Environmental exposure to thousands of synthetic chemicals poses a growing challenge for public health, largely because their biological effects are complex, multiscale, and poorly characterized.

Forest soils have an important role in protecting our climate: they remove large quantities of methane – a powerful greenhouse gas – from our atmosphere. Researchers from the University of Göttingen and the Baden-Württemberg Forest Research Institute (FVA) evaluated the world's most comprehensive data set on methane uptake by forest soils. They discovered that under certain climate conditions, which may become more common in the future, their capacity to absorb methane actually increases. The data is based on regular measurements at 13 forest plots in south-western Germany over periods of up to 24 years. The study found forest soils absorb an average of three percent more methane per year. The researchers attribute this to the climate: declining rainfall leads to drier soils which methane penetrates more easily than moist soils. In addition, microorganisms break down methane more quickly as temperatures rise. The results were published in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology.

Plant cell cultures are an attractive alternative to cultivating whole plants for obtaining natural compounds, but many biosynthetic genes remain inactive under standard culture conditions. Now, researchers from Japan demonstrated that co-culturing plant cells with ‘plant-friendly’ bacteria can activate hidden metabolic pathways. Using tobacco and Arabidopsis cells as model organisms, they showed that these bacteria trigger the production of antimicrobial acetophenones, establishing microbial co-culture as a viable strategy to leverage plant cells as reliable biofactories.

The research team realized the deterministic entanglement-assisted quantum communication based on continuous-variable entangled state over 20-km fiber channels by using improved classical signals in the encoding process and reducing the excess noise in the fiber channel. The results represented a milestone for realizing the deterministic entanglement-assisted quantum communication with continuous-variable system in fiber channels and laid the foundation to the construction of entanglement-assisted quantum communication networks in the future.

Planar micro-supercapacitors (P-MSCs), by jointly optimizing electrode intrinsic properties and interfacial structural design, serve as promising electrochemical components for next-generation micro-energy storage systems. Towards this goal, scientists in China proposed a universal strategy that integrates femtosecond laser plasma lithography with spatial light modulation (SLM-FPL). This approach enables efficient fabrication of silicon-based graphene planar micro-supercapacitors (SEP-MSCs) with integrated micro/nanostructured electrodes and offers a scalable manufacturing solution.

Conductive gels are central to flexible electronics and wearable sensing technologies, yet their practical use is often constrained by weak mechanical strength and poor environmental tolerance. In a recent study published in Journal of Bioresources and Bioproducts, researchers report a wood-based conductive eutectogel fabricated by infiltrating metal-based deep eutectic solvents into a natural wood skeleton, followed by initiator-free ultraviolet polymerization. The resulting material exhibits a rare combination of high tensile strength, stable ionic conductivity, and broad operational temperature tolerance. By leveraging wood’s aligned micro–nano channels and metal–polymer coordination chemistry, the work demonstrates a sustainable pathway toward high-performance conductive gels capable of operating under extreme environmental conditions.

The research team of Xumu Zhang and Genqiang Chen at Southern University of Science and Technology has achieved a new breakthrough in the synthesis and application of benzoxoxetine ligands. They efficiently and modularly constructed benzoxoxetine ligands through a tandem nucleophilic addition S_NAr reaction. The related findings, titled "Redox-Free and Modular Access to Oxacyclic Phosphines Enabled by a Robust Ambiphilic Phosphine Reagent," were recently published as an open access Reserach Article in CCS Chemistry.

In collaboration with the National Institute of Technology (KOSEN), Oshima College, the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) succeeded in developing a new regenerator material composed solely of abundant elements, such as copper, iron, and aluminum, that can achieve cryogenic temperatures (approx. 4 K = −269°C or below) without using any rare-earth metals or liquid helium. By utilizing a special property called "frustration" found in some magnetic materials, where the spins cannot simultaneously satisfy each other's orientations in a triangular lattice, the team demonstrated a novel method that replaces the conventional rare-earth-dependent cryogenic cooling technology. The developed material holds promise for responding to the lack of liquid helium as well as for application to stable cooling in medical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and quantum computers, which is expected to see further growth in demand. This research result was published in UK scientific journal, Scientific Reports, on December 22, 2025.