Chemists at the University of Florida have developed a technique to create highly porous materials from the ubiquitous building blocks of everyday plastics, and the end result could have applications in electronics, separations and battery manufacturing.

Peking University, November 4, 2025: A research team led by Professor Zhang Qinghong and Li Rumeng from the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Peking University (PKU) School of Physics, has found that hailstorms in China have surged since the Industrial Revolution, likely due to human-driven climate warming. The study, published in Nature Communications in September 2025, combines historical records, meteorological data, and artificial intelligence to track long-term hailstorm trends.

Contrails in the blue sky remind us of daily air traffic – and its impact on the climate. However, the effect of contrails on the climate is still only partially understood. It is assumed that they have a predominantly warming effect. Researchers from Forschungszentrum Jülich and universities in Mainz, Cologne, and Wuppertal have now discovered: 80 per cent of all long-lived contrails do not form in cloudless skies, but within existing natural ice clouds, known as cirrus clouds. The climate impact of these embedded contrails has hardly been investigated to date. However, the study published in the journal Nature Communications provides new insights and could influence the planning of climate-optimized flight routes in the future.