As space agencies and private companies look toward sustained human presence on the moon, a fundamental challenge centers on how to build strong, durable infrastructure without hauling every material from Earth. New research from Rice University points to an unexpected solution — transforming one of the moon’s most stubborn obstacles, its abrasive dust, into a valuable building resource.

The harsh environmental conditions and the vast distance for transportation present significant challenges to ensuring a stable resource supply for human activities on Mars. Utilizing in-situ Martian air as the working medium for energy transfer and material conversion, coupled with advanced thermodynamic cycles and chemical processes, could offer an innovative path to build sustainable energy station on Mars. This perspective highlights the key role of Martian atmosphere in multimodal resource conversion. Researchers propose a design framework for future in-situ Martian energy systems, analyze the implementation pathways and current status of resource conversion, and demonstrate its potential to reduce rocket payload costs through thermodynamic analysis. Finally, they summarize the future challenges and directions in the field of multimodal resource conversion on Mars.

Inside living cells, proteins are constantly moving, interacting and organising into complex structures. In many cases, they gather into dense assemblies where space is limited and motion becomes constrained. Understanding how proteins behave in such crowded environments is essential for explaining key biological processes, from cellular organisation to the formation of protein aggregates linked to disease. Using neutron scattering at the Institut Laue - Langevin, combined with computer simulations, researchers studied how a particular type of protein, behaves inside dense assemblies formed by the proteins themselves. They found that the motion of these proteins is not uniform: proteins move more slowly in the dense centre of the assemblies and more freely near the edges. This shows that how proteins organise themselves directly affects how they move, an effect that is important for understanding how biological systems function.