The New York Times reports: Not long ago Volkswagen was a global pariah after pleading guilty to the biggest emissions fraud in automotive history. Now it is the toast of the stock market, with its shares worth twice as much as they were a year ago.

What happened?

Ironically, Volkswagen's misdeeds helped pave the way for its reversal of fortune... The financial commitment Volkswagen made then, when sales of electric vehicles were minimal, is paying off now as the company rolls out a line of vehicles developed from the ground up to run on batteries, with more interior space and more appeal than adaptations of gasoline vehicles... Investors have noticed, lighting up online stock forums with chatter about Volkswagen and rewarding other established carmakers, like General Motors and Ford Motor, that are pivoting to electric propulsion. Shares of Tesla, on the other hand, have slipped. Tesla is still the most valuable car company in the world by a wide margin, but investors are no longer as certain that Tesla will have the fast-growing electric car market to itself...

Volkswagen also benefited from a report issued this month by analysts at UBS, the Swiss bank, which rated it as the traditional carmaker best positioned to compete with Tesla because it already has the ability to mass-produce electric cars economically... With 665,000 employees and sales of 9.3 million vehicles last year, Volkswagen is the second-largest carmaker in the world after Toyota. It can spread the cost of developing new technologies over millions of vehicles and undercut Tesla on price. By 2025, Volkswagen will be able to produce electric vehicles for less than it costs to build a gasoline or diesel car, UBS analysts wrote in this month's report.

They cautioned that Tesla retains a significant lead in battery technology and autonomous driving software.
Sales of electric VW cars tripled last year, to 230,000 vehicles, the article points out — noting that that's just the beginning. This week VW also announced plans to employ 10,000 software engineers to work on new technologies including autonomous driving, becoming the second-biggest software company in all of Europe.

"The diesel scandal remains a financial burden. The company disclosed in its annual report this week that potential liabilities from lawsuits, such as one by shareholders claiming the company misled them, could cost 4.2 billion euros, or $5 billion. That is in addition to the tens of billions of euros Volkswagen has already paid in fines and settlements since 2017 after admitting that it programmed diesel cars to produce lower emissions in testing conditions than in normal use."

But "Investors this week were focusing on Volkswagen's future rather than its past..."

Five cities on Mars, home to one million people? That's the vision of architecture studio ABIBOO, which has drawn up designs based on the latest scientific research — and created an impressive three-and-a-half minute video to showcase it. "According to the architecture company's analysis, the construction can start by 2054," reports EuroNews, "and it could be built by 2100 — that is — when the first community could start living there..." "Water is one of the great advantages that Mars offers, it helps to be able to get the proper materials for the construction. Basically, with the water and the Co2, we can generate carbon and with the carbon, we can generate steel," says Alfredo Muñoz [founder of the architecture studio]. The architecture company plans to use exclusively Martian materials for the construction...

The Mars city project is part of scientific work organised by The Mars Society and developed by the SONet network, an international team of scientists and academics.
ABIBOO envisions "vertical cities" with large green spaces powered by solar panels, with inhabitants surviving on a plant-based diet from the greenhouse-grown crops (which also produce oxygen). The communities would be connected by elevators and tunnels, "all built into the side of a cliff to protect inhabitants from atmospheric pressure and radiation."

Muñoz argues that rather than repeating earth's mistakes of damaging the planet, careful planning can "try to minimize or ensure that new colonizations on other planets happen sustainably."

"A pallet of batteries was released from the International Space Station last week, becoming the heaviest single piece of junk ever jettisoned from the station," reports UPI: Mission controllers in Houston commanded the Canadarm2 robotic arm to release an external pallet loaded with the 2.9 tons of nickel-hydrogen batteries into Earth's orbit Thursday morning. "It is safely moving away from the station and will orbit Earth between two to four years before burning up harmlessly in the atmosphere," NASA said in a statement.
Gizmodo shares a photo of the pallet orbiting 265 miles (427 km) above Chile. And they add that this chain of events starte in 2011 when NASA decided to switch the Space Station from nickel-hydrogen batteries to lithium-ion batteries. This effort required four supply missions from the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) cargo spacecraft, 13 different astronauts, and 14 spacewalks, in which 48 nickel-hydrogen batteries were replaced by 24 lithium-ion batteries...

"It used to be that it wasn't a big deal to toss stuff from ISS because very few satellites were below it [at altitudes below 250 miles (400 km)], " Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, explained in an email. "That's not so true any more with a bunch of cubesats and with recently launched Starlinks during orbit raising. So I have concerns."

To which he added: "I don't immediately see what else they could have done except fly a whole extra HTV mission just to get rid of it."

According to the European Space Agency, around 34,000 objects larger than 3.9 inches (10 cm) are currently in orbit around Earth, in addition to millions of tinier objects, such as tools and bits of spacecraft. The volume of objects in space, both functional and non-functional, is steadily increasing, prompting concerns of potential collisions and even more orbital debris.
A NASA representative told Gizmodo their ballistics officers "indicate no threat" of the pallet smashing into other space objects, but added "this item, like all, will be tracked by U.S. Space Command."

The Associated Press reports: A long dormant volcano on the Reykjanes Peninsula in southwestern Iceland flared to life Friday night, spilling lava down two sides in that area's first volcanic eruption in nearly 800 years... The glow from the lava could be seen from the outskirts of Iceland's capital, Reykjavík, which is about 32 kilometers (20 miles) away. The Department of Emergency Management said it was not anticipating evacuations because the volcano is in a remote valley, about 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) from the nearest road.
The report adds that initial aerial footage "showed a relatively small eruption so far, with two streams of lava running in opposite directions."

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: Much of the carbon in space is believed to exist in the form of large molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Since the 1980s, circumstantial evidence has indicated that these molecules are abundant in space, but they have not been directly observed. Now, a team of researchers led by MIT Assistant Professor Brett McGuire has identified two distinctive PAHs in a patch of space called the Taurus Molecular Cloud (TMC-1). PAHs were believed to form efficiently only at high temperatures -- on Earth, they occur as byproducts of burning fossil fuels, and they're also found in char marks on grilled food. But the interstellar cloud where the research team observed them has not yet started forming stars, and the temperature is about 10 degrees above absolute zero.

This discovery suggests that these molecules can form at much lower temperatures than expected, and it may lead scientists to rethink their assumptions about the role of PAH chemistry in the formation of stars and planets, the researchers say. "What makes the detection so important is that not only have we confirmed a hypothesis that has been 30 years in the making, but now we can look at all of the other molecules in this one source and ask how they are reacting to form the PAHs we're seeing, how the PAHs we're seeing may react with other things to possibly form larger molecules, and what implications that may have for our understanding of the role of very large carbon molecules in forming planets and stars," says McGuire, who is a senior author of the new study. The study appears today in the journal Science.

The Greek alphabet has been retired as a way of identifying tropical storms, the World Meteorological Organization said on Wednesday. The New York Times reports: The decision was made after nine Greek letters were pressed into service last year during the record-breaking 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, which exhausted the normal list of 21 storm names prepared by the organization. Greek letters had been used to name storms only once before, in 2005, another busy hurricane season that produced Hurricane Katrina, among others. National Weather Service officials said the Greek alphabet got in the way of the main reason for naming storms -- to help the public readily identify and track them. Many people were confused by the sounds of the Greek letters, and public attention often focused more on the use of the alphabet itself than on the destruction caused by the storms, officials said.

The World Meteorological Organization, a United Nations agency, said its Hurricane Committee had developed a supplemental list of names that could be deployed instead of Greek letters when the standard list is exhausted in a given season. The 21-name backup list of Atlantic storms begins with Adria, Braylen and Caridad, and ends with Viviana and Will. Like the main list of storm names, the supplemental list does not include names that begin with the letters Q, U, X, Y or Z, which officials said are not common enough or easily understood across English, Spanish, French and Portuguese, the languages frequently spoken throughout North America, Central America and the Caribbean.

The World Meteorological Organization also said on Wednesday that Dorian, Laura, Eta and Iota would no longer appear on the rotating lists of Atlantic tropical storm names, which repeat every six years. The names were retired, the organization said, because of the death and destruction the storms had caused.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A surveillance contractor that has previously sold services to the U.S. military is advertising a product that it says can locate the real-time locations of specific cars in nearly any country on Earth. It says it does this by using data collected and sent by the cars and their components themselves, according to a document obtained by Motherboard. "Ulysses can provide our clients with the ability to remotely geolocate vehicles in nearly every country except for North Korea and Cuba on a near real time basis," the document, written by contractor The Ulysses Group, reads. "Currently, we can access over 15 billion vehicle locations around the world every month," the document adds.

Although the company told Motherboard it has not sold the product to the U.S. government at this time, the news highlights the scale and reach of car-tracking technology, and the fact that car location data is of interest not just to insurance companies and the finance sector, but to government contractors who explicitly say they want to source the data for intelligence and surveillance purposes. [...] Included in the document is a map showing apparent vehicle locations spread across Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey, including along the border with Syria. A section of text next to the map says Ulysses' data access lets clients analyze targets "whether you want to geo-locate one vehicle or 25,000,000 as shown here." An image on the company's LinkedIn page appears to show data related to Bulgaria. [...] The document does not explain exactly how Ulysses sources its data, be that directly from automakers or OEMs, or via an aggregator company. But there are plenty of companies that could be contributing. Andrew Lewis, president of The Ulysses Group, told Motherboard in an email that "any proprietary promotional material we may have produced is aspirational and developed based on publicly available information about modern telematics equipment." Lewis added: "We do not have any contracts with the government or any of its agencies related to our work in the field and we have never received any funding whatsoever from the government related to telematics."

AmiMoJo shares a report from ScienceAlert: The menagerie of bacterial and fungal species living among us is ever growing -- and this is no exception in low-gravity environments, such as the International Space Station (ISS). Researchers from the United States and India working with NASA have now discovered four strains of bacteria living in different places in the ISS -- three of which were, until now, completely unknown to science.

Three of the four strains were isolated back in 2015 and 2016 -- one was found on an overhead panel of the ISS research stations, the second was found in the Cupola, the third was found on the surface of the dining table; the fourth was found in an old HEPA filter returned to Earth in 2011. All four of the strains belong to a family of bacteria found in soil and freshwater; they are involved in nitrogen fixation, plant growth, and can help stop plant pathogens. Basically, good bacteria to have around if you're growing things. The research has been published in Frontiers in Microbiology.

lazarus shares a report from Phys.org: Two Arizona State University astrophysicists, Steven Desch and Alan Jackson of the School of Earth and Space Exploration, set out toexplain the odd features of 'Oumuamua and have determined that it is likely a piece of a Pluto-like planet from another solar system. Desch and Jackson hypothesized that the object was made of different ices and calculated how quickly these ices would sublimate (passing from a solid to a gas) as 'Oumuamua passed by the sun. From there, they calculated the rocket effect, the object's mass and shape, and the reflectivity of the ices.

The scientists found one ice in particular -- solid nitrogen -- that provided an exact match to all the object's features simultaneously. And since solid nitrogen ice can be seen on the surface of Pluto, it is possible that a comet-like object could be made of the same material. "We knew we had hit on the right idea when we completed the calculation for what albedo (how reflective the body is) would make the motion of 'Oumuamua match the observations," said Jackson, who is a research scientist and an Exploration Fellow at ASU. "That value came out as being the same as we observe on the surface of Pluto or Triton, bodies covered in nitrogen ice."

They then calculated the rate at which chunks of solid nitrogen ice would have been knocked off the surfaces of Pluto and similar bodies early in our solar system's history. And they calculated the probability that chunks of solid nitrogen ice from other solar systems would reach ours. "It was likely knocked off the surface by an impact about half a billion years ago and thrown out of its parent system," Jackson said. "Being made of frozen nitrogen also explains the unusual shape of 'Oumuamua. As the outer layers of nitrogen ice evaporated, the shape of the body would have become progressively more flattened, just like a bar of soap does as the outer layers get rubbed off through use."

Oceans' worth of water may remain buried in the crust of Mars, and not lost to space as previously long thought, a new study finds. Space.com reports: Data from NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) mission and the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter revealed that at the rate water disappears from the Red Planet's atmosphere, Mars would have lost a global ocean of water only about 10 to 82 feet (3 to 25 m) deep over the course of 4.5 billion years. Now scientists find that much of the water Mars once had may remain hidden in the crust of the Red Planet, locked away in the crystal structures of rocks beneath the Martian surface. They detailed their findings online March 16 in the journal Science and at the Lunar Planetary Science Conference.

In the new study, the scientists found chemical reactions may have led between 30% to 99% of the water that Mars initially had to get locked into minerals and buried in the planet's crust. Any remaining water was then lost to space, explaining the hydrogen-to-deuterium ratios seen on Mars. All in all, the researchers suggested Mars lost 40% to 95% of its water during its Noachian period about 4.1 billion to 3.7 billion years ago. Their model suggested the amount of water on the Red Planet reached its current levels by about 3 billion years ago.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: In 2016, a family in Illinois thought that a meteorite had hit their backyard. They called up the geology department at nearby Wheaton College to say that whatever struck their property had started a small fire and had left a weird rock embedded in the scorched dirt. "Meteorites, contrary to popular belief, are cold when they hit the ground," says Benjamin Hess, who was an undergraduate at the college but is now a graduate student at Yale University. "My professor readily figured out that that was probably a lightning strike."

When lightning strikes sand, soil or stone, it immediately melts the materials into a glassy clump known as a fulgurite, or lightning rock. When geologists excavated the fulgurite in Illinois, they found something unexpected inside -- an important ingredient for life that had long been thought to be delivered to early Earth by meteorites. A report on the find, in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that this could have been a way for lightning to have played a key role in the emergence of life.

When the researchers dug out the fulgurite in Illinois, they first saw glassy bits on its surface. Below that was a thick, tree-root-like structure extending down about a foot and a half. Hess and two colleagues at the University of Leeds analyzed the minerals inside and found one called schreibersite. This reactive mineral contains phosphorus, an essential element for life. Phosphorus "really plays a key role in a lot of the basic cell structures," says Hess. For example, it makes up the backbone of DNA. Phosphorus was abundant in early Earth, but geologists know that it was mostly inaccessible because it was trapped inside nonreactive minerals that don't dissolve easily in water. One explanation for where the phosphorus came from is meteorites, which can contain reactive minerals like schreibersite. But, according to the researchers, lightning offers an alternative source as it doesn't destroy an entire 100-kilometer area when it strikes and there could have been 1 billion to 5 billion lightning flashes every year when life firm emerged, about 3.5 billion years ago.

KindMind shares a report from ScienceDaily: In 1966, US Army scientists drilled down through nearly a mile of ice in northwestern Greenland -- and pulled up a fifteen-foot-long tube of dirt from the bottom. Then this frozen sediment was lost in a freezer for decades. It was accidentally rediscovered in 2017. In 2019, University of Vermont scientist Andrew Christ looked at it through his microscope -- and couldn't believe what he was seeing: twigs and leaves instead of just sand and rock. That suggested that the ice was gone in the recent geologic past -- and that a vegetated landscape, perhaps a boreal forest, stood where a mile-deep ice sheet as big as Alaska stands today.

Over the last year, Christ and an international team of scientists -- led by Paul Bierman at UVM, Joerg Schaefer at Columbia University and Dorthe Dahl-Jensen at the University of Copenhagen -- have studied these one-of-a-kind fossil plants and sediment from the bottom of Greenland. Their results show that most, or all, of Greenland must have been ice-free within the last million years, perhaps even the last few hundred-thousand years. "Ice sheets typically pulverize and destroy everything in their path," says Christ, "but what we discovered was delicate plant structures -- perfectly preserved. They're fossils, but they look like they died yesterday. It's a time capsule of what used to live on Greenland that we wouldn't be able to find anywhere else." The findings appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

schwit1 shares a report from Phys.Org: A new study led by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science demonstrates that under realistic environmental conditions oil drifting in the ocean after the DWH oil spill photooxidized into persistent compounds within hours to days, instead over long periods of time as was thought during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This is the first model results to support the new paradigm of photooxidation that emerged from laboratory research.

After an oil spill, oil droplets on the ocean surface can be transformed by a weathering process known as photooxidation, which results in the degradation of crude oil from exposure to light and oxygen into new by-products over time. Tar, a by-product of this weathering process, can remain in coastal areas for decades after a spill. Despite the significant consequences of this weathering pathway, photooxidation was not taken into account in oil spill models or the oil budget calculations during the Deepwater Horizon spill. The UM Rosenstiel School research team developed the first oil-spill model algorithm that tracks the dose of solar radiation oil droplets receive as they rise from the deep sea and are transported at the ocean surface. The authors found that the weathering of oil droplets by solar light occurred within hours to days, and that roughly 75 percent of the photooxidation during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred on the same areas where chemical dispersants were sprayed from aircraft. Photooxidized oil is known to reduce the effectiveness of aerial dispersants. The study has been published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Renewable electricity production needs to grow eight times faster than the current rate to help limit global heating, according to a report. The International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) said urgent action was needed to keep pace with rising demand for electricity, which could require a total investment of $131 trillion in renewables by 2050. Francesco La Camera, the director general of Irena, said the "window of opportunity" to achieve the goals of the Paris climate agreement was closing fast. "The recent trends show that the gap between where we are and where we should be is not decreasing but widening. We are heading in the wrong direction," La Camera said. "We need a drastic acceleration of energy transitions to make a meaningful turnaround. Time will be the most important variable to measure our efforts."

The agency's outlook report says keeping a lid on rising temperatures will require electricity to surpass fossil fuels as the dominant source of energy before 2050, as more economies electrify transport and heating to help cut carbon emissions. Clean electricity will also be in high demand to produce "green hydrogen" to burn in heavy industry and manufacturing plants where direct electrification is not possible. The surge in electricity use could mean that electric power will make up just over half of all energy consumed by 2050, compared with 21% in 2018. Fossil fuels have made up almost two-thirds of energy consumption in recent years but may be reduced to 10% by 2050.

CBS News reports: Scientists are pulling inspiration from Noah's Ark in a new lunar proposal that they call a "global insurance policy." They hope to send an ark to the moon, filled with 335 million sperm and egg samples, in case a catastrophe happens on Earth. Instead of two of every animal, the solar-powered moon ark would cryogenically store frozen seed, spore, sperm and egg samples from some 6.7 million Earth species. University of Arizona researcher Jekan Thanga and a group of his students proposed the concept in a paper presented during the IEEE Aerospace Conference this week...

Establishing the ark would involve sending the 6.7 million samples to the moon in multiple payloads, then storing them in a vault beneath the surface, where they would be safe. The idea is to store the ark within a network of lava tubes — about 200 of which were discovered beneath the moon's surface in 2013... These tubes have remained untouched for three to four billion years, and scientists suggest they could provide much-needed protection from solar radiation, meteors or temperature changes on the surface. While the moon is not hospitable to humans, its harsh features "make it a great place to store samples that need to stay very cold and undisturbed for hundreds of years at a time," they said.

Based on some "quick, back-of-the-envelope calculations," Thanga said that transporting about 50 samples from each of 6.7 million species — totaling 335 million samples — would take about 250 rocket launches. That's over six times more than it took to build the International Space Station, which required 40 rocket launches. "It's not crazy big," Thanga said. "We were a little bit surprised about that."

The team's proposal for the ark includes solar panels on the moon's surface for electricity, elevator shafts down into the facility and Petri dishes housed in cryogenic preservation modules.
"What amazes me about projects like this is that they make me feel like we are getting closer to becoming a space civilization," said the University of Arizona doctoral student leading the thermal analysis for the project, "and to a not-very-distant future where humankind will have bases on the moon and Mars."

The Verge reports: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched the latest batch of 60 Starlink satellites into orbit Sunday, and returned to Earth successfully, landing on its Of Course I Still Love You drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, the company announced. Sunday's mission marked a record ninth flight and landing for this Falcon 9 booster, SpaceX said...

Sunday's launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center was the second in the past few days for SpaceX, which sent another of its Falcon 9 rockets skyward from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday. That launch also brought 60 satellites into orbit.
Sharing a video about the mission, CNET calls it "a new standard for rocket recycling." The first stage that boosted the satellites is a veteran of five previous Starlink missions, Crew Dragon's first demonstration flight, a SiriusXM satellite launch and a Canadian Space Agency satellite mission. The fairing, or nose cone, also previously flew on the Transporter-1 ride-share mission.

"Two companies are selling diamonds made in a laboratory from CO2 that once circled the Earth," reports Scientific American: The sales pitch can be stunning. As Ryan Shearman, the founder and CEO of a New York-based company called Aether, recently explained to a reporter for Vogue magazine: Each carat of a diamond removes 20 tons of CO2. That, he said, is more invisible gas than the average person produces in a year.

With the purchase of a 2-carat diamond, Shearman pointed out, "you're essentially offsetting 2 and a half years of your life."

It can take Mother Nature as long as a billion years to make diamonds, which are formed in rocks. But as Shearman explained in an interview with E&E News, he has developed a patent-pending process that can make a batch of diamonds in a laboratory in four weeks. Unlike other laboratory-made diamonds, his process starts with CO2 removed from the air. The gas undergoes a chemical reaction where it is subjected to high pressure and extremely high temperatures. All of this is created using solar, wind or hydraulic power. Or, as Shearman sometimes puts it, "we're committed to the unprecedented modern alchemy of turning air pollution into precious stones." Aether has been selling its diamonds since the beginning of the year at prices ranging from $7,000 for a ring to around $40,000 for earrings with sparkling stone arrangements.

Aether has a competitor, a British company called Skydiamond...

For almost 40 years, the nation's largest DDT manufacturer disposed of some of its waste product off the coast of Southern California. Now, a research boat is deploying "underwater roombas" to map the ocean floor and assess the damage. Gizmodo reports: In October, people living on Santa Catalina Island, which sits 22 miles (35 kilometers) off the coast of Southern California, were shocked to learn from a Los Angeles Times investigation that a scientist had found leaking barrels of dangerous waste strewn across the ocean floor. Residents had heard rumors that the nation's largest DDT manufacturer, which was based in Los Angeles until 1982, had disposed of some of its waste product near the island, and a huge Superfund lawsuit in 2000 had confirmed the company had disposed waste into sewers that ran into the ocean. But records unearthed by the Times confirmed that the manufacturer had filled up a ship with barrels of DDT-tainted waste and dumped it off the coast once a month for almost 40 years, something unaddressed in the Superfund lawsuit.

So how do you start cleaning up leaking barrels of toxic DDT-laced sludge? Send in the robots. A research boat staffed with a crew and two scientists set off this week on a two-week trip to assess the extent of the damage from the DDT barrels. Eric Terrill of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who is spearheading the cleanup efforts, described the robots to the Los Angeles Times as "underwater Roombas," which is very cute. These little buddies are tricked out with sonar equipment that will help them collect data from the ocean floor. Suddenly your robotic vacuum is looking a little less cool. The robot's purpose isn't to vacuum, though, but to survey the area littered with barrels of potentially toxic waste. Over the next two weeks, the aquatic robotic explorers will run between 12 and 16 hours a day, mapping out the ocean floor to ascertain the barrels' location and pinpoint areas for future study.

Astronomers have found the farthest known source of radio emissions in the universe: a quasar 13 billion light-years from Earth spewing jets of particles at nearly the speed of light. Live Science reports: Quasars are some of the oldest, most distant, most massive and brightest objects in the universe. They make up the cores of galaxies where a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole gorges on all the matter that's unable to escape its gravitational grasp. While the black hole is devouring this matter, it's also blasting out an enormous amount of radiation that collectively can be more than a trillion times more luminous than the brightest stars, making quasars the brightest objects in the observable universe.

This quasar in particular, named P172+18, is a relic from around 780 million years after the Big Bang and reveals clues about one of the earliest ages of the universe -- the epoch of reionization. At the start of this period, the universe was darkly veiled by a mostly uniform cloud of hydrogen gas. Scientists refer to this time as the universe's dark ages, because most light emitted was quickly absorbed by the neutrally charged gas. Eventually, gravity collapsed the primordial gas into the first stars and quasars, which began to heat and ionize the surrounding gases, allowing light to pass through. [...] Further observations from telescopes [...] showed that P172+18 is nearly 300 million times more massive than the sun and is among the fastest-growing quasars ever discovered. The problem is, scientists don't know how a black hole became so massive this early on in the universe. The radio jets could be an explanation. The researchers' findings will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

China has revealed a prototype for a new high-speed Maglev train that is capable of reaching speeds of 385 miles (620 kilometers) per hour. CNN reports: The train runs on high-temperature superconducting (HTS) power that makes it look as if the train is floating along the magnetized tracks. The sleek 21-meter-long (69 feet) prototype was unveiled to media in the city of Chengdu, Sichuan Province, on January 13. In addition, university researchers constructed 165 meters (541 feet) of track to demonstrate how the train would look and feel in transit, according to state-run Xinhua News.

Professor He Chuan (vice president of Southwest Jiaotong University, which worked on the prototype) told reporters that the train could be "operational" within 3-10 years. He added: "Sichuan has rich rare earth resources, which is very beneficial to our construction of permanent magnet tracks, thus promoting the faster development of experiments."