In a paper published in National Science Review, an international team of scientists provide an overview of the advances in optical two-way time-frequency transfer based on optical fiber, which is a representative of state-of-the-art clock synchronization technology. This review gives a comprehensive discussion of the field from principles, experiments, to future applications, offering a detailed insight into this advanced technology.

A new review scrutinizes recent fossil and genomic evidence to address the long-standing debate over the origin of modern birds. It highlights growing support for a Late Cretaceous origin of major avian lineages, predating the K/Pg mass extinction. This early diversification coincided with the Cretaceous Angiosperm Terrestrial Revolution, a period of rapid ecological change prompting the emergence of flowering plants, insects, mammals, and ray-finned fishes. The review emphasizes the critical role of newly discovered Mesozoic bird fossils in clarifying the timing of the modern bird radiation.

Researchers have created graphene-based membranes that mimic the chemical gating effect in biological membranes, achieving record ion selectivity (>10,000) between monovalent and bivalent metal ions including Li⁺ and Mg²⁺ ions. The membrane allows adaptive ion permeation in response to certain signaling ions like Al³⁺, thus enables smart and ultrafast ion separation for applications in filtration, sensing, and energy technologies.

Monitoring the vitality of shellfish during cold storage is critical for ensuring seafood quality, yet conventional methods remain invasive, subjective, and slow. 

Chinese researchers identified histone demethylase LSD1 as a critical guardian of ovarian reserve. When deleted in mouse oocytes, LSD1 deficiency disrupted mitochondrial homeostasis and triggered ferroptosis, causing massive loss of dormant primordial follicles. This discovery explains how dormant follicles ("second wave") are maintained differently from active follicles ("first wave") and provides a foundation for treating premature ovarian insufficiency.

A low-field anomalous quantum oscillation is discovered at ultra-clean LaAlO3/SrTiO3 interfaces, which is attributed to the time-reversal symmetry-protected transport along quasi-1D ferroelastic domain walls.

A breakthrough study has developed a model that accurately predicts the failure of lithium metal anodes using electrochemical curve data from just the first two cycles. The model offers new insights into failure mechanisms and provides a predictive tool that could speed up the development of more reliable lithium metal batteries, which are critical for high-energy applications.

ChemELLM, a 70-billion-parameter LLM tailored for chemical engineering, outperforms leading LLMs (e.g., Deepseek-R1) on ChemEBench across 101 tasks, trained on ChemEData’s 19 billion pretraining and 1 billion fine-tuning tokens, accelerating lab-to-fab innovation.

The utilization of covalent organic frameworks (COFs) holds great potential for achieving tailorable tuning of catalytic performance through bottom-up modulation of the reticular structure. In this work, we show that a single-point structural alteration in the linkage within a nickel phthalocyanine (NiPc)-based series effectively modulates the catalytic performance of the COFs in electrochemical CO₂ reduction reaction (CO₂RR). A NiPc-based COF series with three members which possess the same NiPc unit but different linkages, including piperazine, dioxin, and dithiine, have been constructed by nucleophilic aromatic substitution reaction between octafluorophthalocyanine nickel and tetrasubstituted benzene linkers with different bridging groups. Among these COFs, the dioxin-linked COF showed the best activity of CO₂RR with a current density of CO (j_CO) =  − 27.99 mA cm⁻² at − 1.0 V (versus reversible hydrogen electrode, RHE), while the COF with piperazine linkage demonstrated an excellent selectivity of Faradaic efficiency for CO (FE_CO) up to 90.7% at a pretty low overpotential of 0.39 V. In addition, both a high FE_CO value close to 100% and a reasonable j_CO of − 8.20 mA cm^–2 at the potential of − 0.8 V (versus RHE) were obtained by the piperazine-linked COF, making it one of the most competitive candidates among COF-based materials. Mechanistic studies exhibited that single-point structural alteration could tailor the electron density in Ni sites and alter the interaction between the active sites and the key intermediates adsorbed and desorbed, thereby tuning the electrochemical performance during CO₂RR process.