A new scientific study has found significant effects of open-world gaming on people’s quality of life and emotional well-being. It also shows that playing games in tandem with watching nostalgia-inducing movies like Studio Ghibli’s films can have an even bigger effect, indicating that different types of media can interact with each other.
Writing in the journal JMIR Serious Games, which focuses on games studies research, a team of scientists presents evidence that playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild can have a range of positive outcomes. Testing with a sample of postgraduate students–a community famous for its high levels of anxiety, dissatisfaction, and burnout–the authors show that playing Breath of the Wild on its own can help spark a sense of purpose and meaning. Further, this game helped people feel more calm, more adventurous, and more skillful in their lives outside of the game context.
Investigating potential interactions between games and watching film, the authors also instruct a subset of participants to play Breath of the Wild and watch a clip from Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro or Kiki’s Delivery Service in close succession. Theorizing that the film clips spark a positive sense of nostalgia among participants, the authors find an even stronger effect on overall happiness and life purpose among this subset.
Minesto, a marine energy technology developer based in Sweden, is a winner of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair for deploying the first operational, megawatt-scale tidal energy kite in the Faroe Islands.
The question
Can we use an underwater “kite” to turn ocean tides into renewable energy?
The results
In February 2024, Minesto’s Dragon 12 tidal energy kite delivered its first electricity to the national grid in the Faroe Islands. This 40-foot-wide (12-meter-wide), 28-ton subsea powerplant is the largest and latest of three tidal energy kites Minesto has installed in the Faroe Islands since 2020. This one generates far more electricity.
Dragon 12 is called a kite because it produces electricity by “flying” underwater while tethered to the ocean floor, but it looks more like a small plane. Its wing uses hydrodynamic lift to move the kite while an onboard control system steers it in a figure-8 pattern. As it flies, a turbine shaft located at the rear of the kite turns a generator. Clean energy then travels through a cable inside the tether to a seabed umbilical, which transmits power to the onshore grid.
The figure-8 path allows Dragon 12 to accelerate faster than the current flowing past it, reducing the size of the kite and rotor necessary to generate power. Indeed, Dragon 12 is up to 15 times lighter per megawatt than other similar technologies, according to Minesto. Its design also maximizes energy production, allowing the turbine to operate in flow conditions as low as 3.9 feet per second (1.2 meters per second).
Dragon 12 produces power automatically and autonomously, Minesto’s Chief Technology Officer Bernt Erik Westre explained. Once the kite’s onboard sensors detect that flow conditions are conducive to energy generation, it’s off to the races. “We just tell the system to fly, and then it will decide whether conditions are okay to fly in, and it will start,” Westre told Gizmodo. “If they’re not anymore, it will stop.”
In the Faroe Islands, Dragon 12 operates at a depth of 164 feet (50 meters). Minesto’s tidal energy kites “cannot ever get to the surface, unless we detach them with a special tool,” Westre said. Unlike fixed-bottom wind turbines, tidal energy kites are invisible from the shoreline, and ships can safely sail over them. This, coupled with the fact that these power plants can operate in low-flow conditions, opens up a much larger marine renewable energy market, Westre explained.
Within the first two weeks of testing in the Faroe Islands, Minesto verified Dragon 12’s functionality and power production performance. The kite has been delivering clean energy to the national grid ever since, with a 25% increase in power output after Minesto lengthened its tether in May.
“If you want lightweight, renewable energy that’s invisible, you know who to call,” Westre said.
Why they did it
Before joining Minesto in 2016, Westre was working as a naval architect for the oil industry. Ultimately though, the impact this industry was having on the global climate and wealth disparity became too stark to ignore. Westre wanted to be a part of the solution, not the problem.
“I guess I came to a point where I wanted to be able to look my children—and eventually grandchildren, if I ever get any—in the eye and say, ‘I made a shot at it,’” he said. Plus, “We were making the world’s richest companies even richer, and that didn’t feel right anymore.”
Minesto, founded in 2007, doesn’t just aim to reduce the world’s reliance on fossil fuels. The company’s offbeat approach to commercial marine power production aims to maximize the amount of electricity people can harness from the ocean. Its tidal energy kites do this by operating across a wider range of conditions than traditional technologies. This, Westre hopes, will open up a vast, untapped market for tidal energy extraction.
Why they’re a winner
Minesto is developing a new class of megawatt-scale renewable energy technology that produces predictable, clean power in untapped parts of the ocean. While it isn’t the only company working toward this goal, its technology comes with several advantages. The main selling point is its ability to efficiently generate power in low-flow conditions.
“The [design] principle has been the same since 2007, which is to fly or move the turbine rather than keep it stationary underwater,” Westre said. “By doing it that way, the market—or global potential—is so much larger.”
Stationary systems—such as fixed-bottom tidal turbines—could theoretically operate in low-flow conditions too, but they would have to be huge, he explained. The fact that Minesto’s tidal energy kites move allows them to harness energy from slower currents while reducing cost and consumption of materials.
Another key advantage of this system is that it operates completely below the surface with minimal impact on marine wildlife. This avoids visual pollution that can negatively impact tourism and discourage public support for renewable energy projects.
What’s next
Minesto made big strides toward commercialization in 2024. As it continues building out its tidal energy provisions in the Faroe Islands, it’s working towards installing a first-of-its-kind tidal energy array with multiple Dragon 12 kites. The first phase will have a capacity of 10 megawatts—an initial step towards its eventual 200-megawatt capacity.
“10 megawatts on the Faroe Islands will make a difference,” Westre said. Once the array reaches its full capacity, it could meet 40% of the Faroe Islands’ expected electricity needs in 2030, according to Minesto partner Svenska Kullager Fabriken, a Swedish bearing company.
In June, the Swedish Energy Agency awarded Miensto and its partners $2.6 million to build a complete microgrid installation in the Faroe Islands. That project is expected to be complete by 2026.
The team
Minesto is led by CEO Martin Edlund, CTO Bernt Erik Westre, and COO Johannes Hüffmeier.
Click here to see all of the winners of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair.
The ALICE Collaboration is a winner of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair for transforming lead into gold for a fraction of a second and exposing the strange physics that goes on inside the Large Hadron Collider.
The question
What byproducts does ALICE—the Large Ion Collider Experiment at CERN—produce when it studies matter at extreme energy levels?
The result
Many different things, but perhaps most interesting of all—gold!
In a Physical Review C paper published earlier this year, the ALICE Collaboration announced that between 2015 and 2018, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) created around 86 billion gold nuclei, each lasting for about a microsecond.
ALICE primarily studies high-energy collisions between lead nuclei, whose charge is 82 times that of a proton. These large nuclei travel nearly at the speed of light in the Large Hadron Collider, which slams these particles into the ALICE detector. These collisions produce a pulse of photon energy that chips away bits of the nuclei—usually neutrons, but sometimes protons. When a lead nucleus loses three protons, it transmutes into element number 79, or gold.
A visualization of lead-lead collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, recorded by ALICE. Credit: CERN/ALICE Collaboration
This transmutation occurs around 50,000 to 80,000 times per second. Indeed, the program’s “gold production is quite copious,” said John Jowett, an accelerator physicist at CERN. “However, on a human scale the gold production is very small. [Until] now we’ve only created about, I think, 90 picograms, which is one millionth of a gram of gold.”
Those 90 picograms of gold disappear almost immediately after emerging, he added. “So this just reminds us—I like to say to people—how small atoms are compared to the scales we’re used to,” he said.
Why they did it
The result didn’t surprise any CERN scientist familiar with these instruments, Jowett said. “We didn’t talk about it much before, but we knew it should happen.”
Scientists were also aware that this process had serious implications for ALICE in general, according to Daniel Tapia Takaki, a physicist at the University of Kansas who led the CERN working groups for this project. Any particle that transmutes at CERN typically travels very long distances, meaning some inevitably smash into different sections of the LHC tunnel.
“So they basically become kind of a safety hazard—I mean, they at least start switching off the alarms,” said Tapia Takaki. “You want to have a collider that’s very stable… So understanding exactly how to mitigate this transmutation is one of the big priorities for the next generation of colliders.”
The beam pipes inside ALICE. Credit: CERN/ALICE Collaboration
Uliana Dmitrieva is the ambitious young scientist who kicked off a project to officially record this process in a formal, scientific manner. The task proved so gargantuan that by the time the paper made headlines, Dmitrieva, who had proposed the project as a master’s student, had already finished her PhD and was preparing to become a staff scientist at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics.
“It took more time than my PhD thesis,” she laughed. “There were very few [formal] analyses of [these processes], and actually, I had to do everything from scratch, because it was difficult to model. There were a lot of bugs in [the calculations] because nobody had checked this before.”
Why they’re a winner
All that strain proved more than worth the effort—but in ways the team never imagined. The public attention for this project somewhat disguises the fact that gold production is “just a small part of the paper; the paper was mostly about proton emission and lead collisions due to these so-called ultra-peripheral interactions,” Jowett noted.
“It was…strange, because, okay, we just measured protons—nothing interesting—why is it everywhere?” Dmitrieva joked. “It sounds really funny that there’s some kind of alchemy at the LHC.”
But the team decided to lean into this angle, which clearly “caught the imagination of the public, and we thought it was a nice way to explain some of this physics,” Jowett added. Overall, they were pleasantly surprised to see their project become an entry point to the grand scientific enterprise at CERN.
“It made us happy but also humbled,” Tapia Takaki said. “We have a responsibility to share the knowledge and the excitement—and certainly, [creating gold] is very exciting.”
What’s next
Now that the public excitement has cooled down, the researchers are looking to build on this data to further improve the detectors. That said, and given the large size of the project, there isn’t a single, consolidated plan for the collaboration as a whole.
Tapia Takaki wants to boost the collaboration’s ability to make precise, systematic measurements of proton and neutron emission. With these results, he hopes ALICE’s quirky particle physics can help tackle the most pressing questions in quantum mechanics.
Jowett, who retired in 2019, now advises younger physicists, including at the ALICE Collaboration. “There’s a lot of research going on at the LHC,” he said. “It’s a very broadband machine that studies many things—ALICE is just one part of it. This has given a few surprises. And I think it will continue to do so.”
The team
To say that ALICE is a big collaboration would be a tremendous understatement. With 1,886 members across 163 institutions in 39 countries, it takes a veritable city of scientists to turn lead into gold. A full list of ALICE Collaboration members can be found here.
Click here to see all of the winners of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair.
