The view of Earth from space is famously familiar—bright blue ocean, swirling gyres of white clouds, touches of terrestrial green. The luminosity of this image is the result of the sun’s rays shining ...

Scientists in Hong Kong have demonstrated a new ultra-white ceramic material that can drastically cool buildings by reflecting sunlight and heat at record highs. The beetle-inspired material gets its ...

Most space missions rely on chemical rockets for propulsion. Rockets must carry fuel, which increases spacecraft mass and limits their speed and travel distance. For decades, researchers have explored ...

Engineers have found a way to make liquid metals switch between reflective surfaces or those that scatter light. The transition only requires a small zap of electricity and could be used to make ...

For decades, researchers have explored light sails as an alternative. These devices use radiation pressure—the force exerted when light reflects from a surface—to generate thrust. When driven by a ...

That change in reflectivity, known as albedo, is not a distant abstraction. It is emerging in the same decades that have already delivered record heat, stronger heat waves and disrupted seasons, and ...

After Monday’s winter weather, areas around the Peninsulas and the western Southside accumulated three or more inches of snow. And that snow slightly affected high temperatures this week. Snow has a ...

To fabricate micro/nano structures on metal surfaces, various technologies have been proposed, including chemical etching, mechanical grooving, reactive ion etching, and long-pulse laser processing.

Observations confirmed that dark coating can reduce satellite reflectivity by half. There are concerns that numerous artificial satellites in orbit could impair astronomical observations, but these ...