China’s Tianwen-3 Mars sample return mission is entering flight hardware development, targeting a late 2028 launch to seek out biosignatures on the Red Planet.
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New facility to support electronics and software development for missile defense and space programs
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A Vienna-based startup has raised $4 million to scale a software platform that generates synthetic satellite data for training AI models to detect environmental and operational risks.
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In this episode of the SpaceNews Space Minds podcast, host David Ariosto talks with Jonathan Cirtain, CEO and President of Axiom Space. They discuss the challenges — and wonders — […]
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Hyten has called for greater use of commercial technology and faster acquisition cycles
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The Denver-based satellite manufacturer says the acquisition supports its strategy of building an ‘integrated space ecosystem’
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On a quiet spring morning, when dew settles on leaves, something curious sometimes happens. A droplet sitting there peacefully will suddenly lift off. No wind. No vibration. Just a tiny leap into the air.
Physicists call this phenomenon droplet jumping. In simple terms, it means that a droplet lifts off from the surface it sits on. If a raindrop hits a leaf and rebounds upward, that rebound can also be considered droplet jumping.
While this may seem like a minor detail in fluid behaviour, removing liquid from surfaces is important for many technologies. When droplets detach from a contaminated surface, they can carry away particles, a process that forms the basis of self-cleaning materials. When droplets leave hot surfaces, they remove heat. And on cold surfaces, quickly removing droplets can help prevent ice buildup.
For years, scientists believed that there was a physical limit to how large these jumping droplets could be. A new study published in Nature has now shown that this limit can be broken, with the help of a bubble.
The research was headed up by Jiangtao Cheng’s lab at Virginia Tech, and performed in collaboration with researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Wuhan University of Technology.
Within a droplet, two forces compete constantly: the first is surface tension, the other is gravity.
Surface tension tries to pull the droplet into a sphere, which minimizes its surface area and, therefore, its energy. Gravity, meanwhile, pulls the droplet downward, flattening it against the surface.
The balance between these two forces defines the so-called capillary length – which for water is 2.7 mm. Below this length, surface tension dominates and droplets can sometimes propel themselves upward. Above this length limitation, gravity takes over.
This balance has long been a fundamental barrier in the field of self-propelled droplet jumping. “For droplets larger than the capillary length, gravity dominates,” Cheng tells Physics World. “Simply releasing surface energy from shape relaxation is no longer sufficient to generate enough upward momentum for jumping.”
That is why most previous studies have observed droplets no larger than about 3 mm jumping on their own.
The idea behind the new research began with observations in nature. First author Wenge Huang, who grew up in rural South China, often saw dew droplets on lotus leaves containing tiny air bubbles. Occasionally, when those bubbles burst, the droplets moved.
Years later, that observation led to a question: “could a bubble trapped inside a droplet provide the extra energy needed for jumping?”
To test this idea, the researchers placed a water droplet on a superhydrophobic surface, which strongly repels water. They then injected air into the droplet using a fine needle, forming a bubble inside the liquid. After a short time, the bubble burst.
High-speed cameras captured what happened next: the droplet lifted cleanly off the surface.
What surprised the researchers most was that droplets nearly 1 cm wide were able to jump – far exceeding the previously accepted capillary length limitation.
A bubble inside the droplet creates additional air–liquid interfaces, increasing the system’s stored surface energy while adding almost no mass. When the bubble bursts, that energy is released as capillary waves that focus momentum upward.
“Embedding a bubble increases the system’s surface energy without increasing its weight,” explains Cheng.
The researchers also found that the mechanism was extremely efficient, converting more than 90% of the energy into upward momentum, well above that of many conventional droplet propulsion methods.
The implications extend beyond basic physics; the discovery could help improve self-cleaning surfaces, heat transfer systems and anti-icing technologies. The bubble-burst process can also create directional liquid jets, which could be useful for microscale 3D printing and material deposition.
In simple terms, the study revealed something unexpected. A single bursting bubble can launch a much larger droplet than scientists once thought possible, even at the centimetre scale.
The post A bursting bubble can make a puddle jump appeared first on Physics World.
How did you get on?
20 words Warming up nicely
32 words Getting hot, hot, hot
45 words Top dog!
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In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, we hear from a trio of scientists with a common interest in the physics of droplets. Specifically, Joe Forth, Rob Malinowski and Giorgio Volpe share a fascination with droplets that are “animate” – that is, capable of responding to their surroundings in ways that resemble the behaviour of living organisms.
As they explain in the podcast, systems must tick three boxes to qualify as animate. First, they must be active, able to use energy from their environment to do work and perform tasks. Second, they must be adaptive, able to move between different dynamical states in response to changes to their environment or their own internal states. Finally, they must be autonomous, able to process multiple inputs and choose how to respond to them without intervention from the outside world.
Incorporating all these behaviours into a droplet – or a system of many droplets – is challenging. The boundary between autonomous and non-autonomous systems is proving especially hard to overcome, and Volpe, Malinowski and Forth have a friendly disagreement over whether any droplet-based system has managed it yet.
Part of the challenge, they say, is that the field crosses disciplinary borders. Although Volpe thinks the community of droplet researchers is getting better at finding a common vocabulary for discussions, Forth jokes that it is still the case that “the chemists are scared of physics, the physicists are scared of chemists, everyone is scared of biology”. The potential rewards of overcoming these fears are great, however, with possible future applications of animate droplets ranging from consumer products such as deodorant to oil spill clean-up.
This discussion is based on a Perspective article that Volpe (a professor of soft matter in the chemistry department at University College London, UK), Malinowski (a research fellow in soft matter physics in the same department) and Forth (a colloid scientist and lecturer in the chemistry department at the University of Liverpool, UK) wrote for the journal EPL, which sponsors this episode of the podcast.
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SAN FRANCISCO – Mantis Space, a New Mexico startup planning a constellation to supply solar power to spacecraft, emerged from stealth March 12 with $10 million in seed funding. “We are building a constellation of satellites that deliver power directly to solar arrays that exist in the market today and bringing products to market that […]
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The Global Physics Summit (GPS) bills itself as “the world’s largest physics research conference”. Organized by the American Physical Society (APS), it combines the previously separate APS March and April meetings, with at least 14,000 people expected to attend this year’s event in Denver, Colorado, which has the theme “science for a shared future”.
The two APS meetings (especially APS March) have long been pilgrimages for physicists. They’re a chance to meet people whose papers you’ve read, learn about new research, land a dream job or perhaps decide what your future physics career should look like. They offer unparalleled opportunities for gossiping, networking and making your name.
Sometimes they even host extraordinary announcements, such as in 2023 when one group claimed to have discovered room-temperature superconductors, or in 1987 when several groups really did present the first data on high-temperature ones.
Due to the current state of US politics, however, physicists from many countries may well have second thoughts about travelling to this and other scientific meetings in the US.
Indeed, if you’re from one of almost 40 nations to which the US government has partially or fully suspended issuing visas – supposedly “to protect the security of the United States” – you probably won’t be able to get into the country at all.
Among the countries affected by the Trump administration’s ban is Ethiopia, which is home to people like the physicist Mulugeta Bekele, who almost single-handedly kept Ethiopian physics alive in the 1970s and 1980s despite being jailed and tortured.
As Robert P Crease recounts in his latest feature, Mulugeta was awarded the APS’s Sakharov human-rights prize in 2012, picking up his award at that year’s APS March meeting in Boston. Would Mulugeta, I wonder, be able to enter the US in current circumstances?
One US physicist told me that outsiders should respond to the situation in America by boycotting the US entirely. To me, that’s a step too far, not least because breaking contact would show a lack of solidarity with US-based scientists suffering from funding cuts or worse. After all, physics is a global enterprise, as two recent Physics World articles make clear.
The first is a feature about quantifying the environmental impact of military conflicts by Ben Skuse. Numbers are hard to come by, but according to a 2022 estimate extrapolated from the small number of nations that do share their data, the total military carbon footprint is about 5.5% of global emissions. This would make the world’s militaries the fourth biggest carbon emitter if they were a nation.
In another feature, Michael Allen examines how climate change could trigger extreme changes in the activity of earthquakes and volcanoes. Worryingly, increased volcanic eruptions not only contribute to the build-up of greenhouse gases but also create other problems too. In particular, a warming climate melts ice caps, lowering surface loads and potentially causing more earthquakes to occur.
Both issues – and many more besides – will only be solved through global, interdisciplinary collaborations. As the theme of the GPS quite rightly puts it, we need science for a shared future.
That’s why it’s great that the APS, along with AIP Publishing and IOP Publishing, which together form the Purpose-led Publishing (PLP) coalition, are hosting a network of 23 satellite events in Africa, Asia and South America to expand participation in this year’s GPS.
PLP’s satellite hubs, which will take place both in person and online, aim to let researchers engage with the summit programme, contribute to discussions, and take part in locally organized workshops and presentations.
Taking place in countries ranging from Brazil and Benin to the Philippines and Pakistan, the events will host livestreamed and recorded content from Denver as well as offering debates, expert-led sessions and opportunities for networking.
One event will be held in Ethiopia, which, I hope, Mulugeta at least will be pleased to hear.
The post The American Physical Society’s 2026 Global Physics Summit opens in Denver appeared first on Physics World.
Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket successfully returned to flight March 11, launching a technology demonstration mission more than 10 months after the rocket’s previous launch failed.
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Paris, February 2026 — Novaspace’s Capacity Pricing Trends, 8th Edition finds the satellite connectivity market has entered a Post‑Capacity Era, where bandwidth is no longer the basis of differentiation. Starlink’s vertical integration and cost […]
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Enpulsion, an Austrian company that produces satellite electric propulsion systems, has raised its first significant outside funding to increase production and potentially acquire other companies.
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NASA’s approach to managing the development of crewed lunar landers for Artemis has successfully controlled costs but not schedule, raising questions about NASA’s desire to accelerate those efforts.
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