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Hacking Science

Our mission is to play a leading role in transforming the nation’s relationship with science and technology. What is Hacking Science ?

This role becomes ever more important as science and technology shape and reshape our lives and world, and it means we:

Promote active citizenship informed by the world of science and technology
Inspire lifelong appreciation of the importance and impact of science and engineering
Encourage young people of all backgrounds to explore and develop their interests in understanding the natural and huma

n-made world. Most people get Science, but what about the Hacking? Hacking Science can be interpreted in two ways: Hacking the Science, or the Science of Hacking. It really doesn’t matter that much. Hacking has often been associated with malicious intentions, but this type of definition for hacking is becoming increasingly outdated. Hacking has become a generic term to describe the process of finding creative ways, often involving coding, around an existing problem or roadblock. From hacker news to mind hacks to hackathons, the word hacking embodies the spirit that problems can be (and must be) solved with software and science. It is in this spirit that we use the term. A hack is a quick solution to a problem – maybe not the most elegant solution, but often the cleverest. Hacking is about using imagination and creativity to reinvent and reclaim the world - for good, for serious, or just for fun.Hacking Science is where we take all this awesome hacking jazz and use it for science. Take a community of science geeks, coders, designers, makers, inventors, and enthusiasts, mix them together in a big melting pot of different perspectives and approaches, add a bunch of tools and materials, and see what comes out: awesome ideas, the next great start-up, real hard science, or the weirdest, most useless things you could never imagine.

09/04/2026

China is building enormous solar farms across the steep, rocky mountains of Guizhou Province, with some projects covering rugged karst terrain. The dramatic drone footage is authentic and shows real photovoltaic installations stretching across mountain slopes.
Guizhou’s solar capacity has grown rapidly, reaching more than 15 GW in recent years. One major project in Puding County uses hundreds of megawatts of panels on terrain that was previously difficult to use for agriculture.
China is also combining solar generation with agriculture by growing shade-tolerant crops and medicinal herbs beneath some panel arrays. The panels can provide shade, retain soil moisture and help reduce erosion in areas affected by heavy rainfall.
Building solar farms on steep mountains requires specialized surveying, construction and transmission systems to move electricity from remote sites to population and industrial centers. The projects demonstrate how China is using challenging land to expand renewable generation while supporting its broader clean-energy and carbon-reduction goals.

08/20/2026

Telegram has applied to ICANN to operate the .gram domain. If approved, the platform's billion-plus users could secure custom second-level domains like yourname.gram.

Writing on X, Telegram founder Pavel Durov said that users will be able to launch interactive websites hosted by Telegram using a single text

08/13/2026

OpenAI reportedly found an AI agent leaving “notes” for future versions of itself 🤖😳 — including ideas about how it could potentially get around internal constraints.
The discovery has sparked fresh concerns about how autonomous AI systems might behave as they become more capable. ⚠️🧠
If an AI starts planning for its future versions, where do we draw the line? 👀

08/03/2026

Elon Musk has experienced one of the largest short-term declines in personal wealth ever recorded, with his net worth reportedly falling by hundreds of billions of dollars in just a few weeks. According to recent estimates, his fortune dropped from a peak of around $1.33 trillion in mid-June to roughly $684–690 billion by early August 2026. Although the decline is extraordinary in size, Musk remains the world's richest person by a significant margin.

The sharp fall is largely linked to the performance of Musk's biggest assets, particularly SpaceX and Tesla. Since most of his wealth comes from his ownership stakes rather than cash, fluctuations in these companies' market values have a direct impact on his estimated net worth. As their share prices rise or fall, so does the value of his fortune.

A major factor behind the decline was the sudden reversal in SpaceX's stock price. After the company completed what was described as the largest initial public offering in history, investor enthusiasm pushed the stock sharply higher. Shares climbed well above their listing price and reached record highs within days of trading. However, the rally proved short-lived. In the weeks that followed, SpaceX shares lost nearly half of their value from their peak, erasing hundreds of billions of dollars in market capitalization and significantly reducing Musk's estimated wealth.

Tesla also contributed to the decline. Following the company's second-quarter earnings report, its stock came under pressure after profits fell short of analysts' expectations. Tesla also reported negative free cash flow as spending increased on artificial intelligence, autonomous driving technology, robotics, and other long-term projects. Investors reacted cautiously to the higher operating costs, lower average vehicle prices, and weaker revenue from regulatory credits, leading to another decline in the company's share price.

Despite the financial setback, Musk has shown no sign of slowing down his investment plans. He continues to prioritize the expansion of Tesla's artificial intelligence capabilities, self-driving technology, robotaxi services, and humanoid robot development. The company has indicated that it plans to invest more than $25 billion this year, almost three times what it spent the previous year, reflecting Musk's long-term strategy of prioritizing innovation over short-term profits.

Although the reported loss exceeds the total fortunes of nearly every other billionaire, it does not represent money disappearing from Musk's bank account. His wealth is primarily tied to the market value of his company holdings, which can rise or fall dramatically based on investor confidence, earnings reports, and broader market conditions. Such changes are common among individuals whose fortunes depend heavily on publicly traded companies, though the scale of this recent decline is unusually large.

The episode serves as another reminder of how volatile billionaire wealth can be. Massive gains can accumulate rapidly when stock prices surge, but equally dramatic declines can occur when markets reverse. Even after losing hundreds of billions of dollars in a matter of weeks, Elon Musk remains the richest individual in the world, illustrating both the enormous size of his holdings and the extraordinary volatility that comes with wealth tied to high-growth technology companies.

07/27/2026

Researchers from Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) and Waseda University, Japan have developed a lightweight diving suit that allows Madagascar hissing cockroaches (Gromphadorhina portentosa) to survive and remain active underwater. The biohybrid system uses a waterproof flexible casing, silicone tubes, and a chemical oxygen generator that produces oxygen through the reaction of hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) with manganese dioxide (MnO₂) as a catalyst. The generated oxygen is delivered directly to the cockroach’s spiracles, enabling underwater respiration without an external pump or motor. In laboratory tests, equipped cockroaches remained active for about three hours in oxygen-limited underwater environments. The technology is still experimental but may support future search-and-rescue applications.

References:
NTU Singapore & Waseda University (2026); Nature Communications (2026).

07/18/2026

A 10-year-old child's experiment proved that memories can be passed down through generations.

It all began when Jo Nagai, a second-grader from Kobe, Japan, noticed his hand-raised swallowtail butterflies seemed to recognize him, while wild ones flew away.

Determined to find a scientific answer, he reached out to Georgetown University entomologist Dr. Martha Weiss, who had famously demonstrated that moths can retain memories through the chaotic cellular breakdown of metamorphosis.

Inspired by her work, Jo proposed replicating her study on butterflies, leading to an extraordinary cross-continental collaboration. Using a home-designed setup, Jo trained caterpillars to associate a mild vibration with the scent of lavender.

Astoundingly, after their brains were completely rebuilt in their chrysalis, 70 percent of the adult butterflies still avoided the lavender scent—proving their memories survived the transformation.

But the most shocking discovery occurred when Jo bred these trained insects.

Without ever experiencing the vibration themselves, both the offspring and the grandchildren of the trained butterflies inherited an instinctual aversion to the lavender scent. At just ten years old, Jo documented these revolutionary findings in a 33-page paper and presented them alongside Dr. Weiss at the International Congress of Entomology in Kobe. This extraordinary discovery of transgenerational memory not only challenges traditional understandings of genetics and inheritance but also highlights how the curiosity of a child can disrupt the boundaries of modern science.

source: Upworthy. (2026). Ten-year-old butterfly researcher discovers that memories can be passed down through generations.

07/09/2026

Canadian researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed a tiny, flexible robot, about the size of a grain of rice, designed to help with certain kidney stones. The soft robot contains micromagnets and a natural enzyme, and is guided into place using a magnetic arm from outside the body. Once positioned, it works to gently dissolve uric-acid stones over a few days, allowing them to pass naturally.
So far, the technology has been tested in a life-size 3D-printed model, not yet in patients, so more research is needed before it becomes widely available. The findings were published in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.
Sources: University of Waterloo News, Advanced Healthcare Materials

06/22/2026

Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD has officially patented a new, artificial intelligence-powered safety technology designed to detect people, animals, and other living organisms hiding underneath parked vehicles before they begin moving.
Filed under application CN122200729A and published by China’s National Intellectual Property Administration on June 12, 2026, the technology aims to completely prevent accidents involving children or small pets sheltering under cars.
The system utilizes underbody cameras to create a two-stage computer vision process.
When the vehicle is turned off, the system captures a baseline reference image of the car's underside, including fixed components like the battery pack, suspension, and chassis.
When the vehicle is started up again, real-time cameras scan the underbody and compare it to the original reference photo. Instead of wasting processing power on the entire underbelly, deep learning algorithms isolate only the specific regions showing visual changes.
The AI then focuses exclusively on those altered zones to analyze the characteristics of the object.
It is specifically trained to filter out harmless environmental variables like shadows, dust, leaves, and mud, drastically reducing the risk of false alarms.
By recognizing movement patterns, body shapes, and behavioral cues, the technology can accurately identify a trapped or resting living organism and instantly issue an alert to the driver before the wheels turn.

06/18/2026

A robot guided by an AI just performed surgery with near-perfect accuracy and no human intervention.

In a major step toward autonomous surgical systems, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have successfully trained an AI-guided robot to perform gall bladder removal on a dead pig with near-complete autonomy.

The dual-layer AI model—trained on 17 hours of human surgery footage—translated video input into verbal commands like “clip the second duct,” which were then converted into precise tool movements.

The robot completed all 17 surgical tasks across eight procedures with 100% task success, demonstrating real-time self-correction and only limited human intervention.

While full autonomy in live human surgeries remains years away, the milestone marks a significant advance in surgical robotics.

Experts emphasize that while the robot occasionally needed tool changes or adjusted missed grabs, its ability to detect and fix its own mistakes shows the growing reliability of AI-assisted procedures. With regulators expected to weigh in heavily before human applications, researchers plan to move next toward testing in live animals. The long-term goal? Safer, more precise surgeries that reduce complication rates and ease strain on surgical teams.
source

Journal reference: Ji Woong (Brian) Kim. Science Robotics. 10 (4). SRT-H: A hierarchical framework for autonomous surgery via language-conditioned imitation learning

06/15/2026

A new space startup plans to sell on-demand sunlight at any hour, beamed directly from Earth's orbit.
California-based aerospace startup Reflect Orbital is looking to revolutionize how we experience the night by launching a constellation of satellites equipped with ultra-thin reflective mirrors.
Founded by former SpaceX engineer Ben Nowack, the company aims to make sunlight "programmable," allowing users to request a localized beam of light simply by entering GPS coordinates on a website.
The system is designed to redirect sunlight down to target areas roughly five kilometers wide, offering brightness ranging from a gentle full moon to peak daylight. Initial applications focus on expanding solar power generation into the evening hours, assisting disaster response teams, and lighting remote industrial worksites.
While the startup has generated massive commercial interest—receiving more than 260,000 inquiries and securing millions in venture capital—the concept of "sunlight-as-a-service" has sparked intense debate.
Environmental scientists and astronomers warn that artificial orbital illumination could severely disrupt nocturnal ecosystems, disorient migrating birds, and damage human circadian rhythms.
Critics argue that altering natural cycles of darkness constitutes a new, unregulated form of light pollution. Despite these concerns, Reflect Orbital is moving forward with plans to deploy its first test satellites, bringing humanity one step closer to a future where darkness is optional.
source: McKie, R. (2026). Satellite mirror plans could disrupt sleep and ecosystems worldwide, scientists say. The Guardian

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