News from Science China Press

Researchers at Nanjing University developed platinum(IV)-antibody conjugates that enhance tumor immunogenicity without relying on strong cancer cell killing. The targeted system delivers low-dose platinum selectively to tumors, increasing MHC-I expression and improving immune recognition while reducing systemic toxicity. In mouse models, the strategy significantly enhanced the efficacy of anti-PD-1 immunotherapy.

A new study in National Science Review presents the first comprehensive 3D mapping of China's lakes. Researchers found that 65% of the nation's natural lake freshwater is stored in deep lakes of the remote western interior, rather than the water-abundant east. This discovery highlights a severe geographic imbanlance with population distribution, underscoring the vital role of artificial reservoirs and the need for region-specific water governance strategies.

A global meta-analysis shows that carbon farming, through legume cover crops or vermicompost, enhances agroecosystem multifunctionality. Soil biota abundance was strongly linked to multifunctionality and showed more frequent win–win relationships with other functions than species richness. Across agroecosystems, abundance was primarily associated with local soil properties and climate factors. The study identified site-specific management strategies that align carbon inputs with local environmental conditions in global croplands to enhance multifunctionality.

Inspired by the rock-paper-scissors game in ecosystem, researchers have established an active thermal transport model, revealing robust topological temperature localization phenomenon and topological phase transition. This work unveils new physics in non-equilibrium heat transfer and offers a new paradigm for thermal regulation and management.

Quantum particles in imperfect or quasiperiodic environments may spread, become localized, or enter critical states with fractal wave functions. These behaviors can combine into seven fundamental localization phases, but a unified framework for all of them has been missing. A team led by Prof. Xiong-Jun Liu at Peking University has now developed a generic spin-1/2 quasiperiodic system that captures all the fundamental phases, proves three theorems, constructs new exactly solvable models, and proposes the implementation with ultracold atoms in optical Raman lattices.

Plastics are essential to modern life, but their inherent poor mechanical, thermal and electrical properties limit advanced applications. Researchers from the Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics and partners reported in National Science Review a scalable in-situ CNT-polymer fusion and hot-working strategy. This method breaks the bottleneck of high-loading CNT incorporation into thermoplastic matrices, and develops novel CNT superplastics applicable to thermoplastic processing and 3D printing.

A recent work published in National Science Review report the first realization of a higher-order Weyl exceptional ring semimetal in a 3D lossy acoustic metamaterial. This study systematically analyzes the non-Hermitian topological properties of such metamaterial, and focuses on two types of higher-order topological phenomena: topological hinge states and hinge-dependent skin effect.