Military-grade infrared vision goggles use detectors made of mercury cadmium telluride, a semiconducting material that’s particularly sensitive to infrared radiation. Unfortunately, you need to keep detectors that use this material extremely cool—roughly at liquid nitrogen temperatures—for them to work. “Their cooling systems are very bulky and very heavy,” says Xinyuan Zhang, an MIT researcher and the lead author of a new study that looked for alternative IR-sensitive materials.

Added weight was a sacrifice the manufacturers of high-end night-vision systems were mostly willing to make because cooling-free alternatives offered much worse performance. To fix this, the MIT researchers developed a new ultra-thin material that can sense infrared radiation without any cooling and outperforms cooled detectors at the same time. And they want to use it to turn thermal vision goggles into thermal vision spectacles.

Staying cool

Cooling-free infrared detectors have been around since before World War II and mostly relied on pyroelectric materials like tourmaline that change their temperature upon absorbing infrared radiation. This temperature change, in turn, generates an electric current that can be measured to get a readout from the detector. Although these materials worked, they had their issues. Operating at room temperature caused a lot of random atomic motion in the pyroelectric material, which introduced electrical noise that made it difficult to detect faint infrared signals.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News , a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here .

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) kicked off a Wednesday hearing criticizing ​​the Trump administration for cutting science funding, firing federal scientists, and triggering policy uncertainties that she said threaten to undermine the foundation for America’s global leadership.

Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the administration’s abrupt cancellation of grants and laying off scientists has little or no justification. “These actions put our leadership in biomedical innovation at real risk and must be reversed,” she said.

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I'm not sure I can remember another car that took as long to get comfortable with as the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage. It's an achingly beautiful machine, from the outside at least. And by the week's end, I had my first glimpses into how it can deliver driver engagement with the best of them. By then I'd also gotten over my disappointment with the interior and, sadly yet again, had the "British cars with crap electronics" stereotype confirmed once more.

Painted the same striking shade of Podium Green as one of Formula 1's safety cars, the Vantage is one of the most eye-catching cars we've tested in a while. In person, that giant front grille dominates things, but all around the car you see the influence of the aerodynamicists and engineers who want to bend the airflow to their needs; cutting drag here, adding downforce there, feeding a cooling duct or venting waste heat. The way the wheel arches stretch out from the doors reminds me of the One-77 supercar from a few years ago, but it's all a thoroughly modern shape here.

That sculpted and vented hood contains the Vantage's 4.0 L twin-turbo V8. With 656 hp (490 kW) and 590 lb-ft (800 Nm), it's the most powerful Vantage to date, eclipsing the time the company bolted some Eaton superchargers to a 2-ton Chesterfield sofa on wheels . ZF's excellent 8HP automatic transmission sends that power and torque to the rear wheels, which arrived wearing Vantage-specific versions of Michelin's latest Pilot Sport 5 tires.

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Archaeologists recently unearthed a bone projectile point someone dropped on a cave floor between 80,000 and 70,000 years ago—which, based on its location, means that said someone must have been a Neanderthal.

The point (or in paleoarchaeologist Liubov V. Golovanova and colleagues’ super-technical archaeological terms, “a unique pointy bone artifact”) is the oldest bone tip from a hunting weapon ever found in Europe. It’s also evidence that Neanderthals figured out how to shape bone into smooth, aerodynamic projectiles on their own, without needing to copy those upstart Homo sapiens . Along with the bone tools, jewelry, and even rope that archaeologists have found at other Neanderthal sites, the projectile is one more clue pointing to the fact that Neanderthals were actually pretty sharp.

Getting to the point

Archaeologists found the bone point in Mezmaiskaya Cave, high in the Caucasus Mountains (Mezmaiskaya is also home to the remains of three Neanderthals who lived around 90,000 years ago; anthropologists sequenced samples of their DNA in earlier studies). Herbivore teeth from the same layer of sediment dated to around 70,000 years old, and the bone point’s position near the bottom of that layer probably makes it closer to 80,000 or 70,000 years old. That makes it the oldest bone projectile point ever found in Europe (so far).

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Google has built an enormously successful business around the idea of putting ads in search results. Its most recent quarterly results showed the company made more than $50 billion from search ads, but what happens if AI becomes the dominant form of finding information? Google is preparing for that possibility by testing chatbot ads, but you won't see them in Google's Gemini AI—at least not yet.

A report from Bloomberg describes how Google began working on a plan in 2024 to adapt AdSense ads to a chatbot experience. Usually, AdSense ads appear in search results and are scattered around websites. Google ran a small test of chatbot ads late last year, partnering with select AI startups, including AI search apps iAsk and Liner.

The testing must have gone well because Google is now allowing more chatbot makers to sign up for AdSense. "AdSense for Search is available for websites that want to show relevant ads in their conversational AI experiences," said a Google spokesperson.

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Vox Media has sold video game specialist website Polygon to Internet brand aggregator Valnet , the publisher of content-churning sites including Game Rant, OpenCritic, Android Police, and Comic Book Resources. The move comes alongside significant layoffs for veteran journalists at the 13-year-old outlet, including co-founder and editor-in-chief Chris Plante and Senior Writer Michael McWhertor .

The sudden job cuts appear to have been completely unexpected for those affected. Polygon Senior Reporter Nicole Carpenter, for instance, published a story about the Epic vs. Apple case at 10 am Eastern time this morning before sharing news of her layoff less than two hours later on Bluesky.

"Along with just about everyone else at Polygon, I am now out of a job, ending over a decade at Vox Media for me," Curation Editor Pete Volk wrote on Bluesky . "Working at Polygon was a wonderful experience, and I'm proud of the work we did there."

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It's time again to honor the winners of the annual Dance Your PhD contest, where eager young scientists attempt to convey the concepts of their doctoral theses through dance. This year's overall winner is the University of Helsinki's Sulo Roukka, who researches chemesthesis , specifically how people experience different sensory food compounds like capsaicin (hot) or menthol (cool).

As we've reported previously , the Dance Your PhD contest was established in 2008 by science journalist John Bohannon, who is now a data scientist at South Park Commons. Bohannon told Slate in 2011 that he came up with the idea while trying to figure out how to get a group of stressed-out PhD students, who were in the middle of defending their theses, to let off a little steam. So he put together a dance party at Austria's Institute of Molecular Biotechnology , including a contest for whichever candidate could best explain their thesis topics through interpretive dance.

The contest was such a hit that Bohannon started getting emails asking when the next one would be—and Dance Your PhD has continued ever since. It's now in its 17th year. There are four broad categories: physics, chemistry, biology, and social science, with a fairly liberal interpretation of what topics fall under each. All category winners receive $750. Roukka won the chemistry category and, as the overall champion, will receive an additional $2,750.

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Tesla today denied a report that its board contacted executive search firms to find a replacement for CEO Elon Musk. The Wall Street Journal reported last night that about a month ago, "Tesla's board got serious about looking for Musk's successor" and that board "members reached out to several executive search firms to work on a formal process for finding Tesla's next chief executive."

Tesla's official X account then posted a statement attributed to board chairperson Robyn Denholm saying that "there was a media report erroneously claiming that the Tesla Board had contacted recruitment firms to initiate a CEO search at the company."

"This is absolutely false (and this was communicated to the media before the report was published). The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead," Denholm's statement said.

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Microsoft is increasing the recommended asking price of Xbox hardware and accessories worldwide starting today and will start charging $79.99 for some new first-party games this holiday season. The announcement comes after "careful consideration given market conditions and the rising cost of development," Microsoft said.

In the United States, this means Microsoft's premiere Xbox Series X will now cost $599.99 for a unit with a disc drive (up from $499.99), while the Digital version will cost $549.99 (up from $449.99). On the lower end, a 1 TB Xbox Series S will now cost $429.99 (up from $349.99), while a 512GB unit will cost $379.99 (up from $299.99).

The new prices are already reflected on Microsoft's official online store, and Microsoft says it will "provide updated recommended pricing to local retailers." That might leave a small window where you can get Xbox hardware and accessories from those retailers at the older, lower price while supplies remain available.

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