Technologies

First moon samples in over 40 years may alter lunar history

«Our current views need readjustment» about how long our beloved white globe remained warm and volcanically active, says a researcher.

In late 2020, a Chinese space capsule delivered fresh moon samples to Earth for the first time in about four decades, and these precious lunar rocks just revealed a new detail about our planet’s glowing companion: Its volcanoes were alive and active considerably longer than scientists thought.

«All our experience tells us that the moon should be cold and dead 2 billion years ago. But it is not, and the question is, ‘Why?'» said Alexander Nemchin, a professor of Geology at Australia’s Curtin University and author of the analysis published Thursday in the journal Science.

Alongside an expansive and international team of researchers, Nemchin discovered that some of the newly transported moon rocks contain lunar fragments from later days of the white orb’s timeline. Dated about two eons ago, these fragments are relatively young. But here’s the kicker: Those same pieces are also remnants of a volcanic eruption.

Connecting the dots, the team members realized they were looking at solid confirmation that the lunar surface was alive pretty late in the game.

«We need to dig deeper with this,» Nemchin remarked. «We are highlighting that our current views need readjustment — further research will tell how dramatic this readjustment should be.»

Welcome back, lunar research

The saga began last year in December, when China’s Chang’e 5 mission sent a spacecraft to scrape the surface of the moon and collect a variety of rock and dust samples for Earth-based analysis. It returned with about 4 pounds (2 kilograms) of extraterrestrial material.

The year 1976 marks the last time lunar samples were brought down to our home planet, an achievement of the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 mission. But before that, NASA’s Apollo missions were running the course from Earth to the moon several times — the crusades returned photographs, moon rocks and personal anecdotes of astronauts.

«There was some need and drive to do this 50 years back,» Nemchin explained. «Then, priorities changed and everybody moved to something else.» But now, he says, «we have the moon back in the focus.»

He notes lunar research is important not only from an astronomy perspective, but also because any effort to travel to the moon — or really, any space exploration — tends to expedite technologies that ultimately benefit us on Earth.

One example of such serendipitous tech comes from Australian physicists’ research in the ’90s. They developed a highly complex mathematical tool hoping to detect smeared signals of black holes that vanished in the cosmos. Unfortunately, they never found any — but their invention paved the way for modern-day Wi-Fi.

Moon rock science

«Every new sample gives us a big boost in understanding what is happening, simply because we still have so few of them,» Nemchin remarked. «Apollo samples have been worked on for the last 50 years and are still actively investigated.»

While analyzing the rocks brought back by Chang’e 5, Nemchin and fellow researchers first checked out what types were present. In particular, they were after basalt fragments, which are correlated with volcanic activity.

«We needed to get an idea about chemical composition of the fragments to be able to compare [them] to the large basaltic field visible from the orbit,» he said. «And, make sure [those] fragments represent this field of basalts and do not come from somewhere else.»

Then, the scientists confirmed specific ages of the pieces of interest. Validating that these fragments are young was one of the main goals of the mission. That’s how the team members expected to prove their hypothesis of the moon having active volcanoes more recently than textbooks suggest.

«All basalts we had before are older than 3 billion years,» Nemchin said. «We also had a few very young points determined from material ejected by very young impacts — impact melts — but nothing in between. Now we have a point right in the middle of the gap.»

Such age determinations are called crater counting, something the team hopes to continue doing in the future in order to attain the full array of rocks to map out each generation of the moon. Nemchin also notes that a few interesting chemical features were found in the basalt samples, including high iron content, which isn’t present in any other retrieved pieces of the lunar surface.

Further chemical research on the rocks, he says, will help answer new questions introduced by the team’s novel findings, such as searching for the source of heat that led to lunar volcanic activity a couple of billion years ago.

And at the end of the day, the Australian geologist emphasizes that «what is important for me in all this is that we managed to bring a large international group of people to work on the sample.»

«Somehow,» he added, «In the current situation when international travel is still rather restricted, I had more interaction with different people than in the previous years when we could move around any way we liked.»

Technologies

150 Years After the First Phone Call, We’re Still Looking for 1-on-1 Connections

I spoke to an AT&T archivist about Alexander Graham Bell’s famous transmission. Even though calls have changed, the reasons behind them are still the same.

My interview with William Caughlin, the head of AT&T Archives and History Center, started with an ironic twist. Our Microsoft Teams video call failed, so we ended up talking over the «regular» phone.

Perhaps «regular» isn’t entirely accurate, given the infrastructure. But it was fitting for the topic of our conversation: the very first phone call, which occurred exactly 150 years ago.

On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made a famous exclamation to his assistant: «Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.» That sentence crossed a single copper wire to the next room. Though the technology that enabled the call has changed drastically over the past century and a half, the experience was fundamentally the same. Two people in two different locations were having a conversation — and seeking a connection — in real time.

Caughlin told me that Bell had been working on experiments for a year by then. But even though he was able to transmit speech sounds over copper wire in 1875, it was inarticulate. «Watson could hear noises, sounds, but he couldn’t really make out what Bell was saying. But Bell knew he was on the right path at that point,» Caughlin said.

Those experiments culminated on March 10, when the sounds became clear.

Read more: AT&T Says It’s Pumping $250 Billion Into New Infrastructure Improvements

Artifacts of the future

To celebrate the anniversary of that first transmission, AT&T created a pop-up exhibit at its Dallas headquarters, open to the public through Thursday, March 12.

Some notable artifacts on display from this day 150 years ago include the copper wire over which the message was sent, which in 1914 was wrapped in a loose spool and set behind glass. There’s also Thomas Watson’s notebook, where he recorded those historic first words.

«It’s one of the greatest treasures in our collection,» said Caughlin.

And with its red ribbon and official seal, the original March 7, 1876, patent for «Improvement in Telegraphy,» is said to be the most valuable patent ever granted.

The telephone occupied Bell’s attention for only a few years. Though it launched an industry, Bell was still tinkering elsewhere, according to Caughlin.

«He was a lifelong learner, a scientist, researcher, and even though he left the telephone business in 1878, he continued experimenting.»

Bell considered the «photophone» to be his greatest invention, said Caughlin. In 1880, Bell transmitted a human voice over a beam of light. It was a precursor to today’s fiber-optic cables, which essentially do the same thing: sending pulses of light through glass fibers across thousands of miles. Bell transmitted his voice using mirrors and a parabola receiver 1,300 feet away in another building. It required direct sunlight, but the voice was very clear.

Also in the archive is the original transistor that was invented by AT&T physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, which Caughlin says is «the second greatest invention that ever came out of AT&T.»

It’s the technology that underlies most of the items on my desk and whatever device you’re reading this story on. «In your smartphone, you have something like 20 billion transistors,» Caughlin pointed out.

Its 1950 patent is also included in the collection.

Connections then and now

In that Boston lab in 1876, the network consisted of a copper wire running from Bell’s transmitter to the receiver Watson was using. Now, AT&T says it moves an exabyte (1 billion gigabytes, or the storage equivalent of nearly 4 million iPhone 17E smartphones) of data across its network every day.

Voice calls represent a small fraction of that traffic. The technology that connects our phones — 5G networks, fiber backbones, satellite calling — continues to evolve even as the number of calls remains a small portion of how we communicate. Nearly three times more texts than voice calls passed through AT&T’s network in 2025.

I, for one, will almost always prefer to chat via text rather than make a phone call, mostly for expediency.

But phone calls haven’t disappeared. If anything, they’ve morphed into a nuisance, given the barrage of scam calls and now impersonal AI-based customer service systems that get in the way of human connection. Today’s carriers and phone-makers are having to implement more aggressive filtering tools, though with mixed success.

And yet when I want to connect and focus my full attention on someone, a voice call or video call is the way to do it. And unlike days past, I can make a call from anywhere without worrying about long-distance charges. Heck, I don’t even need to memorize phone numbers anymore — I just tap one of my favorite contacts or ask the resident disembodied voice assistant to make the call for me.

Bell no doubt knew the importance of hearing someone’s voice, live, over the phone line. A century and a half later, through incredible advancements in telephony technology, that connection is still just as valuable.

Technologies

Look Out Below! A 1,300-Pound NASA Satellite Is on Its Way Back to Earth

After 14 years in orbit, NASA’s Van Allen Probe A satellite is expected to begin re-entering Earth’s atmosphere on Tuesday.

All things that go up must eventually come down. NASA expects the Van Allen Probe A satellite to come crashing back to Earth after a 14-year journey through space. The agency predicts that the probe will begin re-entry around 7:45 p.m. ET on Tuesday but says that time may be off by as much as 24 hours, meaning it could come down at any point in the next day or two.

Launched in 2012, the Van Allen Probe A is one of two satellites that NASA launched into orbit around the Van Allen radiation belt, which exists around Earth due to solar winds caught in the Earth’s magnetosphere. The probes were supposed to remain in space for only two years, but ultimately measured radiation for seven years before running out of fuel in 2019. Without fuel, the probes couldn’t orient themselves toward the sun to power their solar panels, and both shut down.

Once the mission ended, NASA originally calculated the probes would fall back to Earth sometime in 2032. The agency admits it did not account for the current solar maximum. The solar maximum is a period of increased instability on the sun, which leads to more intense space weather events. NASA says the extra solar wind caused drag on the probe, hastening its descent faster than initial calculations predicted.

Data from these probes is still used today to measure and predict the impact of solar winds and radiation on communications systems, navigation satellites, power grids and even astronauts in space. The radiation that the Van Allen Probes studied is also the same radiation responsible for all of those gorgeous auroras Earth has been getting lately.

Will the probe hurt anyone when it comes back?

NASA says that most of the spacecraft will likely burn up as it re-enters the atmosphere, but some components are expected to survive the trip back to Earth.

The components probably won’t hit anyone. NASA says the current odds of the debris causing harm to humans are about one in 4,200, which is minimal. The Space Force will continue to monitor Van Allen Probe A’s progress through the day in case those odds change.

The probe’s partner, Van Allen Probe B, is also scheduled to crash back into Earth, but it isn’t expected to arrive until sometime after 2030.