For five days in April of 2025, record-breaking winds swept through China, with speeds surpassing 45 meters per second in some areas. That’s roughly the same wind speed of a category 2 hurricane. However, a hurricane breezes through in a matter of hours. What caused this extreme wind event — that resulted in five deaths and caused more than $154 million in economic losses, according to the Ministry of Emergency Management — to persist at such strength for so long and across so much of the country?

Sodium-ion batteries have garnered significant attention as vital energy storage solutions owing to their cost-effectiveness and high energy density, yet tracking their interface ion kinetics and achieving precise state of charge (SoC) quantification remain challenging. Scientists from China have demonstrated an implantable multiresonant fiber-optic grating sensor to address these issues. This operando tool rapidly decodes the dynamic nanoscale ion transport at the electrode-electrolyte interface and achieves highly accurate SoC quantification by integrating the optical signal, offering a powerful platform for next-generation battery diagnostics and design.

Understanding and predicting new phenomena in crystals with quantum geometry. This is the goal Dr Johannes Mitscherling is working towards. He is establishing a new Emmy Noether Group at the University of Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany.

 A research team led by Dr. Kang Daehyun at the Center for Climate and Carbon Cycle Research of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST; President Oh Sang-rok) announced that it has developed KIST-Ocean, an AI-based global ocean prediction model, to overcome these limitations. This achievement is the result of the KIST Climate and Environment Research Institute, which was established to predict and respond to climate change through science and technology. It is significant in that it has successfully integrated AI technology into the field of long-term ocean and climate forecasting-which requires vast amounts of observational data and physics-based analysis capabilities-thereby achieving both high accuracy and computational efficiency.

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) and RIKEN Pioneering Research Institute (PRI) in Japan together with collaborators from the University of Münster, Germany, have developed a new hydrogel that offers significant advantages over others currently on the market in the field of biomaterials. The new hydrogel has a highly organized structure made from nanofibers that contain tiny water channels. The molecules within each nanofiber all point in the same direction, creating an electrical polarization along the fiber. This means that in addition to being strong and flexible, the new gel could be used to transport ions, generate electrical signals when squeezed, or have other advanced interactions with biological tissues. 

Hydrogen is widely viewed as a promising clean energy carrier, but storing and transporting it efficiently remains a major challenge. Methanol offers an attractive alternative because it is liquid under ambient conditions, contains a high proportion of hydrogen, and can be converted into hydrogen when needed. Now, researchers have uncovered how different oxygen species on catalyst surfaces control this conversion process, offering new guidance for designing more efficient catalysts for hydrogen production.

Entrepreneurs around the world are invited to apply for a chance to pitch their optics or photonics technologies or products to a panel of expert judges at the 17th annual SPIE Startup Challenge.  SPIE, the international society of optics and photonics, holds the competition at Photonics West every January, with multiple teams walking away with cash prizes.