Agricultural plastic mulch helps farmers conserve water, control weeds, and improve crop productivity, but disposing of the used films creates a growing environmental challenge. Researchers have now developed a catalyst made from fishbone-derived char, phosphoric acid, and iron that converts low-density polyethylene agricultural film into bio-oil with a yield of up to 89.32 wt.% and an olefin selectivity of 84.03%.

Astronomers used new MOTHRA telescope in Chile to image famous eye-shaped nebula. Team found 22 glowing shock waves where stellar debris collided with interstellar gas. After colliding with gas, stellar fragments remain intact for just 10,000 years, the team estimates. Finding reveals how dying stars return material to space to form new stars and planets.

Rice University’s Pengcheng Dai recently published a paper in Physical Review X describing the first successful efforts to put a proposed altermagnet material into a single magnetic domain state, allowing the research team to characterize the material’s intrinsic magnetic structure. 

Shengxi Huang, associate professor in Rice University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was elected this month as a fellow of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, in recognition of her contributions to the field and service to its scientific community.

Published in Chemical Science, researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have designed and synthesized new multi-functional compounds that change structure under UV light. Depending on the light conditions,  the molecules reversibly switch between two stable forms through a ring-opening and ring-closing reaction.  These molecular switches have a range of desirable properties, for example glowing with fluorescence after their structure changes, making it easy to see which state the molecule is in.

How cells respond to the leukemia drug 6-thioguanine still holds surprises: A new study, led jointly by researchers from CeMM and the University of Oxford identifies NUDT5 as an unexpected regulator of drug sensitivity and reveals that its role has nothing to do with its enzymatic activity. Published in Nature Communications (DOI 10.1038/s41467-026-74489-9), the findings combine targeted protein degradation, medicinal chemistry and genetic experiments to uncover a previously hidden layer of thiopurine biology and further challenge traditional views of how enzymes function in cells.

Discovery was hidden in the Hubble Space Telescope’s archival data. Astronomers used stream as a tool for mapping dark matter in a low-mass galaxy. Team expects future telescopes will find many more stellar streams, expanding the ability to probe dark matter across the universe.

For the first time, researchers have discovered a globular cluster stellar stream in a galaxy beyond the Milky Way – specifically in an ultra-diffuse galaxy. The discovery opens up new possibilities for studying dark matter, one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in modern astrophysics. The finding was made by researchers from the University of Copenhagen and has just been published in Nature.