2025-07-12 00:00:03
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Enjoy today’s videos!
Reachy Mini is an expressive, open-source robot designed for human-robot interaction, creative coding, and AI experimentation. Fully programmable in Python (and soon JavaScript, Scratch) and priced from $299, it’s your gateway into robotics AI: fun, customizable, and ready to be part of your next coding project.
I’m so happy that Pollen and Reachy found a home with Hugging Face, but I hope they understand that they are never, ever allowed to change that robot’s face. O-o
[ Reachy Mini ] via [ Hugging Face ]
General-purpose robots promise a future where household assistance is ubiquitous and aging in place is supported by reliable, intelligent help. These robots will unlock human potential by enabling people to shape and interact with the physical world in transformative new ways. At the core of this transformation are Large Behavior Models (LBMs) - embodied AI systems that take in robot sensor data and output actions. LBMs are pretrained on large, diverse manipulation datasets and offer the key to realizing robust, general-purpose robotic intelligence. Yet despite their growing popularity, we still know surprisingly little about what today’s LBMs actually offer - and at what cost. This uncertainty stems from the difficulty of conducting rigorous, large-scale evaluations in real-world robotics. As a result, progress in algorithm and dataset design is often guided by intuition rather than evidence, hampering progress. Our work aims to change that.
Kinisi Robotics is advancing the frontier of physical intelligence by developing AI-driven robotic platforms capable of high-speed, autonomous pick-and-place operations in unstructured environments. This video showcases Kinisi’s latest wheeled-base humanoid performing dexterous bin stacking and item sorting using closed-loop perception and motion planning. The system combines high-bandwidth actuation, multi-arm coordination, and real-time vision to achieve robust manipulation without reliance on fixed infrastructure. By integrating custom hardware with onboard intelligence, Kinisi enables scalable deployment of general-purpose robots in dynamic warehouse settings, pushing toward broader commercial readiness for embodied AI systems.
[ Kinisi Robotics ]
Thanks, Bren!
In this work, we develop a data collection system where human and robot data are collected and unified in a shared space, and propose a modularized cross-embodiment Transformer that is pretrained on human data and fine-tuned on robot data. This enables high data efficiency and effective transfer from human to quadrupedal embodiments, facilitating versatile manipulation skills for unimanual and bimanual, non-prehensile and prehensile, precise tool-use, and long-horizon tasks, such as cat litter scooping!
[ Human2LocoMan ]
Thanks, Yaru!
LEIYN is a quadruped robot equipped with an active waist joint. It achieves the world’s fastest chimney climbing through dynamic motions learned via reinforcement learning.
[ JSK Lab ]
Thanks, Keita!
Quadrupedal robots are really just bipedal robots that haven’t learned to walk on two legs yet.
[ Adaptive Robotic Controls Lab, University of Hong Kong ]
This study introduces a biomimetic self-healing module for tendon-driven legged robots that uses robot motion to activate liquid metal sloshing, which removes surface oxides and significantly enhances healing strength. Validated on a life-sized monopod robot, the module enables repeated squatting after impact damage, marking the first demonstration of active self-healing in high-load robotic applications.
Thanks, Kento!
That whole putting wheels on quadruped robots thing was a great idea that someone had way back when.
[ Pudu Robotics ]
I know nothing about this video except that it’s very satisfying and comes from a YouTube account that hasn’t posted in 6 years.
Our AI WORKER now comes in a new Swerve Drive configuration, optimized for logistics environments. With its agile and omnidirectional movement, the swerve-type mobile base can efficiently perform various logistics tasks such as item transport, shelf navigation, and precise positioning in narrow aisles.
Wait, you can have a bimanual humanoid without legs? I am shocked.
[ ROBOTIS ]
I can’t tell whether I need an office assistant, or if I just need snacks.
[ PNDbotics ]
“MagicBot Z1: Atomic kinetic energy, the brave are fearless,” says the MagicBot website. Hard to argue with that!
[ MagicLab ]
We’re excited to announce our new HQ in Palo Alto [CA]. As we grow, consolidating our Sunnyvale [CA] and Moss [Norway] team under one roof will accelerate our speed to ramping production and getting NEO into homes near you.
I’m not entirely sure that moving from Norway to California is an upgrade, honestly.
[ 1X ]
Jim Kernan, Chief Product Officer at Engineered Arts, shares how they’re commercializing humanoid robots—blending AI, expressive design, and real-world applications to build trust and engagement.
[ Humanoids Summit ]
In the second installment of our Moonshot Podcast Deep Dive video interview series, X’s Captain of Moonshots Astro Teller sits down with André Prager, former Chief Engineer at Wing, for a conversation about the early days of Wing and how the team solved some of their toughest engineering challenges to develop simple, lightweight, inexpensive delivery drones that are now being used every day across three continents.
[ Moonshot Podcast ]
2025-07-11 02:00:03
IEEE and Pixar Animation Studios’ collaboration on the RenderMan SciTech Art Challenge last year broke entry records for the annual competition, tripling the usual number of submissions. Nearly 200 artists, engineers, and enthusiasts competed to demonstrate shading, lighting, rendering, and compositing techniques using RenderMan tools. The contest was held from 26 August to 26 November 2024.
As the 2025 competition date nears, here’s a look into RenderMan and how IEEE got involved in this exciting, innovative challenge.
Developed by Pixar in 1988, RenderMan has been at the forefront of computer-generated imagery (CGI) ever since. Created by visionaries Loren Carpenter, Rob Cook, Pat Hanrahan, and Tom Porter, the technology revolutionized the animation industry with its ability to produce realistic images. RenderMan, which has been used in such blockbuster movies as Avatar, Jurassic World, and Toy Story (the first fully computer-animated film), is still a vital tool for artists and studios worldwide.
Pixar received an IEEE Milestone award in 2023 for RenderMan’s groundbreaking technology. A Milestone plaque recognizing the technology is displayed next to the entrance gates at Pixar’s headquarters in Emeryville, Calif.
To celebrate the recognition and IEEE’s roots in electrical science, the two organizations came up with a “compute” theme for last year’s art challenge. Contestants’ entries had to feature a cityscape showcasing future human innovations or an alternate reality in which electricity never had been invented.
Leif Pedersen, a RenderMan specialist at Pixar, says the collaboration with IEEE allowed preparation to meet opportunity.
“We were already preparing for the art challenge,” Pedersen says, “and it was a perfect opportunity to leverage that wonderful milestone and make the challenge a celebration of computing.”
The partnership also led to something unusual: Pixar released the proprietary assets inspired by the studio’s early hardware history, including elements modeled after the original Pixar Image Computer.
“We’re pretty hesitant to ship out assets like that and also our intellectual property, but Pixar was all in because we knew that it was going to be a great hit,” Pedersen says. “It was so cool to see how creatively people ran with their ideas.”
“Pixar was built to foster interaction. Artists and engineers walk parallel paths, and art is where they meet.”
Participants used the assets in imaginative ways, turning chipsets into cityscapes and monitors into robot heads.
The winner was Margot Brun for The Robot Artist. Furkan Avci came in second with I Got You, Buddy. Noémie Layre placed third with The Robotanist.
The judges, who included IEEE Region 5 Director Matt Francis and past IEEE Region 6 Director Kathy Herring Hayashi, said they were amazed by the diversity of the entries.
The IEEE members’ technical perspective added a valuable dimension to the judging process, Pedersen says, adding, “It was crucial to have that outside view. We’re so in tune with making something pretty or based on a story, so getting that edge on ‘compute’ with IEEE’s expertise was incredibly important.”
The IEEE Milestone plaque recognizing RenderMan is on display next to the entrance gates at Pixar’s headquarters in Emeryville, Calif.Disney/Pixar
The RenderMan Challenge isn’t just about showcasing one’s talent, Pedersen says. It also can launch one’s career in CGI. Past participants and winners have gone on to work at Pixar and other major studios including Netflix and the Moving Picture Co.
“We don’t bring greatness to the contestants,” Pedersen says. “They’re already brilliant artists in their own right. We give them a platform where they’re learning an industry-leading tool with massive amounts of complexity, where their creativity can run freely.
“Pixar was built to foster interaction,” he adds. “Artists and engineers walk parallel paths, and the art is where they meet.”
For students and young professionals who want to work in the field, Pedersen has this advice: “The most crucial thing is education and the determination to be the best you can be. You can be an illustrator, a mathematician, or a programmer.”
The RenderMan team includes sculptors, illustrators, physicists, and software engineers collaborating to push the boundaries of digital imagery.
“There’s a place for you at Pixar and other VFX [visual effects] animation houses,” Pedersen says. “I encourage you to keep up with the latest technology, get to know people with similar interests, and look for events like the RenderMan Art Challenge.”
This year’s challenge kicks off next month.
2025-07-10 02:00:02
The global population is getting older. By 2030 there will be nearly 1.5 billion people who will be at least 60, according to the World Health Organization.
Studies have found that most older adults want to stay in their own homes. To help them, an assortment of technologies known as age tech is being developed to improve their quality of life and help them maintain their independence for as long as possible. Products include health and wellness monitoring devices, financial management systems, home-care robots, and smart appliances.
But not all age tech designers are taking into account issues that older people face, such as decreased mental acuity, mobility, perception, and strength.
Designing with those concerns in mind can be guided by technical standards. Last year the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) formed the Technology Standards for the Aging (AgeTech) Industry Connections group. The IC group’s goal is to ensure that age tech products and services are easy to use, safe, and secure for senior citizens.
Age tech standards could address accessibility aspects related to aging—which aren’t considered disabilities by the U.S. Americans With Disabilities Act and similar laws.
“When we talk about age tech, we’re talking about technologies that are either specifically designed to be used by older people to address a need they have or a product that was designed for general use but has a feature that would be beneficial for an older person,” says IEEE Life Fellow George Arnold, the IC’s chair. Now retired, Arnold spent much of his career working on standards development.
“We are focused on technologies that are designed for older people and not just general products that happen to be used by older people,” Arnold says.
The IEEE Life Members Committee has raised awareness about the need to develop technology tailored for older adults. The committee supports those who are at least 65 years old and have been members for a sufficient period, such that their age and years of membership equal or exceed 100.
IEEE got involved with age tech after sessions presented at last year’s IEEE Life Members Conference, Arnold says. One session explored how emerging technologies and new applications could impact seniors. Another presentation, given by AARP’s AgeTech Collaborative, described difficulties older adults face when using newer technology, as well as their concerns about data privacy and other factors.
A discussion about what IEEE could do to address the issues led to a suggestion that age tech standards might be needed, Arnold says.
“For the most part,” he says, “these solutions have been designed for older people without their input, or being adequately tested on them.”
Arnold, along with Senior Life Member Michael Andrews and Life Member Kirpal Singh Khalsa—the conference’s organizers—got to work. They compiled a bibliography of all the projects and programs being conducted on the aging population by universities, government agencies, and private industry.
Arnold also researched relevant IEEE standards. He found about a dozen that were related but none that were specific to aging.
“We are focused on technologies that are designed for older people and not just general products that happen to be used by older people.”
Andrews, Khalsa, and Arnold then formed the IC group, which Arnold describes as an “incubator that provides a vehicle for volunteers to develop proposals for new IEEE standards.”
“The goal,” he says, “is to develop proposals for IEEE standards to address such issues as terminology, human factors [how people interact with technology], usability, metrics, test methods, and interoperability for age tech products and services.”
The IC group’s participants include representatives from AARP, the AAL Programme, the Aging Research Center, and the Smart-Aging Research Center. Several universities are involved in the initiative because, Arnold says, they’re able to provide an avenue to publish research or make people aware of their work on aging and longevity. They include Universidade Anhembi Morumbi, the Australian National University, Tecnológico de Monterrey, the University of Limerick, and the University of Pennsylvania.
The IC group also is working with the Consumer Technology Association, which deals with products sold to the general public.
Arnold encourages product developers to participate: “It’s always helpful to be the driver of a standard. In many cases, the developers get some of their intellectual property embedded in the standard or are able to find a market for what they’re working on.”
The IC group is developing a framework document to define terms used in the age tech field, providing a common understanding, Arnold says. The group also is creating a road map to help discover what standards are appropriate.
From there, he says, he anticipates writing proposals for one or more standards that should be developed by an existing IEEE standards committee.
“The thing that’s unique about the age tech program,” he says, “is that it cuts across many different technologies, so there are about half a dozen societies that could address various aspects.”
They include the IEEE Engineering Medicine and Biology Society, which deals with wearables for health applications, and the IEEE Computer Society, which focuses on cybersecurity, software, and usability issues. The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society would be involved with assistive machines being developed for older people. The IEEE Consumer Technology Society handles products for the general public. The IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology takes a broad view of new developments’ impact.
Another area of focus, Arnold says, is creating datasets for developers to offer insights into the lives and health of senior citizens.
“A lot of datasets represent a broad range of people, from young to old, so basically products are being designed for the average person—which don’t necessarily account for differences as people age,” he says. “There are a lot of factors that need to be designed for them, such as slower reaction time and other aspects of human performance.”
The IEEE SA recently held the Aging Healthy Digital Innovation Challenge to encourage engineers to develop such technologies. The competition, which recently concluded, sought projects that would enhance patient engagement, streamline health care delivery, and improve overall patient outcomes. Products could include devices for disease monitoring and therapies; nutrition management; and personalized emotional and wellness support and monitoring systems.
The competition was sponsored by the IEEE AgeTech IC group and the New Frontiers in the Continuum of Care for Connected Health IC group, in collaboration with the IEEE SA Healthcare and Life Sciences global practice group.
Alva Health’s NeuroCheck wearable stroke detection device is designed to identify the earliest signs of ischemic stroke. The pair of wrist-worn medical-grade devices continuously monitors motor asymmetry—a hallmark symptom of stroke—and alerts patients and caregivers when a stroke is suspected.Alva Health
The winner was Alva Health’s NeuroCheck. The wearable stroke detection device is designed to identify the earliest signs of ischemic stroke. The system consists of a pair of wrist-worn medical-grade devices, a smartphone application, and a cloud-based analytics engine powered by proprietary machine learning algorithms. NeuroCheck continuously monitors motor asymmetry—a hallmark symptom of stroke—and alerts patients and caregivers when a stroke is suspected, enabling faster treatment and improved outcomes. The device’s components were developed in collaboration with leading academic institutions and health care systems, including Yale. NeuroChek can run for more than 90 days without having to be charged.
Arnold says IEEE has a built-in roster of age tech experts who can lend their expertise to the IC group: life members.
“Life members should become involved in the IC,” he says, “because they have a tremendous wealth of knowledge as users of age tech and also the technical expertise they’ve developed during their careers.
“Many life members are now retired and still want to be involved. Helping IEEE develop age tech for practical use is a great way to stay technically and professionally engaged, and to help other senior citizens improve their quality of life."2025-07-09 22:48:50
A new chip component designed by MIT researchers promises to expand the reach of the Internet of Things into 5G. The discovery represents a broader push for 5G-based IoT tech—using the telecom standard’s low latency, energy efficiency, and capacity for massive device connectivity. The new research also signals an important step toward applications that include smaller, low-power health monitors, smart cameras, and industrial sensors, for instance.
More broadly, the prospect of moving the IoT onto 5G means more things can connect more quickly with potentially greater data speeds and less battery drain. It also means trickier and more complicated circuits will need to be toiling away behind the data streams.
And doing all this using 5G standards rather than equivalent 4G/LTE or Wi-Fi networks arguably means IoT is expanding its range and scope. It’s moving beyond relatively modest-sized IoT deployments to broader networks boasting the potential for hundreds of nodes or more.
To clarify, however, says Soroush Araei, a PhD candidate at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science, IoT-over-5G doesn’t mean that every node in a network will suddenly be getting its own phone number.
“The main goal here is that you have a single radio receiver that can be reused for different applications,” Araei says. “You have a single piece of hardware which is flexible, and you can tune it across a wide frequency range in software.”
Using 5G standards rather than 5G wireless networks allows IoT devices to frequency hop, to sip their battery power, and to use massive-connectivity tricks that allow for up to one million devices per square kilometer.
On the other hand, the fact that IoT developers have to date been slow to adopt 5G underscores just how difficult the hardware challenge is.
“For IoT, power efficiency is critical,” says Eric Klumperink, associate professor of IC design at the University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands. “You want a decent radio performance for very low power—[using] a small battery or even energy harvesting.”
But with more and more devices connecting to more and more networks, 5G or otherwise, other concerns rear their heads too.
“In a world increasingly saturated with wireless signals, interference is a major problem,” says Vito Giannini, a technical fellow at Austin, Tex.-based L&T Semiconductor Technologies. (Neither Giannini nor Klumperink were involved with the MIT group’s research.)
Using 5G standards potentially addresses both issues, Araei says. Specifically, he says, the MIT group’s new tech relies on a slimmed-down version of 5G that’s already been developed for IoT and other applications. It’s called 5G reduced capacity (or 5G RedCap).
“5G RedCap IoT receivers can hop across frequencies,” he says. “But they’re not required to be as low-latency as the top-tier 5G applications [including smartphones].”
By contrast, the simplest IoT chip that uses Wi-Fi would rely on a single frequency band—perhaps 2.5 or 5 gigahertz—and could potentially seize up if too many other devices were using the same channel.
Frequency hopping, however, requires robust radio communications hardware that can quickly switch between frequency channels as directed by the network and then ensure the frequency hops align with network instructions and timing.
That’s a lot of hardware and software smarts packed into a tiny chip that might be just one of hundreds of motes affixed to pallets across an entire warehouse.
But features like that are just the appetizers, Araei says.
The centerpiece of any viable 5G RedCap chip is the hardware that can flexibly work across a range of frequencies, while still keeping to a tiny power budget and a modest overall cost for the device. (The MIT group’s tech can only be used for receiving incoming signals; other chip components would be needed to transmit across a similarly wide range of frequencies.)
Here the researchers pulled a few tricks from the world of analog circuits and power electronics. But rather than bulk components layered and stacked like ceramic capacitors, the present work integrates these tricks into an on-chip system to miniaturize RF frequency hopping cheaply and efficiently. The researchers presented their work last month at the IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium in San Francisco.
“This is kind of a switched-capacitor network,” Araei says. “You’re turning on and off these capacitors in a periodic manner sequentially, which is called ‘N-path structure.’ That generally gives you a low-pass filter.”
Which means that rather than using a single capacitor in the circuit, the team used a miniaturized bank of capacitors to flick on and off in tune with the needs of the frequency range being received at the circuit.
And because they could put all this frequency-filtering wizardry at the front-end of the circuit, before the amplifier touches the signal, the team reports high efficiency at blocking out interference. Compared to conventional IoT receivers, they report, their circuit can filter out 30 times more interference, while doing so using only single-digit milliwatts of power.
In other words, the group appears to have designed some pretty effective low-power 5G IoT receiver circuitry. So who can design a similarly clever transmitter?
Do both of those, and someone someday will be in business, says Klumperink. “There are arguments to be made for IoT-over-5G (or 6G),” he says. “Because spectrum is allocated and managed better than ad hoc Wi-Fi connections.”
Running the Internet of Things over 5G realistically means operating with very low power requirements. The MIT team’s chip consumes less than a milliwatt while still filtering out extraneous signals.Soroush Araei
The MIT group’s circuitry, Klumperink says, could conceivably be manufactured at a mainstream chip fab.
“I don’t see big hurdles as the circuit is implemented in mainstream CMOS technology,” Klumperink says. (The group’s circuits demand only a 22-nanometer fabrication process, so it wouldn’t need to be a bleeding-edge foundry by any stretch.)
Araei says the team aims next to work on eliminating a need for a battery or other dedicated power supply.
“Is it possible to get rid of that power supply and basically harness the power from the existing electromagnetic waves in the environment?” Araei asks.
He says they also hope to extend the frequency range for their receiver tech to cover the whole frequency range of 5G signals. “In this prototype we were able to achieve low frequencies of 250 megahertz up to 3 GHz,” he says. “So is it possible to extend that frequency range let’s say up to 6 GHz, to cover the entire 5G range?”
If these various upcoming hurdles can be cleared, says Giannini, a range of applications probably appear on the near-term horizon. “It offers an advantage for mobility, scalability, and secure wide-area coverage in mid-range and mid-bandwidth scenarios,” he says of the MIT group’s work. He adds that the new circuit’s 5G IoT adaptability could make the tech well suited for, he says, “industrial sensors, some wearables, and smart cameras.”
2025-07-08 23:05:01
Olivine is a rather unassuming rock. Olive brown to yellow green in color, this hard yet brittle mineral is thought to be the most abundant in Earth’s upper mantle. Chemically, olivine is magnesium iron silicate, though it contains other elements too. Economically, it’s close to worthless. Its limited industrial utility stretches to gemstones, metalworking, ceramics, and occasionally, as a gravel for road construction. At some mining sites, olivine is a waste product, stored in piles on the surface.
It’s certainly not an obvious choice as a source for battery materials.
But that’s exactly how it’s viewed by a group of New Zealand engineers. Christchurch-based Aspiring Materials has developed a patented chemical process that produces multiple valuable minerals from olivine, leaving no harmful waste behind. Perhaps most interesting to the energy sector is the rarest of its products—hard-to-source nickel-manganese-cobalt hydroxide that is increasingly required for lithium-ion battery production.
Aspiring’s pilot plant, which opened in February, is in an anonymous industrial estate east of the city. One corner of the main floor is dominated by a large stainless-steel tank, which is connected to a series of smaller tanks arranged in a stepped line. “Apart from our electrolysis system, the hardware is more typical of dairy plants,” says Colum Rice, Aspiring’s chief commercial officer. “The process is elegant but not massively complicated. Our inputs are rock, water, and renewable energy, and our products come with no CO2 emissions.”
The rock is olivine “flour”; a fine, green-gray dust that is an unwanted by-product from refractory sand production. This is carried by screw conveyer into the largest tank, where it is combined with sulfuric acid. This acid-leaching step “transforms it into kind of an elemental soup,” says Megan Danczyk, lead chemical engineer at Aspiring. From there, it passes down the reaction chain vessels, where through the addition of caustic soda and careful management of particle size and temperature, three products can be individually extracted.
Megan Danczyk, Aspiring Materials’ lead chemical engineer, holds a scoop of magnesium hydroxide.Aspiring Minerals
About 50 percent of what the process makes is silica that can be a partial replacement for Portland cement, the most common variety of cement in the world. About 40 percent is a magnesium product suitable for use in carbon sequestration, wastewater treatment, and alloy manufacturing, among other things. The final 10 percent is a mixed metal product—iron combined with small quantities of a nickel-manganese-cobalt hydroxide. The battery industry calls it NMC, and it is the go-to material for high-power applications.
Danczyk explains that at the end of the extraction process, they’re left only with a salty brine. “This goes to an electrolyzer, which recycles and regenerates the acid we use for digestion and the base we use to separate the products. It’s a closed loop. We’re using the whole rock, and we’re processing it at low temperature and ambient pressure.”
Right now, Aspiring does each separation consecutively, or as Rice put it, “silica, reload, NMC, reload, magnesium.” The plan is to add two more reaction chains in parallel, so that the process can run continuously, shortening the runtime from three days to one.
NMC materials are already widely used in battery manufacturing; typically forming the cathode in high-energy-density lithium-ion batteries, or for those electrical systems that need to be frequently cycled, such as power tools, large-scale energy storage, and electric vehicles. “What we’ve been able to produce here matches the specs of what is currently used in the battery space,” says Danczyk.
Today, most industrially relevant NMC materials are made by combining salts of their three main ingredients, and each of those regularly appear on critical minerals lists because of their growing importance in our modern world. The challenge with critical minerals is accessing them. Most of the planet’s nickel is sourced and refined in Indonesia. South Africa has the world’s largest manganese reserves, but exports almost all of it to China for processing. For cobalt, the largest producer is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but again, it is refined in China. Concerns around supply monopoly, geopolitical instability, human rights violations, and environmental damage in these regions have been widely documented.
While NMC hydroxide represents the smallest fraction, (about 1 percent) of Aspiring’s outputs, it could still make a dent in future supply chains for battery materials. As Jim Goddin—who sat on the U.K. government’s expert committee that developed the country’s Critical Minerals Strategy in 2023—explains, the approach to securing supplies of these materials is changing.
“Economies are looking at how they can shore up supply, and diversify the supply chains, including collaborating with smaller producers who potentially offer more stability. The third branch is the circular economy, which is ensuring that materials they do have are used for longer or recovered for reuse.”
Aspiring is not the only company looking to extract more value from already-mined materials. Canadian company Atlas Materials is currently commercializing a similar closed-loop process that produces a similar set of products, but the starting point differs—rather than olivine, it focuses on serpentine.
“My understanding is that of these two raw materials, olivine is actually the more difficult to acid leach,” says Fei Wang, an assistant professor at Université Laval in Quebec City. “So that means it needs a higher energy input and will consume the acid more quickly.” Wang’s research also focuses on hydrometallurgical extraction of critical metals, but he is not involved with Atlas or Aspiring. “There’s no doubt that Aspiring’s technology is interesting, and represents a step forward in progress, but I have some concerns around the economics of it,” he adds.
For Goddin, the conversation should be broader than that. “From a European perspective, things are shifting towards cleaner, more sustainable production. There’s an increasing focus on providing data about the environmental impacts of the materials that are imported and consumed. Even if, say, Aspiring’s materials ended up being more expensive, they may be able to compete on those grounds. They’re extracting value from every component they produce, and with low to no waste. That’s likely to be a benefit for exporting to those markets.”
2025-07-06 21:00:02
Distant exoplanets can be dodgy to spot even in the best of observations. Despite the challenges, a team of astronomers just reported the discovery of a gas giant exoplanet that lies about 400 light-years from Earth. It’s called TOI-4465 b and it takes 12 hours to transit across the face of its star during its 102-day orbit.
TOI-4465 b was actually first observed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and reported as a transit event. A transit is when the object being observed crosses in front of its star from our point of view here on Earth. That means the planet has to be in just the right orbit to be seen. In addition, other objects can also transit stars (such as small black holes). So, just seeing it transit wasn’t enough to confirm TOI-4465 b as a planet. Astronomers needed to see it transit more than once to make sure it just wasn’t a one-time wiggle in the data.
Due to its lengthy orbit, astronomers only get three chances each year to observe TOI-4465 b, and those windows are challenging, according to Zahra Essack of the University of New Mexico. She led a team project focused on this gas giant planet. “The observational windows are extremely limited. Each transit lasts about 12 hours, but it is incredibly rare to get 12 full hours of dark, clear skies in one location,” she said. “The difficulty of observing the transit is compounded by weather, telescope availability, and the need for continuous coverage.
This gas giant exoplanet is part of the population of distant worlds that lie in the size range of our own Jupiter. It’s actually about 25 percent larger in radius and has about six times Jupiter’s mass packed inside. Interestingly, this massive, dense world is pretty temperate as big Jupiters go—its temperature ranges from 375–478 kelvins (about 200–400°F).
TOI-4465’s size and moderate temperatures put it in a rare class of Jupiter-type planets. It bridges the gap between the really hot Jupiters, most of which orbit extremely close to their stars in very short (around 10 days or less) orbits and our own cold Jupiter (which orbits the Sun in 11.8 years). The 102-day orbit would put TOI-4465 b somewhere between Mercury and Venus if this planet were in our own Solar System. This size, orbit, and lower temperature make the planet a great target for future observations, particularly by JWST, which could also study its atmosphere in some detail.
“This discovery is important because long-period exoplanets (defined as having orbital periods longer than 100 days) are difficult to detect and confirm due to limited observational opportunities and resources. As a result, they are underrepresented in our current catalog of exoplanets,” explained Essack. “Studying these long-period planets gives us insights into how planetary systems form and evolve under more moderate conditions.”
So, how do scientists go about observing TOI-4465 b given the challenges it poses? Essack and her team used the power of citizen science to extend the observing time around the world. The team put out a call for people with telescopes powerful enough to observe the star and its possible planet. At least 24 citizen scientists across 10 countries used their personal telescopes to track the next transit. Given their positions around the world, these citizen scientists were able to cover the 12-hour observation time needed to confirm the transit. Their data complemented additional data from professional observatories such as Palomar in California, the Whipple Observatory in Arizona, the La Silla Observatory in Chile, and others.
“The discovery and confirmation of TOI-4465 b not only expands our knowledge of planets in the far reaches of other star systems but also shows how passionate astronomy enthusiasts can play a direct role in frontier scientific research,” said Essack. “It is a great example of the power of citizen science, teamwork, and the importance of global collaboration in astronomy.”
The Transiting Exoplanet Survery Satellite (TESS)—being prepared here in 2018 by NASA technicians—gathered the original data that led to TOI-4465 b’s eventual confirmation as an exoplanet.Kim L. Shiflett/NASA
Several key programs enabled this global effort, beginning with the original TESS data. Members of the TESS Follow-up Observing Program Subgroup 1 (TFOP SG1), the Unistellar Citizen Science Network (a group of amateurs and professionals who use computerized Unistellar telescopes), and the TESS Single Transit Planet Candidate (TSTPC) Working Group, led by University of New Mexico professor Diana Dragomir also contributed.
“What makes this collaboration effective is the infrastructure behind it. The Unistellar network provides standardized equipment and data processing pipelines, enabling high-quality contributions from citizen scientists. TFOP SG1 offers a global coordination framework that connects professional and amateur astronomers and observational facilities. The TSTPC Working Group, led by Professor Dragomir, brings together the detection and follow-up expertise needed for these challenging observations,” said Essack.
The idea of using amateur astronomers’ telescopes to participate in scientific observations is not new. For example, in the 1980s, a team of observers around the world made up part of the International Halley Watch. It was created to get images of the comet from its first appearance in 1985 to mid-1986 from as many observers in as many parts of the world as possible. Other citizen scientist efforts cropped up, with both amateur and professional observatories working together to study such objects as variable stars, blazars, supernovae, novae, occultations, eclipses, and much more.
Today, people also get involved in other branches of science, including biology, health and medical research, ecology, and other crowdsourced research. Their participation allows scientists to get more data over longer periods of time and stretches research budgets in the process.
