MONSARAZ, PORTUGAL – 30 June 2025 – The silence was broken by cheers and the snap of camera shutters as nine European high school students stepped out of a simulated Mars environment in Portugal, successfully completing the first-of-its-kind EXPLORE analog mission. From 23 to 27 June 2025, these students from Austria, Greece, and Portugal traded their everyday lives for a challenging five-day immersion in an isolated, Mars-like landscape near Monsaraz, in the wilds of the Alentejo province.

A fast, precise new 3D printing advance samlessly merges soft and hard properties into a single object using different colors of light. The breakthrough technology could pave the way for next-generation prosthetics, flexible medical devices and stretchable electronics that move naturally with the body, much like a human joint or ligament.

To overcome quenching and spatial localization in conventional plasmonic antenna–2D semiconductor hybrids, a plasmonic metasurface was developed. By applying Babinet’s principle to design hollow nano-antennas and inducing surface lattice resonances (SLRs), the research team minimized non-radiative losses and achieved large-area emission enhancement. This work presents a scalable approach for realizing low-power, high-brightness light emission in flexible optoelectronic devices.

Macquarie University research reveals widely-used fungicide causes reproductive damage in beneficial insects