Researchers developed an automated cold plasma and bubble system for dual modality function of treating food-industry wastewater and transforming into nutrient-rich liquid fertilizer for hydroponic farming. This automated electrified flow system runs on a low energy, reduced wastewater organic load while simultaneously improving plant growth, offering a scalable and promising route toward sustainable agriculture and water reuse.

A review of 56 field studies reveals that vegetative barriers reduce agricultural runoff by 40% and sediment loss by 63% on average, with even stronger performance in dry climates. Woody barriers outperform grass-only strips, but high variability across sites means effectiveness is hard to predict using simple design rules alone. The researchers offer a probabilistic model to help farmers and land managers make better decisions, positioning vegetative barriers as a practical alternative to cover crops in water-limited regions.

This review presents recent progress in understanding the molecular control of rice grain size and nutritional quality, and spotlights emerging routes for their genetic improvement.

Researchers studying 5556 participants in a Chinese endoscopy-screened cohort found that genetic risk and lifestyle independently and jointly influenced upper gastrointestinal cancer risk. The study identified a potential new gastric cancer susceptibility locus at 6p12.1 from genome-wide association study and showed that adding polygenic risk scores to conventional risk models improved risk stratification. A healthy lifestyle reduced risk across genetic risk groups, with greater benefit among those at high genetic risk.

Researchers have developed "MetaRL," a meta reinforcement learning model that provides near-optimal, individualized investment strategies for goals-based wealth management, i.e., the portfolio composition and the decision to take a goal or not. Pre-trained on thousands of scenarios, MetaRL achieves 97.8% of optimal utility while operating over 100 times faster than traditional methods. The model delivers immediate "zero-shot" solutions in milliseconds and remains robust against changing market regimes and stochastic inflation, enabling high-throughput, sophisticated financial planning for a broad range of investors.