Once thought impossible to make, quantum dots have become a common component in computer monitors, TV screens, and LED lamps, among other uses. Three of the scientists who pioneered these colorful nanocrystals—Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus, and Alexei I. Ekimov—have been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences “for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.” The news had already leaked in the Swedish news media—a rare occurrence—when Johan Aqvist, chair of the Academy’s Nobel committee for chemistry, made the official announcement, complete with five flasks containing quantum dots of many colors lined up before him as a visual aid.

A quantum dot is a small semiconducting bead with a few tens of atoms in diameter. Billions could fit on the head of a pin, and the smaller you can make them, the better. At those small scales, quantum effects kick in and give the dots superior electrical and optical properties. They glow brightly when zapped with light, and the color of that light is determined by the size of the quantum dots. Bigger dots emit redder light; smaller dots emit bluer light. So, you can tailor quantum dots to specific frequencies of light just by changing their size.

Physicists had thought since the 1930s that particles at the nanoscale would behave differently. That’s because, according to quantum mechanics, there is much less space for electrons when particles are that small, squeezing electrons together so tightly that material properties can change dramatically. Scientists succeeded in making nanoscale-thin films on top of bulk materials in the 1970s that had size-dependent optical properties, in keeping with those earlier predictions. But making those films required ultra-high vacuum conditions and temperatures near absolute zero, so nobody expected them to have much practical use.

A solution emerged from the study of ancient colored glass. Glassmakers long ago realized they could add silver, gold, or cadmium to their molten glass, vary temperature, and control the cooling process to make different shades of colored glass. Scientists later realized that the colors arose from tiny particles inside the glass, and the particular color depended on the size of those particles.

In the late 1970s, Ekimov, as a newly minted PhD, began researching the optical properties of colored glass at the S.I. Vavilov State Optical Institute in what was then the Soviet Union. He drew on some of the optical diagnostic methods he’d used for his doctoral research on semiconductors, shining light on the materials and measuring how it was absorbed to learn more about the crystal structure.

Ekimov began tinting his lab-made glass with copper chloride, X-raying the resulting glass after cooling. He found that tiny crystals of the copper chloride had formed and how he made them—varying the temperature between 500°–700° C and the heating times from one to 96 hours—affected the sizes, which ranged from about 2 nm to 30 nm. Furthermore, the particle size affected the light absorption of the glass, just like the thin films created in the 1970s: the smaller the particles, the more blue light they absorbed. These were the first quantum dots deliberately made in the laboratory.

Alas, Ekimov’s 1981 paper announcing his discovery was published in a Soviet journal, and thus, researchers elsewhere in the world didn’t have access. That included Brus, who published a 1983 paper announcing his discovery of nanoparticles floating freely in a solution that also showed size-depending optical effects.

The leader of Russia’s space corporation, Yuri Borisov, discussed his country’s future ambitions in space on Tuesday at the International Astronautical Congress. He spoke expansively about Russia’s plans to build a new space station in low-Earth orbit, the Russian Orbital Station, as well as other initiatives.

“We are expecting to design, manufacture, and launch several modules by 2027,” Borisov said via a translator at the conference, which is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, this year. The conference’s plenary sessions are being livestreamed on YouTube.

This space station will reside in a polar orbit, Borisov added, allowing it to observe the entire planet’s surface. Its purpose will be to test new materials, new technologies, and new medicines. “It will be like a permanently functioning laboratory,” he said.

Megaconstellations and nuclear tugs, too

During the discussion, Borisov added that Russia is also hard at work on the “Sfera” megaconstellation to satisfy the country’s large demand for communications. This constellation would include the capacity to provide direct-to-cell communications, which necessarily means that some of these satellites will be very large. Such projects cost billions of dollars at a minimum to get off the ground.

In a PowerPoint slide accompanying Borisov’s presentation, Roscosmos also advertised other, even grander visions. The slide showed a nuclear-powered deep space transport vehicle called “Nuklon” and two “prospective” launch vehicles named Amur-LNG and Korona.

It all may have looked and sounded good on the international stage, but the presentation had something of the feel of a Potemkin Village, which refers to fake villages designed to impress the Russian empress Catherine the Great two centuries ago. Put another way, most (if not all) of the presentation was based on vaporware rather than hardware.

Shortly before Borisov took the stage, Russian media sources revealed that the country’s budget for space activities is due to drop over the next two years—rather than rise to meet the challenge of these ambitious new space programs.

According to an article in Lenta.Ru, translated by Rob Mitchell, the proposed Russian space activity budget for 2024 will comprise 285.95 billion rubles ($2.88 billion), followed by 271.91 billion rubles ($2.74 billion) in 2025 and 258.1 billion rubles ($2.6 billion US) in 2026. The article says that “the budget allocations will be aimed in particular to advance financing of investment projects for the Russian space and rocket industry and for the functions of the Roscosmos State Corporation.”

Less money to build more things? Probably not.

From Russia, with doubt

No one doubts the ability of Russia to build space stations, as the country has a long history of assembling successful orbital outposts. However, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has struggled to build new hardware for spaceflight activities. Both its Nauka space station module and Luna 25 spacecraft that recently crashed into the Moon were essentially mothballed projects largely constructed decades ago.

The idea that Russia will now build a new space station and launch it within the next four years at a reduced budget is especially difficult to comprehend in the current situation. The country’s main focus is on financing and fighting its unprovoked war against Ukraine, and as the space budget story shows, resources for the space program are likely to be reduced rather than increased.

Every project proposed beyond the space station seems even more fanciful. Consider, for example, the Amur and Korona rockets. Russia has been talking publicly about the reusable “Amur” rocket for three years now. It looks similar to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and aims to have a reusable first stage. But there has apparently been zero progress toward actually developing the hardware.

As for the Korona rocket shown on Borisov’s slide, who knows? It’s probably a reference to a single-stage-to-orbit rocket first conceived of 30 years ago when NASA and McDonnell Douglas were working on the DC-X launch vehicle in the United States. The idea that Russia is going to resurrect this concept and develop actual spaceflight hardware is not “prospective,” as the Roscosmos slide claims. Rather, it’s preposterous.

Fifty-six million years ago, trillions of tons of carbon found its way into the atmosphere, acidifying oceans and causing the already-warm global climate to heat up by another 5º C (9º F)—an episode known as the “Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum” or “PETM.”

Like today, the warming climate affected the environment on land and in the sea, with extreme downpours and heat-stressed plankton at the base of the food web. Land animals had a high rate of extinction and replacement by smaller species, and there was a mass extinction of tiny shell-making creatures that lived on the sea bed. The hotter climate supported alligators and swamp-cypress forests, like those in today’s southeastern United States, in Arctic latitudes that are covered by ice and tundra today.

Where did all that carbon come from?

Its source has been debated for years, with some scientists blaming the destabilization of methane ice in the seabed and others pointing to the widespread volcanic activity in the North Atlantic at the time. Modeling of the carbon isotope shift points to carbon originating from both organic and volcanic sources, but the relative proportions aren’t settled.

A new study published in Nature Geoscience by Professor Christian Berndt of the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Germany blames underground magma that drove methane and CO₂ from marine sediments into the atmosphere via gassy eruptions dubbed “hydrothermal venting.” Berndt worked with an international group of 35 coauthors on the paper.

Waiting 17 years for a date

The idea that hydrothermal venting played a major role in the PETM dates back to 2004. Seismic images gathered for oil and gas exploration showed that the marine sediments off Norway were pockmarked with thousands of craters that are about PETM age, and other studies have found similar craters near Greenland. But the seismic images couldn’t constrain the time when the craters formed precisely enough to determine if they played a role in triggering the PETM: “That was conjecture, basically,” said Berndt.

To see if the vents really could have triggered the PETM, they needed to retrieve samples from them to date them—and that required drilling deep into the seabed that lies below 5,600 feet (1.7km) of Atlantic Ocean.

So in 2004, Berndt and several coauthors formally proposed a project to drill and sample a hydrothermal vent, but they had to wait 17 years before drilling finally started in 2021 as part of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP). “You have to be patient,” said Berndt.

Berndt and colleagues were aboard the scientific drilling ship “JOIDES Resolution” as it drilled five boreholes into the “Modgunn Vent,” some 200 miles off the Norwegian coast. The crater at the top of the vent is about 1.3 km (4,300 feet) wide and approximately 80 meters (260 feet) deep. Beneath the crater, seismic images show a 400-meter-deep (1,300 feet), chimney-like feeder zone that connects the crater to a sheet of now-frozen magma called a “sill.”

The right time?

“This was bang on at the beginning of the PETM,” Berndt told Ars.

The samples recovered from the boreholes provide “conclusive evidence for hydrothermal venting immediately before the PETM onset,” supporting the “major role” of the vents in the PETM warming, Berndt and colleagues say in their paper. They base this on two lines of evidence found in the crater: a globally recognized shift in carbon isotopes that marks the PETM and the presence of a species of plankton that only existed during the PETM.

“The crucial one and the most precise one… is the carbon isotope excursion,” said Berndt.

But both these lines of evidence only show up in the sediments that filled the crater after it initially formed; they’re found 10–15 meters up from the crater floor. That distance leaves some wiggle room in tying the crater to the start of the PETM. “That means the vent was formed very shortly before the PETM, and during the PETM, it filled in,” said Berndt.

“The crater is older than the PETM,” agreed Professor Appy Sluijs of Utrecht University, who was not involved in Berndt’s study. But Sluijs points out that the plankton species in these deposits existed throughout the PETM. “The species can therefore not distinguish between the onset or the body of the event,” said Sluijs. In other words, the presence of this species can’t narrow down the time the crater formed to less than a fairly large window.

So how long before the PETM did the vent form?