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It’s that time again, for Google to announce that real-time translation has come to one of its communication apps. This time, it’s Google Meet, which can translate between English and Spanish as you speak in a video call. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s not the first time Google has announced something like this.
Google Translate has had features that let you speak to someone in another language in real time for a while. For example, back in 2019, there was a real-time translation feature called Interpreter Mode built into Google Assistant. It’s also been possible on Pixel phones for a while (and even Samsung phones). Most of these, however, have been either text-to-text, or speech-to-text. You can use the Google Translate app for a speech-to-speech experience, but like with Google Assistant’s Interpreter Mode, that only works in person.
So, what’s different here? Well, during its I/O keynote, Google demoed two users in a video chat speaking in their native languages. Google Meet then translates and speaks the translation back in a relatively human-sounding voice. This new feature is available now for Google Workspace subscribers (plans start at $7/month), but unfortunately, it’s not in the free version. On the plus side, additional languages are promised to start coming out in just a few weeks.
While I haven’t tested it out yet, it does seem to be a more convenient way to access a feature that you might otherwise have to hack together with another tab, or by opening your phone and holding it up to a speaker. Plus, it can be a bit more natural to hear translations spoken out for you, rather than having to rely on translated captions. I do wonder whether it can keep up with the natural speed and flow of a conversation, though—nobody likes to feel interrupted.
Almost no one hits it big in music. The odds are so bad it’s criminal. But on a late spring evening in Louisville, Kentucky, Mike Smith and Jonathan Hay were having that rare golden moment when everything clicks. Smith was on guitar. Hay was fiddling with the drum machine and keyboard. Dudes were grooving. Holed up in Hay’s living room, surrounded by chordophones and production gizmos, the two musicians were hoping that their first album as a jazz duo would finally win them the attention they’d been chasing for years.
Finding such reservoirs could help accelerate a global energy transition, but until now, geologists only had a piecemeal understanding of how large hydrogen accumulations form — and where to find them.
"The game of the moment is to find where it has been released, accumulated and preserved," Chris Ballentine, a professor and chair of geochemistry at the University of Oxford and lead author of a new review article on hydrogen production in Earth’s crust, told Live Science in an email.
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Ballentine’s new paper starts to answer those questions. According to the authors, Earth’s crust has produced enough hydrogen over the past 1 billion years to meet our current energy needs for 170,000 years. What’s still unclear is how much of that hydrogen could be accessed and profitably extracted.
In the new review, published Tuesday (May 13) in the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment, the researchers draw up an "ingredient" list of geological conditions that stimulate the creation and build-up of natural hydrogen gas belowground, which should make it easier to hunt for reservoirs.
"The specific conditions for hydrogen gas accumulation and production are what a number of exploration companies (e.g. Koloma, funded by a consortium led by Bill Gates Breakthrough Energy fund, Hy-Terra funded by Fortescue, and Snowfox, funded by BP [British Petroleum] and RioTinto) are looking at carefully and this will vary for different geological environments," Ballentine said.
Natural hydrogen reservoirs require three key elements to form: a source of hydrogen, reservoir rocks and natural seals that trap the gas underground. There are a dozen natural processes that can create hydrogen, the simplest being a chemical reaction that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen — and any type of rock that hosts at least one of these processes is a potential hydrogen source, Ballentine said.
"One place that is attracting a lot of interest is in Kansas where a feature called the mid continental rift, formed about 1 billion years ago, created a huge accumulation of rocks (mainly basalts) that can react with water to form hydrogen," he said. "The search is on here for geological structures that may have trapped and accumulated the hydrogen generated."
Based on knowledge of how other gases are released from rocks underground, the review’s authors suggest that tectonic stress and high heat flow may release hydrogen deep inside Earth’s crust. "This helps to bring the hydrogen to the near surface where it might accumulate and form a commercial resource," Ballentine said.
Within the crust, a wide range of common geological contexts could prove promising for exploration companies, the review found, ranging from ophiolite complexes to large igneous provinces and Archaean greenstone belts.
An ophiolitic landscape in Italy’s Sondrio province. The rocks are rich in iron, which gives them a reddish-brown color.
Michele D’Amico supersky77/Getty Images
Ophiolites are chunks of Earth’s crust and upper mantle that once sat beneath the ocean, but were later thrust onto land. In 2024, researchers discovered a massive hydrogen reservoir within an ophiolite complex in Albania. Igneous rocks are those solidified from magma or lava, and Archaean greenstone belts are up to 4 billion-year-old formations that are characterized by green minerals, such as chlorite and actinolite.
The conditions discussed in the review are the "first principles" for hydrogen exploration, study co-author Jon Gluyas, a professor of geoenergy, carbon capture and storage at Durham University in the U.K., said in a statement. The research outlines the key ingredients that companies should consider when developing their exploration strategies, including processes through which hydrogen might migrate or be destroyed underground.
"We know for example that underground microbes readily feast on hydrogen," co-author Barbara Sherwood Lollar, a professor of Earth sciences at the University of Toronto, said in the statement. So environments where bacteria could come in contact with hydrogen-producing rocks may not be great places to look for reservoirs, Sherwood Lollar said.
Hydrogen is used to make key industrial chemicals such as methanol and ammonia, which is a component in most fertilizers. The gas could also aid the transition away from fossil fuels, as hydrogen can power both cars and power plants.
But hydrogen today is produced from hydrocarbons, meaning manufacture of the gas comes with huge carbon emissions. "Clean" hydrogen from underground reservoirs has a much smaller carbon footprint, because it occurs naturally.
Earth’s crust produces "plenty of hydrogen," Ballentine said, and it is now a question of following the ingredient list to find it.
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Ventiva’s fanless PC cooling technology is evolving from a curiosity to what appears to be a genuine game-changer: not only is it demonstrating 45W cooling capabilities with two partners, but Ventiva is also claiming that its ICE9 system can cool up to 100 watts of thermal energy as well.
Dell — the partner with which Ventiva originally worked with — is one of the companies interested in the 45W cooling solution. The other is Compal, a “white box” contract manufacturer that builds PCs for any number of vendors who then claim them as their own.
Ventiva surfaced late last year, and we sat down with company executives at CES 2025. Rivals like Frore or xMEMS use a vibrating membrane to replicate the actions of a fan, moving cool air over heated elements within a PC and then outside the system. Ventiva essentially ionizes the air, which is pushed away from a charged wire and creates airflow.
The amount of air moved, and how much cooling is applied, depends on a few factors: the size of the cooling component (which Ventiva calls an ICE), how much charge is applied, and how many ICE devices are working together. At CES 2025, however, Ventiva was talking about moving just 25 watts’ worth of thermal energy, enough for the 15W of an Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake”-U chip, for example., but not quite enough for the 28W “Arrow Lake” chips or the rival Ryzen AI 300 processors, whose TDPs are also about 28W.
By pushing up to 40W, Ventiva’s partnerships with Compal and Dell would allow both companies to design laptop reference designs that could accommodate a wider variety of PC processors, including while they were running in excess of their rated TDP in turbo mode. The ICE technology is less than 12mm high, allowing thinner laptops to be made.
Ventiva is also looking at the future. The company is demonstrating a 100W test laptop at Computex 2025 this week, which it will presumably use to strike even more partnerships.
“AI-driven laptops are transforming the way we work, create, and play, but their increasing thermal output requires a new level of device heat management,” said Carl Schlachte, chairman, president and chief executive of Ventiva, in a statement. “This is our highest-performing thermal management system to date, enabling laptop OEMs and ODMs to push power to the limit, and stay totally cool, under any workload, from 3D design to AI development to immersive game playing.”
While 100 watts of cooling is well below what gaming laptops can consume under full load, there’s certainly a chance that a midrange laptop might be able to use Ventiva’s solution for some sort of gaming application. And boy, wouldn’t a silent gaming laptop — without the need to dunk it in a vat of coolant — be a thing of beauty?
The standard knock, of course, is that meal kits are expensive: anywhere from $7 to $14 a portion, less than a restaurant meal but more than most food budgets. So I set an experiment for myself. Armed only with meal kit recipe cards, I went to my local grocery store to see if I could make the meals for less. Reader, it wasn’t easy.
In fact, I mostly failed. For the sake of science, I bought everything at the store that the meal kit provided in the box, including rice or “Italian herb seasoning,” even if I otherwise already had it at home—but tried to buy it in as small a portion as I could. Where quality was credibly equivalent to the meal kit, I bought the lowest-cost option. Portions were for two, not for a family.
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And I only went to one store for each meal, meaning if I had to improvise substitutes to make the meal happen, that’s what I did. No one’s going to three stores for a Tuesday dinner, and so I did what people do when they’re shopping for themselves on a weeknight: I bought what was there.
My conclusion, not to spoil the ending, is that the real bonus offered by a meal kit is sauces, spices, and flavors, doled out in small portions rather than large jars. You can maybe buy a steak for less, even at an all-organic butcher, but you won’t get your cream-cheese sauce with roasted red peppers, the Parmesan cheese for your rice, and the herbs you rub your meat with.
Aside from time savings, it turns out that what a meal kit does best is serve up single- or double-serve flavor at relatively low cost compared with procuring it yourself. When trying to replicate meal kit sauces and spices at a grocery store, I ended up spending a lot more—though of course I then also had multitudinous condiments left over for future meals.
Which is to say: You can, of course, eat much more cheaply than a $12 kit meal. But you can’t easily eat these exact things this cheaply, unless you already own the right spices and bulk ingredients. Here’s my experience trying.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Ingredients:2 boneless, center-cut pork chops or 2 skin-on salmon fillets; 1 cup long-grain white rice; 4 cloves garlic; 2 tbsp vegetarian ponzu sauce, 4 tbsp soy glaze, 6 tbsp cumin-Sichuan peppercorn sauce, 12 oz carrots, 4 scallions, 2 tsp black and white sesame seeds
Houston-based startup Venus Aerospace has completed the first-ever test flight of a rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE) in the United States.
The launch took place on Wednesday (May 14) from Spaceport America in New Mexico. A small rocket equipped with Venus’ RDRE lifted off at 9:37 a.m. EDT (1337 GMT; 7:37 a.m. local time in New Mexico).
The milestone marked the first successful test of such an engine from U.S. soil and took Venus a "step closer to making high-speed flight accessible, affordable and sustainable," the company said in a statement.
Venus Aerospace conducted the first-ever test flight with its rotating detonation rocket engine on May 14, 2025. (Image credit: Venus Aerospace)
"This is the moment we’ve been working toward for five years," Venus CEO Sassie Duggleby said in the statement.
The test serves as a proof of design for Venus’s RDRE and keeps the company on track for runway-based high-speed flight, she added: "We’ve proven that this technology works — not just in simulations or the lab, but in the air."
The Venus RDRE uses a compact, high-efficiency design the company hopes can eventually power aircraft up to Mach 6 — six times the speed of sound — starting from conventional runways. Compared to traditional rocket engines, RDREs offer greater thrust in smaller packages, but up until now the technology has been mostly theoretical.
Normally, rocket engines burn fuel in a combustion chamber in a steady, controlled process. RDREs use a continuous detonation wave that travels in a circle within a ring-shaped chamber, which produces higher pressure and efficiency and results in increased thrust with less fuel.
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"This milestone proves our engine works outside the lab, under real flight conditions," Venus CTO Andrew Duggleby said in the same statement. "We’ve built an engine that not only runs, but runs reliably and efficiently — and that’s what makes it scalable."
The RDRE is designed to work in tandem with Venus’s VDR2 air-breathing detonation ramjet — a combination the company says will enable sustained hypersonic flight without the need for a booster. (Hypersonic flight is generally defined as Mach 5 and above.)
"This is the foundation we need that, combined with a ramjet, completes the system from takeoff to sustained hypersonic flight," Andrew Duggleby said.
With the successful test in the books, Venus is planning full-scale propulsion test of their integrated system as it moves to qualify the design of its future Stargazer M4, a reusable passenger aircraft capable of reaching Mach 4.
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When arsenic is mentioned, many people associate it with a bygone poison. The type of quiet killer used in a murder mystery set on a train somewhere in Victorian England. It seems like a problem of the past.
However, arsenic is a naturally occurring substance that can contaminate groundwater and food irrigated with tainted water. And in an alarming new study, researchers have found that climate change is impacting the level of arsenic that people are ingesting.
Given that arsenic is a carcinogen, it’s primed to become a lethal killer. Billions of people are at risk of developing arsenic-induced diseases.
Why Arsenic Levels are Rising in Rice
In a 2025 study in The Lancet, an international team of researchers revealed the results of a study that measured two components associated with climate change — increased carbon dioxide (CO2) levels and surface temperatures — in rice paddies in China.
“One important chemical aspect that has been known about rice is its ability to accumulate arsenic, leading to an important and crucial question: Can CO2 and temperature affect arsenic concentration, and if so, what are the health consequences?” says Lewis H. Ziska, an associate professor in environmental health sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
The study was the first of its kind. Although scientists have long understood how both inorganic and organic arsenic can make their way into food or water, they weren’t sure how climate change might influence arsenic levels.
To find out, the researchers grew rice in controlled paddies in China from 2014 to 2023. To a certain extent, the research team expected to find some arsenic in the rice because it grows in flooded paddies and absorbs arsenic from the water.
The research team also expected the CO2 levels and surface temperatures would increase because climate change scientists have charted a projection of the likely increase. But would increased CO2 levels and temperatures lead to higher arsenic levels? And what might that mean if people eat the tainted crop?
The study found that the increased CO2 levels and temperatures indeed lead to higher concentrations of arsenic. The researchers’ rice paddies were representative of rice paddies in Asia, which means that what happened in their paddies is likely happening in others around the region.
Higher arsenic rates in rice are a major health concern. Arsenic is a known carcinogen. When found in drinking water, there is an increased risk of bladder and skin cancer. Other studies have found that ingesting arsenic can lead to cancer in the digestive tract, hematopoietic system, kidneys, liver, or lymphatic system.
Problematically, billions of people can now be considered at risk for arsenic-related cancers. More than half of the world’s population depends on rice as a staple food. Scientists are concerned that the increased arsenic in a staple food like rice could lead to a spike in future cancer cases throughout Asia.
Rice Consumption in the U.S.
But what does this mean for the U.S. food supply? Rice consumed in the U.S. comes from the Arkansas Grand Prairie, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Delta, or Sacramento Valley. These crops have not been tested by scientists to determine how CO2 levels and surface temperatures are impacting the arsenic concentrations. But if climate change can raise arsenic levels in Asia, Ziska says it can happen in the U.S. as well.
“It seems likely given the biogeochemistry of how rice can accumulate arsenic when grown under flooded (paddy) conditions,” Ziska says.
It’s a research area that Ziska says needs more attention, both in terms of long-term study support and public awareness. Many people don’t realize that climate change has the ability to alter the food supply by creating conditions that are ripe for toxins.
“Climate change isn’t just about wildfires and sea-level rise and storms of the century. It’s also affecting a food staple — rice — that is consumed by half the world’s population every day. Maybe we should pay attention,” he says.
This article is not offering medical advice and should be used for informational purposes only.
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Emilie Lucchesi has written for some of the country’s largest newspapers, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and an MA from DePaul University. She also holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Illinois-Chicago with an emphasis on media framing, message construction and stigma communication. Emilie has authored three nonfiction books. Her third, A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy, releases October 3, 2023, from Chicago Review Press and is co-authored with survivor Kathy Kleiner Rubin.
