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Nautilus was racing to be the first in the world to mine the sea floor. Now UK Seabed Resources, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, could take the lead. It has a licence to explore an area of the Pacific sea floor in international waters for minerals.

The team says that it is now exploring other nanomaterials such as graphene as additives or coatings in lithium-ion battery electrodes. “By understanding the attributes and limitations of each class of material, we will be able to rationally design composites that maximize overall battery performance,”

This manuscript reports on the recent progress and the remaining materials challenges in the development of coated conductors (CCs) for power applications and magnets, with a particular emphasis on the different initiatives being active at present in Europe. We first summarize the scientific and technological scope where CCs have been raised as a complex technology product and then we show that there exists still much room for performance improvement. The objectives and CC architectures being explored in the scope of the European project EUROTAPES are widely described and their potential in generating novel breakthroughs emphasized. The overall goal of this project is to create synergy among academic and industrial partners to go well beyond the state of the art in several scientific issues related to CCs' enhanced performances and to develop nanoengineered CCs with reduced costs, using high throughput manufacturing processes which incorporate quality control tools and so lead to higher yields. Three general application targets are considered which will require different conductor architectures and performances and so the strategy is to combine vacuum and chemical solution deposition approaches to achieve the targeted goals. A few examples of such approaches are described related to defining new conductor architectures and shapes, as well as vortex pinning enhancement through novel paths towards nanostructure generation. Particular emphasis is made on solution chemistry approaches. We also describe the efforts being made in transforming the CCs into assembled conductors and cables which achieve appealing mechanical and electromagnetic performances for power systems. Finally, we briefly mention some outstanding superconducting power application projects being active at present, in Europe and worldwide, to exemplify the strong advances in reaching the demands to integrate them in a new electrical engineering paradigm.

What are the milestones after you land?Once we prove we can land safely we'll show we can hover over the lunar surface. We may leave a small commemorative payload on the moon and then lift off to lunar orbit. Bringing anything we later mine back from the moon will have three separate, technically challenging elements: getting mined resources into lunar orbit, from there to Earth orbit, and then to Earth's surface. The great thing here is that we don't have to invent anything new to do all this.

Installment 5 of Creating a Sustainable Food Future explores the potential role of aquaculture in meeting global fish demand in 2050, finding that aquaculture production will need to more than double by midcentury.

IMF’s Finance & Development magazine explores innovative approaches to managing our natural resources as well as the revenue generated from sales of natural resource products.

The second problem is which particles to use. At the moment oxides of metals such as zinc and copper seem to be the favourites, but tiny tubes made of carbon are also being explored.

In a memorandum of understanding, ministers from Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden as well as the UK, agreed to explore the regulatory, legal, planning and technical issues that need to be addressed to create the grid.

Investors believe that its ongoing exploration in Botswana looks promising, and is working on what could be a major copper-silver district. 

Junior gold and base metals explorer Tectonic Resources NL (ASX: TTR) said first-phase drilling at its Harbour View site had confirmed gold between 25 g/t at four metres, to 3.4 g/t at two metres. Copper was found at 4.5 per cent at four metres,