LAB REPORT

Amid a new wave of interest in the possibility of life on other worlds, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and NASA are embarking on a new effort to identify planets with the basic compounds for life when they launch a small satellite from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara in January.

The 13-month Pandora Mission will attempt to capture the atmospheric conditions of 20 planets as they eclipse their respective suns, an effort to aid the James Webb Space Telescope’s photographing of planets orbiting vibrant, young stars.

The Pandora team is hoping to find biosignatures — chemicals that can only be produced by a living organism such as oxygen, carbon dioxide and methane — which provide evidence of past or present life, though the chance of finding those gases is almost infinitely small, said Peter McGill, an optical astronomer on the Pandora Mission. But data gathered in the project could help answer some of humanity’s biggest questions.

A new partnership between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology (ILT) in Germany looks to perfect the amplifiers used in laser-based fusion reactors.

LLNL announced the three-year partnership on Dec. 18, emphasizing the work’s potential benefits for commercial fusion power. The U.S. Department of Energy’s STARFIRE program and Fraunhofer Gesellschaft’s International Cooperation and Networking program will provide funding.

Fusion power, if adapted for the power grid, stands to provide an abundant and reliable source of electricity.

Despite LLNL successes in demonstrating controlled laser fusion, significant challenges, such as improving the efficiency of laser systems, remain before commercialization.

“The transition from basic research to power-plant development requires the rapid, robust development of rugged new laser systems,” Tammy Ma, director of LLNL’s Livermore Institute for Fusion Technology, stated in the announcement. “Fraunhofer ILT’s expertise in industrial scaling of diode-pumped lasers is crucial for accelerating our [inertial fusion energy] program.”

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Stanford University say they have built a two-photon lithography system that could push 3D nanofabrication toward manufacturing scale, boosting throughput by more than 1,000 times compared with commercial tools while maintaining minimum feature sizes of 113 nanometers.

Two-photon lithography uses ultrafast laser pulses to harden material only at the laser’s tight focal point, letting engineers “write” complex 3D structures with very fine detail. The technique is valued for resolution, but it has been slow and confined to small fields of view because most systems rely on microscope objectives. Printing anything larger typically requires stitching together thousands of tiny tiles, a workflow that takes time and can introduce alignment errors.

Even most rocket scientists would rather avoid hard math when they don't have to do it. So when it comes to figuring out orbits in complex three-body systems, like those in cis-lunar space, which is between Earth and the moon, they'd rather someone else do the work for them.

Luckily, some scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory seem to have a masochistic streak — or enough of an altruistic one that it overwhelmed the unpleasantness of doing the hard math — to come up with an open-source dataset and software package that maps out 1,000,000 cis-lunar orbits. The work is published on the arXiv preprint server.

Note that the last paragraph didn't say stable cis-lunar orbits. In fact, only 9.7% of them were "stable" over the three years the simulation was run. Others resulted in a satellite either crashing into the moon, burning up in Earth's atmosphere, or being ejected from the system entirely. So why is it so difficult to stay in orbit between Earth and the moon?

While the internet obsessed over juicy diss tracks, scrutinised the details of jewel heists and chased down Labubus, science moved behind the scenes in ways that altered the world.

For the better or worse, here are the top seven ways that events and breakthroughs in 2025 changed our lives forever. (Hint: it doesn’t include Katy Perry jettisoning into space).

1. The world’s fastest supercomputer

In January, the world’s fastest supercomputer was inaugurated at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Named El Capitan, it’s only the third computer ever to reach exascale computing speeds – with a peak performance of 2.79 exaFLOPS (2.79 quintillion calculations — known as ‘floating point operations’ — per second).

The supercomputer will be used to organize America’s stockpile of nuclear weapons and research the design of new ones. Its construction started in May 2023 and cost $600 million.