PopSci

Cardboard boat enthusiasts descend on Salem Maritime National Historic Historic Park in Salem, Massachusetts for The Great Salem Maritime Cardboard Boat Regatta. First held in 2023, the event tests the engineering, ingenuity, determination, and artistry of boat builders. The regatta is one of several events held during the annual Salem Maritime Festival, celebrating the city’s rich maritime history.

Check out the excitement below. (Click to expand images to full screen.)

The post Ready, Set, Paddle! Scenes from The Great Salem Maritime Cardboard Boat Regatta appeared first on Popular Science.

Labor Day sales are a great time to score deals on big-ticket items you’ll use in your home year-round, such as air purifiers that double as heaters, fans, and your personal pollution fighter. Dyson’s premium models don’t often see deep discounts, but right now, you can snag a few of their most powerful units for less. And if you’re not a Dyson stan, there are great deals from Levoit and Blueair, too. If your living room feels stuffy or your bedroom’s a little too musty, these deals can help freshen things up and offer a buffet from indoor dust and outdoor yuck. 

Dyson Purifier Hot+Cool HP1 — $529.95 (was $599.99)

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It clears 99.97% of allergens and pollutants, then cools or heats your space depending on the season. Use the app or remote to schedule clean air, or simply let it run and enjoy a multi-function appliance that combines the benefits of a heater, fan, and purifier in one.

Dyson Purifier Big+Quiet Formaldehyde BP03 — $849.99 (was $999.99)

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Big room? Big purifier. This one’s designed to move air across a wide space while quietly removing indoor pollutants, including formaldehyde. The long-lasting HEPA filter can last up to 5 years, and its breeze mode is a nice touch when you want some fresh air vibes without opening a window.

More air purifier deals

• Dyson Purifier Cool PC1, $399.99 (was $499.99)
• LEVOIT Core 600S-P Air Purifiers for Home Large Room Up to 2933 Ft² With HEPA Sleep Mode, $259.99 w/ coupon (was $299.99)
• BLUEAIR Signature Air Purifier for Large Rooms & Home, $359.99 (was $449.99)

The post Dyson air purifiers are up to $150 off for Labor Day appeared first on Popular Science.

If you’re old enough to remember VHS (Video Home System) tapes, then you’ll remember that they marked a time when video felt a bit more magical and personal. They were a far cry from from the overloaded digital video sharing sites of today. It meant something more to record and to watch video back in the 1980s and the 1990s, even if we also had fuzzy lines and breaking tapes to put up with.

Related: How to digitize your VHS and cassette tapes

The new app Cassette looks to tap into some of that retro nostalgia. It adds a VHS feel to the videos you’ve got stored in the gallery on your iPhone (or iPad), and also aims to recreate that feeling of seeing random clips all stitched together from a camcorder—not just one specific video from your device, but a succession of them, maybe even surfacing some clips that you’d long forgotten about.

You can download and use Cassette for free, with the random video selection option. If you like the look of it and want to be able to select specific videos, you can pay $0.99 a month, $5.99 a year, or $7.99 for lifetime access to the feature.

How to use Cassette

Once you load up the app on your iPhone, give it permission to access your full photo and video library, and you’ll be met with the main interface: An old-style box TV at the top (complete with VHS player slot), and all of your saved videos underneath, sorted by year. To start watching, tap on a year or choose Take Me Somewhere to pick one at random.

A pleasant animation then shows the selected VHS tape being loaded, and your clips start playing. Cassette will pick videos from the year, showing them one by one in the player at the top, complete with a little bit of artificial VHS fuzz and buzz. Down at the bottom you’ve got playback controls for pausing, skipping forwards and backwards, and jumping to another clip from the year at random.

What you can’t do, unless you subscribe, is tap on a specific video thumbnail that you want to watch next. As a free user you have to sit back and watch the clips in order, or jump to something random. It’s an overall very enjoyable experience.

For an even more immersive feel, tap on the TV screen at the top. This will show your videos in full screen mode, complete with the old-school VHS stamps overlaid on top, showing when and where the video was taken. In this mode you can tap once on the clip to bring up the playback controls again; tap eject (far left) to go back to the main interface.

Settings and upgrades

There are a couple of settings worth knowing about in Cassette, which you can access by tapping the three dots up in the top right corner of the main interface. The first is Show Precise Locations, which when enabled will show video locations as precisely as possible if there’s GPS information shown with them—right down to street level in some cases.

The second toggle switch in settings is Filter Saved Videos: Turn this on and the app will attempt to filter out videos you’ve saved from other apps, so you can focus on the original clips you’ve saved yourself. The idea is there will be fewer Instagram Reels and TikToks on your retro VHS player while you’re browsing through your memories.

Also on the settings page, you’ve got options for tipping the developer and purchasing the app—both of which we’d recommend if you want to support independent app development. If you do go ahead and upgrade to the pro level of Cassette, you can tap around the thumbnails on each year in whatever order you like.

There’s one more feature worth mentioning: When you make a video full screen, tap anywhere on it to find the share button (the arrow on top of a square). You can use this to share the selected video with other people, move it into another app, or even beam it to a bigger screen via AirPlay.

The post This app recreates the magic of VHS tapes and home movies with your iPhone videos appeared first on Popular Science.

Long weekends are for sleep-ins, naps, and lying around questioning your life choices—and maybe also your mattress. Labor Day is delivering a wave of mattress deals across the internet, whether you’re after a budget-friendly Amazon upgrade or ready to splurge on a plush, high-tech direct-to-consumer dream cloud. If your current home setup is more “college futon” than “adult sanctuary,” this is your sign.

Sealy Dreamlife 14” Foam Mattress-in-a-Box, Queen — $594.15 (was $699)

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If summer had you out and about, fall is the time to hibernate—and you’ll want a mattress worthy of your cold-weather retreat. This queen-size Sealy stacks up 14 inches of plush comfort, including a 3-inch layer of SealySupport transition foam wrapped in a stretchy, washable cover. Plus, it skips harsh chemicals like formaldehyde and other ozone-depleting substances. Other sizes and thicknesses (6″ to 14″) are also on sale.

Purple RejuvenatePremier, Queen size — $6,499 (was $6,999) … $300 additional savings if purchased with a base

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Yes, it’s a splurge. But if you’re a side-sleeping desk jockey with back pain (hi, it’s me), it might be the best purchase you make this decade. Purple’s high-end 16.5-inch RejuvenatePremier mattress includes two 2″ layers of the signature GelFlex Grid—a funky-looking but magic-feeling material that cushions joints, minimizes motion transfer, and stays cool overnight. It’s so supportive that it feels like the mattress is gently pushing you up rather than letting you sink in. That’s on top of a DreamLayer air flow tier and dynamic support coils. Pro tip: Opt for the white glove delivery. This thing weighs over 200 pounds and requires steady hands and a sturdy frame. Oh, and you’re gonna need new deep-pocket sheets for this bad boy. But the pressure relief is so worth it. (There are also savings on the more affordable Restore line, as well.)

More mattress deals on Amazon

• Serta Sleeptrue Medium 12″ Queen Hybrid Mattress, $384.20 (was $499)
• Signature Design by Ashley Full Size Chime 12″ Medium Firm Hybrid Mattress with Cooling Gel Foam, $231.93 (was $289.99)
• Novilla 10″ Gel Memory Foam Full Mattress, $144.49 (was $169.99)
• 12″ Cal King Hybrid with Gel Foam and Springs, $289.99 (was $329.99)
• NapQueen 6″ Twin-XL Mattress, $67.94 (was $148.99)

More mattress deals direct

• Save up to 25% at Helix
• Save up to 30% at Brooklyn Bedding
• Save up to 30% at Nolah
• Take up to 30% off at Leesa
• Take up to 35% off at Casper
• Take up to 50% off at Nectar

The post Time to upgrade your sleep from “meh” to magnificent with Labor Day mattress deals appeared first on Popular Science.

It’s a holiday weekend here in the United States, which makes it a great time to capture photos and videos of the festivities. As a professional photographer (and middling video shooter), I rely on portable SSDs for every day editing work and the Samsung T7 series are some of the best on the market. Right now, you can get a 1TB portable SSD for just $79 during Amazon’s Labor Day sale. This is the lowest price I have seen anywhere this year, so grab a few and keep your computer’s built-in hard drive free and clear.

SAMSUNG T7 Portable SSD, 1TB External Solid State Drive $79 (was $110)

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This portable SSD is probably smaller than the stack cards in your wallet, but it’s a super-fast backup drive. It has 1TB of built-in storage and transfers data via a USB 3.2 connection. It boasts read and write speeds up to 1,050/1,000 MB/s, respectively, which means you can move a full memory card full of media in just a few minutes.

Portable SSDs like this are essential if you’re working on photos and videos for a few reasons. Keeping the files on this external drive allows your programs to work at maximum speed thanks to an un-cluttered built-in drive. The high-speed connection is fast enough to edit 4K video files in real time with no stuttering. I keep several of these in my travel bags and on my desk at home and always edit directly off of them. It’s a great work flow.

More Samsung SSD deals

• SAMSUNG T7 Portable SSD, 2TB External Solid State Drive $130 (was $188)
• SAMSUNG T7 Portable SSD, 4TB External Solid State Drive $226 (was $345)

The post If you edit photos or videos, you need this 1TB SSD on sale for $79 at Amazon for Labor Day appeared first on Popular Science.

The smelly, gigantic blobs of brown seaweed that drift across the Atlantic Ocean every summer may not seem like a major threat at first glance. Yet, they are major players in Earth’s marine ecosystems. Once believed to be restricted to the nutrient-deprived Sargasso Sea off the United States’ eastern coast, marine biologists now better understand pelagic Sargassum for what it is—a fast growing organism found across a vast range of waters, with complex ramifications for its surroundings.

Sargassum is a genus of brown seaweed (and therefore an algae) abundantly found across many of the planet’s oceans. The leafy organism also features gas-filled sacs called pneumatocysts that allow it to float atop water as both a habitat and food source for multiple marine species. However, it quickly can become a nuisance once it washes up on coastal shores. As Sargassum rots, it releases noxious hydrogen sulfide gas which emits its trademark “rotten egg” smell. Although not dangerous in small amounts, exposure to enough of it can cause eyes, nose, and throat irritation.

To better contextualize and study the seaweed, researchers at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute published a review of 40 years’ worth of data in the journal Harmful Algae that analyzes 40 years of pelagic Sargassum’s development, expansion, and environmental impacts. 

“Our review takes a deep dive into the changing story of sargassum– how it’s growing, what’s fueling that growth, and why we’re seeing such a dramatic increase in biomass across the North Atlantic,” FAU Harbor Branch oceanographer and study co-author Brian Lapointe said in a statement.

By better understanding its shifting nutrient composition (particularly its carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus contents), Lapointe and colleagues hope to understand how the pungent algae changes over time amid its larger ecological context.

Researchers became particularly interested in the seaweed after the first appearance of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt in 2011. Stretching from the West African coast all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, the bloom has returned every year except for 2013. And with each reappearance, the Belt only grows larger. In May, it reached a new record biomass of 37.5 million tons, and this excludes the Sargasso Sea’s base biomass of around 7.3 million tons.

Part of Sargassum’s surprise entry onto the global stage appears to be based on initial faulty assumptions. According to the historical review, early oceanographers initially only tracked Sargasso Sea’s seaweed based on surface sightings due to the belief that it flourished in warm, clear, nutrient-lacking waters. By the mid-20th century, researchers realized the region was a “biological desert,” leading them to question Sargassum’s needs.

In recent years, advanced ocean circulation models, field studies, and satellite observations have helped clarify the situation. It now appears that Sargassum actually thrives in nutrient-rich coastal spaces like the western Gulf of Mexico. From there, it likely enters the open ocean through the Loop Current and Gulf Stream, where it eventually feeds into Sargasso seaweed.

But what’s causing the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt’s exponential growth in recent years? In short, nitrogen. Between the 1980s and 2010s, Sargassum’s nitrogen content rose by more than 50 percent.

“These changes reflect a shift away from natural oceanic nutrient sources like upwelling and vertical mixing, and toward land-based inputs such as agricultural runoff, wastewater discharge and atmospheric deposition,” explained Lapointe.

As for how the Belt formed in the first place, experts now theorize that an extreme atmospheric event is to blame. Between 2009 and 2010, a negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation potentially sucked Sargassum southward out of the Sargasso Sea and into tropical Atlantic waters. Basically, extreme environmental occurrences coupled with extreme human influences are the likely culprits.

“The expansion of Sargassum isn’t just an ecological curiosity–it has real impacts on coastal communities. The massive blooms can clog beaches, affect fisheries and tourism, and pose health risks,” Lapointe said. “Understanding why Sargassum is growing so much is crucial for managing these impacts.”

The post 7 wild photos. 40 years of data. 1 smelly seaweed story. appeared first on Popular Science.

Great apes are impressive architects, but their tree top nest-building remains one of their most understudied abilities. For example, Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), , are adept at constructing two kinds of abodes. The 200 pound primates may assemble barebone frames for shade and shelter during the day, but it’s a different story at night. Before turning in for the evening, orangutans will weave complex platforms as high as 65 feet in the tree canopy. These cozy dwellings are furnished with makeshift blankets, mattress linings, pillows, and even roofs to guard against inclement weather.

But what does it take for the critically endangered apes to learn how to build their shelters? To find out, primatologists at the Max Planck Institute and University of Warwick reviewed 17 years’ worth of observational data collected on 44 orangutans. According to their conclusions published in the journal Nature Communications Biology, the answer may have far more to do with apes’ innate curiosity and concentration skills than instinctual knowledge.

“Orangutan nest-building tendency may have some innate basis, but the details and method must be socially learned starting from a very young age,” University of Warwick psychologist and paper co-author Ani Permana said in a statement.

The team found that it doesn’t take long for an orangutan to begin showing interest in nest-building. By six months’ old, the infants are “peering” at their mothers’ techniques, as well as playing with nesting materials like twigs, branches, and leaves. Between the ages of one and four, the young apes start practicing how to build day nests while learning from their mistakes. Night nest lessons don’t start until around the age of three, and generally take around five years to master.

“Aside from learning ‘how to’ build a nest, immature orangutans also appear to learn the ‘know-what’ of which materials to use,” added animal behaviorist and study co-author Caroline Schuppli. “The choice of tree species is important, and infants—who primarily peer at their mothers—are more likely to select the same species their mothers use.”

One of the team’s most striking realizations is that nest construction education doesn’t solely revolve around a mother’s abilities. Researchers confirmed that as orangutans matured, they expanded their pool of tutors to include other community members. These role models further reinforced knowledge on which trees to use, what materials to build with, and even which accessories to use when furnishing their nests. Schuppli compared the progression to our own peer-influenced adolescent development.

“Just like human teenagers finding their own path, maturing orangutans increasingly peer at the nest-building of others and begin experimenting with the tree species those individuals use,” she said.

Despite the experimentation with other nesting techniques, the team noted that orangutans tend to eventually fall back on the same nesting materials used by their mothers, possibly because they recognize the value of tried-and-true building strategies. This consistency across generations points to shared cultural elements across wild orangutan populations. However, this vital knowledge will be lost without effective environmental conservation efforts.

Orangutan social learning has previously been documented for behaviors like tool usage, but the study marks the first confirmation of nest-building observational learning. The implications are vast, particularly for understanding the importance of social knowledge construction among great apes. It also suggests nest building is an ancient evolutionary behavior that dates back millions of years ago, suggesting that there are older psychological underpinnings behind why we primates need a comfy place to lay our heads.

The post Baby orangutans spy on mom to build cozy treehouse nests appeared first on Popular Science.

Washington State’s vast Olympic National Park sprawls across almost one million acres, 600 miles of trails, and 64 trailheads. Many of these important open spaces  are in wilderness areas, meaning inaccessible to vehicles and machines. So how do park rangers maintain them for visitors? 

They don’t drop humanoid drones out of the sky, if that’s what you’re thinking. In fact, their solution is a much cuter hybrid: Mules.

Mules are the result of interbreeding between a male donkey (Equus asinus) and a female horse (Equus caballus). Thanks to their strength, agility, and endurance, they are the perfect pack animal, according to a Washington’s National Park Fund statement. In fact, mules have been helping maintain the trails in national parks since the early 1900s.

“They get a lot of the endurance and resilience from the donkey’s side, and the personable attitude of the horse mom,” Olympic National Park packers Heidi Brill told The Seattle Times earlier this summer. 

For years, Olympic National Park has been nominating one of their four-legged workers as “Mule of the Month” to introduce the team and their crucial contribution to the public. May’s Mule of the Month was a spirited and quick “sports-model” mule named RainCloud. June’s Mule of the Month was dark-coated Katherine, while July’s was 26-year-old Daisy, dubbed the “magnificent matriarch.” 

“Olympic National Park’s mule team helps transport equipment, materials, and supplies throughout the park’s designated wilderness areas,” reads a social media post by the park. “If you encounter them on the trail, find a safe space to step aside and let them pass. But don’t feel bashful about snapping a few photos of these backcountry celebrities!”

The park’s over two dozen mules each weigh on average about 1,000 pounds. Given that mules can haul around 20% of their body weight, this long-eared team carries everything from trail maintenance gear to construction materials and research equipment during their working season (April through October) at Olympic National Park. They even support the search and rescue teams, safely evacuating injured hikers out of the wilderness.  

When a new mule arrives at the park, Brill and her colleagues put them “next to good mentor mules,” she explained in the statement. “Temperament is important because they are diplomats for the park,” she added. “About 75% of our job is just knowing the characters in the team, and who gets along with who and can go where in the string.” 

It remains to be seen who will win the prestigious honor of being August’s Mule of the Month.  

The post Meet the chonky, hard-working mules of Olympic National Park appeared first on Popular Science.

In the 1999 animated film, Toy Story 2, Buzz Lightyear and his fellow sentient playthings enter an airport’s ‘back-of-the-house’ to rescue Sheriff Woody Pride from a suitcase. Together the toys encounter a world of diverging conveyor belts, inclines and declines, and seemingly endless turns, all designed to carry checked baggage from an airline ticket counter or curbside kiosk to its intended flights.

According to Michael Rangole, maintenance manager for Vanderlande Industries—the company that maintains and operates the baggage handling system at California’s San José Mineta International Airport (SJC)—Toy Story 2 is incredibly accurate. 

“San Jose’s system alone has over 120 curves,” says Rangole. 

Beyond what’s conveyed in Toy Story 2, what exactly happens to your luggage from the time it is tagged to the moment it’s placed into the plane’s cargo hold? The answer may surprise you. 

From ticket counter to conveyor: a checked bag’s first step

“It all starts with what’s known as ‘bag hygiene,’” says Simran Sandhar, SJC’s terminal and customer experience superintendent. The term refers to everything from stowing luggage handles to keeping oddly shaped items, like fishing rods and bowling balls, off the belt (these are brought to an oversized baggage counter after tagging). 

“If luggage doesn’t go onto the belt properly,” says Sandhar, “it will encounter some hiccups and delays in the baggage make-up area,” which is the behind-the-scenes zone where luggage is sorted before being loaded onto departing planes. “Good bag hygiene allows a bag to get where it’s supposed to go with minimal issues.”

When you drop off a piece of luggage at an airline check-in counter, an agent weighs your bag and threads an airline-issued baggage tag through its handle, sealing both sides of the tag together with a sticky adhesive. Each tag includes the airline code and unique baggage ID number, a three-letter code for your destination airport, and a barcode that stores your flight number, destination, and passenger info. 

There’s also what’s known as a “bingo tag,” says Sandhar, “that little barcode sticker that an agent will rip off from your baggage tag and stick directly on your luggage. It’s used as backup, just in case the main tag falls off.”

What happens in an airport’s ‘back-of-house’ 

Once a piece of luggage arrives within SJC’s behind-the-scenes make-up area, an automatic tag reader will scan its barcode, followed by a series of photo sensors (“SJC has over 800 of them,” says Rangole) that track the bag’s progress. These sensors provide airport personnel with a general idea of where the bag is, what time it arrived within the make-up area, and how long it’s been in the system. 

After a bag is scanned, it’s sent along the airport’s system of conveyor belts either left, right, up, down, or center depending on which TSA X-ray scanners are available. 

Do checked bags go through security?

Even your checked bags go through a TSA security check. “Each and every piece of checked luggage is then screened, assuring that they’re not carrying any prohibited items,” says Sandhar, like fireworks and lithium batteries (friendly reminder to not leave those new rechargeable headphones in your checked bag). Bags requiring additional manual screening by a TSA agent go in one direction, cleared luggage heads off in another.

(Have you ever arrived at your destination and opened your bag, only to find a note inside saying that your luggage has been inspected? This is the moment in the baggage process where you’ll receive that note.)

A cleared bag makes its way into the make-up area’s sortation system, where it passes under another barcode reader that identifies the bag’s airline. If it’s Southwest it goes off in one direction, if it’s Alaska it travels to another.

“The entire process takes an average of three-and-a-half-minutes,” says Rangole, “if there aren’t any hiccups.”

The reasons there are ‘cut-off’ times for checking in luggage

Despite the brief amount of time that a bag typically spends in an airport’s make-up area, most airlines have a cut-off time for checking in luggage (typically 45 minutes before domestic flights and longer for international ones). “Once the luggage leaves our system,” says Sandhar, “it still needs to be sorted according to flight, transported over to that flight, loaded onto the plane, and weight and balance calculated.” This latter part refers to the proper distribution of a plane’s overall cargo weight. 

If there’s a glitch in the system your bag might get delayed. Say a bag gets stuck on a conveyor belt because of a loose bag strap or a pinched wheel. “An alarm will go off and an airport team member will get to that bag and unjam it as quickly as possible,” says Sandhar. 

But don’t worry too much about checking a backpack, which can often have loose bits dangling off from it. “It’s the responsibility of an airline agent to place bags like these in a bin with the straps tucked in [part of baggage hygiene], which should alleviate a majority of the hazard.”

Why do checked bags still get lost?

In 2023 alone, U.S. airports handled more than 470 million checked bags. Approximately two-million of those bags never made it to their destinations. 

Lost luggage often occurs when tags fall off and sensors don’t know where to send the bag. Sandhar recommends always removing airline baggage tags, as well as those little bingo stickers, once you’ve left your destination airport. “If you have a lot of tags on your bag you’re going to cause a delay,” he says, “because we might have to do some manual investigation to ensure that it gets to the right place.”

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Why do we put seatbacks up for landing? An aviation expert explains.

Why do our ears pop on a plane? An audiologist explains.

Of course, there’s also human error. A luggage handler may load a bag onto the wrong flight, or not have enough time to make a transfer if the time between connecting flights is especially limited. “Not every airport baggage make-up area is the same,” says Sandhar. It all depends on their size, traffic volume, budget, and the specific technology they have in place. “While the core purpose remains the same—to group bags for a specific flight—the implementation can range from fully automated systems with robotics to manual sorting areas where staff physically load bins and carts.”

To help assure your bag gets where it needs to go, always check your airline-issued baggage tag to make sure the agent has issued your info correctly. Also, put a name tag on your luggage that includes your name, phone number and country code (if you’re traveling internationally). “An address isn’t necessary,” says Sandhar. “But your name and phone number will pay dividends in the unlikely event that a tag falls off and no airline is able to identify whose luggage it is.”

It also would have made Buzz Lightyear’s quest to recover his friend so much easier. 

This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post What really happens to your bag after you check it in? appeared first on Popular Science.

Researchers at Texas A&M University are perfecting a deceptively simple solution to our increasingly overburdened energy grid: ice-cooled buildings.

This approach, known as thermal energy storage or sometimes referred to colloquially as “ice batteries,” uses energy to freeze liquid overnight, when most people are asleep and electricity demand is lower. That stored ice is then melted to help cool building temperatures during peak hours. If successful, the end result is reduced electricity use for air conditioning during the day, which could decrease overall energy demand and help lower costs.

Creative solutions like these, presented in The Journal of Physical Chemistry, could play a more prominent role in the coming years, as the rise of AI data centers, which require constant cooling, continues to strain an already stressed energy grid.

Business are already using ice batteries

Ice batteries are already out of the lab and working in the real world. One of the most vivid examples is the iconic, Art Deco–inspired, 30-story Eleven Madison skyscraper in Manhattan. It reportedly uses 500,000 pounds of ice every day to cool the building during peak hours. That’s roughly the equivalent of three city buses packed full of ice cubes. Trane Technologies Commercial HVAC Americas, the company responsible for Eleven Madison’s cooling system, told CBS News earlier this year that their use of ice batteries reduces overall cooling costs by up to 40%.

“When everyone else is using their electricity in the middle of July to cool their building or to cool their homes, it’s a big draw on the grid,” Trane president Holly Paeper told CBS.  “This building won’t draw from that because it made its ice last night.” 

The ice-based thermal energy storage market has seen a significant uptick in interest in recent years. Trane alone (one of at least half a dozen companies operating in this space in the U.S.) claims it has made over 4,000 installations globally. Still, that represents only a tiny fraction of overall structures. The U.S. alone has an estimated six million commercial buildings.

Not all ice batteries are built the same 

But cooling all of that water also requires energy. That’s where the research conducted by the Texas A&M team comes in. Ice battery systems typically use salt hydrates as a kind of chemical binder to convert liquids into ice. During this conversion process, the salt hydrates interact with various other chemicals, called “nucleation particles,” to freeze liquids. The specific type of nucleation particles used, and the precise temperatures at which they interact, can significantly impact the overall reliability and efficiency of ice battery systems. 

This complex chemistry is what the researchers explored in their study. Getting the nucleation particles and salt hydrate composition right can reduce the amount of energy required to generate ice. Using less energy in that process translates to greater cost savings for building owners who install these systems. The chemical composition also affects whether ice batteries are compatible with specific types of HVAC systems or heat pumps. In this particular case, nucleation particles with the element barium were better at triggering a freeze.

“The ice battery technology has been around for a while,” Texas A&M Department of Materials Science and Engineering professor and paper co-author author Patrick Shamberger said in a statement. “But there are problems on the material side that I’m interested in: What’s the right material at the right temperature? Can we make it reversible? Can we make it last for 30 years?”

Related: [Could aquifers store renewable thermal energy?]

Ice batteries could help cool future AI data centers 

Data centers increasingly used to power advanced AI models require massive amounts of electricity. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centers accounted for roughly 1.5% of global electricity consumption in 2024—a figure expected to triple by 2030 as countries race to build faster, more powerful AI systems. Much of that increased energy demand is being met by a familiar source: fossil fuels. Environmentalists warn that the growing reliance on natural gas to power AI infrastructure could cause countries like the U.S. to backtrack on climate commitments aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

The potential savings extend beyond data centers, too. Air conditioning accounts for about 20% of total energy use in homes and businesses, a figure which can spike to nearly 70% on especially hot summer days. Ice batteries certainly aren’t a silver bullet, but their widespread adoption could help stem the tide of this emerging energy dilemma. If scaled up, they could reduce overall energy consumption, which in turn would lessen the need to build new energy sources. Using ice batteries, in other words, could theoretically help offset the need for additional fossil fuel-based power.

“We don’t want to solve grid problems by building more power plants,” Shamberger said in a statement. “That’s a very costly solution and they’d have to charge higher rates overall.”

In a sense, ice batteries use modern chemistry to revive a process rooted in the past. As Nicola Twilley writes in her recently released book Frostbite, the modern concept of electric cooling we’re familiar with wasn’t truly invented until the 20th century. Before that, cooling, whether for a dining room party or to power a global supply chain of meat and produce, relied on the rapid transport of melting ice.

“As late as 1907, New York City, already a modern metropolis filled with automobiles and skyscrapers,” Twilley writes, “Relied on natural ice, harvested from lakes upstream and brought down the Hudson River on barges.”

Now, more than a century later, it’s looking like ice might be making a comeback. 

The post Can ‘ice batteries’ cool down our soaring energy demands? appeared first on Popular Science.