By focusing on adaptive aerodynamics, the ice-tolerance concept with variable drooping leading edge technology could revolutionize how planes handle icing skies. An ice tolerance solution based on the variable camber leading edge of iced wings is proposed, where the leading edge adapts its camber to counter ice effects. Compared with traditional aerodynamic design for ice tolerance, this concept not only strikes a balance between safety and functionality, but also boosts efficiency even under severe icing conditions.

Flexible dispersion manipulation is critical for holography to achieve broadband imaging or frequency division multiplexing. Within this context, metasurface-based holography offers advanced dispersion control, yet dynamic reconfigurability remains largely unexplored. This work develops a dispersion-engineered inverse design framework that enables 3D multi-plane frequency-reconfigurable holography through a twisted metasurface system. The physical implementation is based on a compact bilayer configuration that cascades the broadband radiation-type metasurface (RA-M) and phase-only metasurface (P-M). The RA-M provides a phase-adjustable input to excite P-M, while the rotation of P-M creates a reconfigurable response of holograms. By employing the proposed scheme, dynamic switching of space-frequency multiplexing and achromatic holograms is designed and experimentally demonstrated in the microwave region. This method advances flexible dispersion engineering for metasurface-based holography, and the compact system holds significant potential for applications in near-field computational imaging/detection, high-speed high-data-capacity near-field wireless communication, and switchable meta-devices.

Supernovae appear to our eyes—and to astronomical instruments—as brilliant flashes that flare up in the sky without warning, in places where nothing was visible just moments before. The flash is caused by the colossal explosion of a star. Because supernovae are sudden and unpredictable, they have long been difficult to study, but today, thanks to extensive, continuous, high-cadence sky surveys, astronomers can discover new ones almost daily.

It is crucial, however, to develop protocols and methods that detect them promptly; only in that way can we understand the events and celestial bodies that triggered them. In a pilot study, Lluís Galbany of the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) in Barcelona and his colleagues present a methodology that can obtain the earliest possible spectra of supernovae—ideally within 48 hours, or even 24 hours, of the “first light.” The results have just been published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP).

SAN ANTONIO — August 18, 2025 — New research led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has confirmed decades-old theoretical models about magnetic reconnection, the process that releases stored magnetic energy to drive solar flares, coronal mass ejections and other space weather phenomena. The data was captured by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP), which is the only spacecraft to have flown through the Sun’s upper atmosphere.

SAN ANTONIO — August 18, 2025 — A Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) review of data collected from near-Earth asteroids Bennu and Ryugu supports the hypothesis that they were originally part of the Polana collisional family in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

SAN ANTONIO — August 18, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has developed and tested a micrometeoroid and orbital debris (MMOD) detection and characterization system designed for satellites and spacecraft to monitor impacts from space debris. The system provides critical post-impact data, ensuring awareness of an impact even when damage is not immediately apparent.