A computer that can calculate hundreds of scientific tasks simultaneously and thus helps provide a solution to key social challenges: this is the new IT heart of Paderborn University. The ‘Otus’ supercomputer was put into operation at the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing (PC2) on Monday 10 November. From now onwards, researchers all over Germany can use it to run challenging computer simulations and conduct scientific enquiry at the highest level.  

Electronic signs are all around us, giving directions or advertising the latest gadget. In ACS Energy Letters, researchers report that they’ve developed a dynamic display technology that dissipates heat instead of generating it when the color changes, cooling the surface underneath. They also showed the display could be attached to flexible backings and wrapped over skin. The passive cooling mechanism could usher in the next generation of sustainable, flexible outdoor signs and smart devices. 

Emissions of the greenhouse gas methane from lakes and reservoirs risk doubling by the end of the century due to climate change according to a new study from Linköping University, Sweden, and NASA Ames Research Center in the US. This in turn could raise Earth’s temperature more than suggested by the UN climate panel IPCC’s current worst-case scenario.

The Mpemba effect—"hot water can freeze faster than cold”—has long intrigued physicists as one of nature’s most counterintuitive phenomena. Its quantum analogue, the quantum Mpemba effect (QME), brings this counterintuitive phenomenon into the quantum world: a more asymmetric state can restore its subsystem symmetry faster during nonequilibrium evolution. Although this effect has been extensively investigated in integrable and thermalized systems, whether such a phenomenon can persist in many-body localization (MBL) systems that do not thermalize, has remained an important open question. Exploring the QME in MBL systems is key to understanding new mechanism of symmetry restoration without thermalization and to offering new insights into universal nonequilibrium dynamics.

Professor Zhongkui Zhao of Dalian University of Technology, in collaboration with Professor Riguang Zhang of Taiyuan University of Technology, Researcher Yuefeng Liu of the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Professor Ting Zhang of Qingdao University, and Professor Chunshan Song  of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, constructed a single-atom Cu-N₂O₁ site with axial oxygen coordination on C₃N₄. Through the polar activation of the CH bond by the polar Cu-O bond, they successfully pioneered a new photocatalytic methane upgrading strategy independent of reactive oxygen species. This strategy not only significantly increased the rate of photocatalytic methane conversion to ethanol by 226  μmol/g/h under mild conditions, but also achieved an ethanol product selectivity as high as 98%. This achievement not only greatly advances the basic understanding of photocatalytic methane conversion to ethanol, but also creates a new paradigm for photocatalytic methane upgrading, successfully solving the seesaw dilemma between the liquid fuel generation rate and its selectivity in the photocatalytic methane conversion process, and providing new ideas and methods for the innovative development of future photocatalytic methane conversion. The article was published as an open access research article in CCS Chemistry, the flagship journal of the Chinese Chemical Society.