Tracking the future of nuclear energy.
Civil Nuclear

Olympus Mons keeps growing because Mars has no plate tectonics to drift its crust off the hotspot feeding it lava

Mars has no plate tectonics, so its largest volcano has spent billions of years piling lava on the same spot instead of drifting off its heat source the way Hawaii does.

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Dispensary

When Howard Carter's team opened Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, the inventory included alabaster jars of dark residue that legend turned into still-edible honey, sealed around 1323 BCE and never actually identified by any chemist who tested it — a Yale team now suspects opium

The famous story of edible honey from Tutankhamun's tomb is mostly folklore — but the chemistry that makes honey nearly immortal is real, and a 2025 Yale study suggests the actual residues in Tut's alabaster jars may have been something far stranger: opium.

Aerospace

In November 1957, Soviet sources told the world that the dog Laika had survived several days aboard Sputnik 2, but at a 2002 space congress in Houston, scientist Dimitri Malashenkov revealed she had actually died within hours of launch when the cabin overheated

For forty-five years the Soviet Union told the world Laika had survived days aboard Sputnik 2. In October 2002, at the World Space Congress in Houston, scientist Dimitri Malashenkov finally released the telemetry that showed she had died within hours of launch when the cabin overheated past 40 degrees Celsius.

Physics News

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to two scientists who had figured out how to reprogram a bacterial defence system against viruses into a pair of molecular scissors that can cut the DNA of any living organism with programmable precision

In October 2020, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna became the first all-female team to share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, honored for turning a bacterial defense against viruses into CRISPR-Cas9 — programmable molecular scissors that can cut the DNA of any organism on Earth.

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Tracking the future of nuclear energy.

Nuclear Power Daily is an independent publication covering civil nuclear energy, reactor technology, regulation, safety, fuel cycles, and the policies and projects shaping nuclear power. The site pairs a deep archive with current reporting on the research, companies, policy shifts, safety debates, and technical breakthroughs shaping the future of nuclear energy. We employ modern AI technologies to support our editorial workflows; every published piece is editorially directed and reviewed.

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