Enlarge / All galaxies have large amounts of gas that influence their star-formation rates. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and J. Lee (NOIRLab))

Galaxies pass gas—in the case of galaxy NGC 4383, so much so that its gas outflow is 20,000 light-years across and more massive than 50 million Suns.

Yet even an outflow of this immensity was difficult to detect until now. Observing what these outflows are made of and how they are structured demands high-resolution instruments that can only see gas from galaxies that are relatively close, so information on them has been limited. Which is unfortunate, since gaseous outflows ejected from galaxies can tell us more about their star formation cycles.

The MAUVE (MUSE and ALMA Unveiling the Virgo Environment) program is now changing things. MAUVE’s mission is to understand how the outflows of galaxies in the Virgo cluster affect star formation. NGC 4383 stood out to astronomer Adam Watts, of the University of Australia and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), and his team because its outflow is so enormous.

Enlarge / UNSW Sydney engineers developed a new way to make cold brew coffee in under three minutes without sacrificing taste. (credit: University of New South Wales, Sydney)

Diehard fans of cold-brew coffee put in a lot of time and effort for their preferred caffeinated beverage. But engineers at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, figured out a nifty hack. They rejiggered an existing espresso machine to accommodate an ultrasonic transducer to administer ultrasonic pulses, thereby reducing the brewing time from 12 to 24 hours to just under three minutes, according to a new paper published in the journal Ultrasonics Sonochemistry.

As previously reported, rather than pouring boiling or near-boiling water over coffee grounds and steeping for a few minutes, the cold-brew method involves mixing coffee grounds with room-temperature water and letting the mixture steep for anywhere from several hours to two days. Then it is strained through a sieve to filter out all the sludge-like solids, followed by filtering. This can be done at home in a Mason jar, or you can get fancy and use a French press or a more elaborate Toddy system. It's not necessarily served cold (although it can be)—just brewed cold.

The result is coffee that tastes less bitter than traditionally brewed coffee. “There’s nothing like it,” co-author Francisco Trujillo of UNSW Sydney told New Scientist. “The flavor is nice, the aroma is nice and the mouthfeel is more viscous and there’s less bitterness than a regular espresso shot. And it has a level of acidity that people seem to like. It’s now my favorite way to drink coffee.”

Enlarge / The interior or the DIII-D tokamak. (credit: General Atomics)

Using nuclear fusion, the process that powers the stars, to produce electricity on Earth has famously been 30 years away for more than 70 years. But now, a breakthrough experiment done at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego may finally push nuclear fusion power plants to be roughly 29 years away.

Nuclear fusion ceiling

The DIII-D facility is run by General Atomics for the Department of Energy. It includes an experimental tokamak, a donut-shaped nuclear fusion device that works by trapping astonishingly hot plasma in very strong, toroidal magnetic fields. Tokamaks, compared to other fusion reactor designs like stellarators, are the furthest along in their development; ITER, the world’s first power-plant-size fusion device now under construction in France, is scheduled to run its first tests with plasma in December 2025.

But tokamaks have always had some issues. Back in 1988, Martin Greenwald, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology expert on plasma physics, proposed an equation that described an apparent limit on how dense plasma could get in tokamaks. He argued that maximum attainable density is dictated by the minor radius of a tokamak and the current induced in the plasma to maintain magnetic stability. Going beyond that limit was supposed to make the magnets incapable of holding the plasma, heated up to north of 150 million degrees Celsius away from the walls of the machine.