Dyes are used to colour papers, leather products, garments, and are also employed in the rubber and cosmetic industries. But what happens after these dyes have served their purpose? Billions of tons of dye-containing wastewater enter water systems every year, eventually rendering them unfit for human and animal use. They can also lead to serious health issues such as breathing problems, jaundice, and cancer. As an effort to tackle this issue, researchers have developed advanced materials, which act like microscopic sponges, as a promising solution to industrial wastewater treatment. 

Researchers have developed a comprehensive numerical model for liquid metal batteries that captures potential, mass transfer, and species distribution while remaining fast enough to support practical battery management. The work could help bring greater precision to how these emerging batteries are monitored, controlled, and optimized, especially in long-duration energy storage applications where both safety and lifespan are critical.

A chromosome-level genome has opened a new window into how Hemsleya ellipsoidea, a medicinal cucurbit known as Xuedan, evolved its unusual ability to accumulate cucurbitacin IIa (CuIIa), a bioactive triterpenoid associated with anti-inflammatory and antibacterial activities. 

Fresh aroma is one of the qualities that makes litchi immediately recognizable, yet the chemistry and genetics behind this sensory trait have remained unclear.

A new comprehensive review published in Chiral Chemistry highlights rapid progress in the catalytic asymmetric synthesis of chiral organogermanes, marking a significant shift from traditional resolution-based approaches toward efficient catalytic methods that directly control stereochemistry at both carbon and germanium centers.

Old charcoal kilns hidden in Mediterranean forests may offer a natural window into one of today’s most discussed soil technologies: biochar. A study published in Biochar shows that charcoal left in forest soils for decades undergoes clear chemical aging, develops oxygen-rich surface groups, and helps create distinctive soil microsites shaped by both biology and geology.

People are exposed to thousands of chemicals every day — through the products they use, the food they eat and the environments they live in — but only a fraction of those chemicals have been fully tested for safety.

Researchers at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences (VMBS) are turning to artificial intelligence to help close that gap, using new tools to predict chemical toxicity and determine how much those predictions can be trusted.

An international experiment that has already broken several records. The KATRIN project (KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino Experiment), led by KIT–Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and involving 20 institutions from seven different countries, including the Politecnico di Milano, celebrated the achievement of 1,000 days of neutrino measurements with the inauguration of phase 2 of the project: the commissioning of a new and more sophisticated detector, TRISTAN. The RadLab group of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering – DEIB at Politecnico di Milano, led by professors Carlo Fiorini and Marco Carminati (the latter being the national coordinator for the experiment), also supported by the National Institute for Nuclear Physics, made a significant contribution to the creation of the new detector by designing and developing the detection modules and the low-noise, highly compact readout electronics of the SDD detector.

For about half the global population, rice is the staple food. Yet every year, a fungal disease – rice blast – destroys harvests that could feed 60 million people. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have uncovered how the pathogen outsmarts the rice plant’s defense system. The findings open up new possibilities for making rice more resilient, directly benefiting global food security.