Philanthropies selectively mitigate damage from lost federal science funding - Physics Today

With support from U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratories, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Texas-based company Element3 has launched the first domestic lithium mining project in 50 years. This achievement is likely to have a big impact, turning the United States from a net importer of lithium to a country well on the path to greater energy independence, national security, and economic strength. The milestone, in February 2026, came less than a year after DOE launched the Minerals to Materials Supply Chain Research Facility, or METALLIC, in April 2025. The facility builds on DOE demonstration testbeds to speed technologies that strengthen the nation's supply chain of minerals critical to the technology, transportation, and defense industries. It provides experts and tools to de-risk development of these critical minerals technologies.

Kevin Warsh is drawing lessons about tech from Alan Greenspan—but selectively

Australian adults who completed the self-compassion meditation training reported significantly increased body appreciation, positive well-being and lower self-judgment. The benefits were still evident six weeks after the program concluded, and frequency of practice alone did not drive the size of change. The randomized controlled trial, published in the journal Mindfulness, involved 227 people aged 18 to 39 years. Participants in the intervention group undertook 20 minutes of daily self-compassion, while those in the control group remained on the waitlist.

Astronomers analyzing white dwarf stars have for the first time found a star that would appear green to human eyes, according to a new study. While for most stars, color is temperature-dependent and limited to a few hues, white dwarfs, which are the dense remnants of sun-like stars that have died, can glow in an incredible range of colors, said lead study author Mark Hollands, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick, England, on Thursday. “The colors that normal stars can have are pretty much only orange, white or blue,” Hollands told CNN. “What we found is, for most white dwarfs, that’s the same as well. But there are some special cases where the physics in the outer layers of these stars are sufficiently strange that it causes actually quite big deviations in terms of their spectrum,” he said. These deviations are due to the interaction between the helium in their atmosphere and traces of other elements, which vary between white dwarfs, depending on what material has interacted with the star over the course of its lifetime.