil itself had a unique property that enabled it to be easily formed with minimal force.
“[It was] the strong bonding among the iron oxide,” Yu Qiao, a structural engineer who led the study, told Digital Trends. “The very same component in Martian soil that gives it the reddish color.”
Thanks to iron oxide’s strong bonding properties, all that was needed to turn the regolith into bricks was a flexible container and pressure equal to someone dropping a 10-pound hammer from a few feet up. No kiln or additives were required. This “no-bake” process is important because, as Qiao said, “It does not demand extensive heating, so [it] needs [a] simpler setup to produce and consumes less energy.”
The new method creates small, round pellets that can then be shaped into bricks. Even without rebar, the researchers found the bricks to be stronger than steel-reinforced concrete.
A paper detailing the study was published this week in the journal Scientific Reports.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.