Accurate river water level estimation is crucial for flood prevention, disaster mitigation and water resource management, yet strong non-stationarity and nonlinearity in complex plain river-network regions pose significant challenges to conventional approaches.

Metastatic breast cancer remains challenging to treat because tumor cells rewire metabolism to survive and spread.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) represents one of the most urgent yet addressable oncology challenges confronting Latin America. In Mexico, digestive tract cancers remain a leading contributor to cancer mortality, while CRC continues to rank as the second-most common malignant neoplasm among Latino populations in the Americas.

This crisis stems less from a lack of therapeutic advances than from severe diagnostic bottlenecks. In several large regional hospital networks, the median interval from initial symptom onset to definitive treatment stretches to seven months. The longest portion of that delay occurs between initial clinical evaluation and diagnostic confirmation. When health systems rely on late stage symptomatic presentation, oncology care becomes reactive, expensive, and frequently palliative.

A research team has uncovered genetic clues to flowering time, salt stress responses, and seed characteristics in soybean landraces from Zhejiang Province, China. 

Improving X-ray imaging under photon-starved conditions could enable lower-dose and higher-resolution imaging for medical diagnosis, security inspection, and industrial testing. Researchers from Chongqing University, the 26th Institute of CETC, and Stevens Institute of Technology developed a scalable photonic crystal scintillator using Marangoni effect-driven interfacial self-assembly. The approach increased average light output by 4.64-fold and improved the X-ray imaging signal-to-noise ratio by 13 dB while maintaining spatial resolution better than 25 μm.

A new review published in PhotoniX Synergy examines how artificial intelligence is transforming the design of terahertz (THz) metamaterial devices (meta-devices). The authors survey conventional and AI-assisted approaches for THz meta-absorbers, modulators, filters, sensors, detectors, and multifunctional devices, and show how machine learning, evolutionary algorithms, deep learning, generative models, and large language models can establish data-driven links between structural geometry and electromagnetic response. The review also discusses challenges including computational cost, limited interpretability, data scarcity, and manufacturability, and outlines future directions such as physics-informed learning, multi-scale optimization, and AI-assisted optical computing hardware for 6G communication, imaging, biosensing, spectroscopy, and security inspection.

Oil-rich food waste leachate is difficult to treat. Researchers at Zhejiang A&F University found that combining Pseudomonas aeruginosa STQ-2 with rhamnolipid-containing fermentation supernatant improved oil degradation and chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal. At an initial used cooking oil concentration of 5.0 g/L, the combined treatment achieved rates of approximately 89.9% and 95.6%, respectively, after 96 hours. The findings point to a potential biological approach for treating oily food waste leachate.

Subcutaneous immunization with live influenza virus in mice provided durable protection against lethal flu, outperforming intramuscular or inactivated vaccines. The virus remained restricted to the injection site and lymph nodes without causing lung damage. A single dose gave 100% protection for 277 days through strong germinal center responses.

Aqueous zinc-ion batteries are promising candidates for large-scale energy storage, yet their development is severely hindered by the interfacial instability of zinc anodes. Distinct from strategies employing pre-formed polymers, this work proposes an innovative monomer-induced in situ interface engineering strategy. By leveraging the preferential adsorption of acrylamide monomers on the Zn surface, a locally high-concentration region is created, which subsequently enables the in situ construction of a stable hydrated network interphase (HNI) triggered synergistically by Zn²⁺ and SO₄²⁻ during electrochemical cycling. The HNI precisely regulates Zn deposition via a triple synergistic mechanism: Lewis acid–base coordination (C = O···Zn²⁺) provides fixed nucleation sites; dynamically anchored SO₄²⁻ within the interphase forms negatively charged microregions that homogenize Zn²⁺ flux via Coulombic repulsion; and a dense hydrogen-bonding network effectively confines free water and suppresses side reactions. Benefiting from this multifunctional interphase, the Zn//Zn symmetric cell achieves an ultra-long cycling life of 8650 h (over 360 days) at 1 mA cm⁻² with excellent reproducibility, the Zn//Ti cell delivers a high average Coulombic efficiency of 99.71% at 5 mA cm⁻². The Zn//I₂ full cell retains 89.15% of its capacity after 12,000 cycles. This work provides a novel paradigm for interfacial construction toward high-performance zinc metal anodes.

Researchers developed SwiVirScan, a screening platform containing 36,416 peptides from 140 swine-associated viruses. In 127 adult breeding pigs, every serum sample showed antibody reactivity to peptides assigned to multiple viruses. The study also identified a persistent association between antibody signals for porcine bufavirus and porcine circovirus 3. The findings can guide follow-up surveillance, but antibody signals alone do not establish active infection.