Imagine drawing on something as delicate as a living cell — without damaging it. Researchers at the University of Missouri have made this groundbreaking discovery using an unexpected combination of tools: frozen ethanol, electron beams and purple-tinted microbes.

By advancing a method called ice lithography, the team was able to etch incredibly small, detailed patterns directly onto fragile biological surfaces.

Using synchrotron X-ray nanotomography with detailed 3D imaging and in-situ mechanical testing, researchers are peering inside shark skeletons at the nanoscale, revealing a microscopic “sharkitecture” that helps these ancient apex predators withstand extreme physical demands of constant motion. After hundreds of millions of years of evolution, scientists can now finally see how shark cartilage works at the nanoscale – and learn from them.

Based on the CAFE-Brazil datasets, a new study from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry shows that deep thunderstorm convection over the Amazon rainforest transports BVOCs up to ten to twelve kilometers above the canopy, where they accumulate during the night, before igniting dawn photochemistry in the upper atmosphere. The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Currently, there remains the formidable challenge of preparing supported metal catalysts that possess both high catalytic activity and stability. Herein, a novel supported Ru catalyst (Ru-Al₂O₃@CN-A) with a special structure where single Ru atoms and Ru nanoparticles embedded into N-doped carbon layer is successfully fabricated via a coating-impregnation-pyrolysis-etching (CIPE) strategy.

Almost all of Cu_xS compounds only produce the simple two-electron transferred products CO and HCOOH but it remains a large challenge to obtain the multiple-electron transferred hydrocarbon products in electrocatalytic CO₂ reduction reaction (CO₂RR). Moreover, identifying the distinct contributions of S atoms to catalysis, particularly for catalytic activity and product selectivity in electrocatalytic CO₂RR, remains a challenging task. A research team led by Professor Yuan-Biao Huang at the Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Science, has successfully prepared a model catalyst based on a conductive two-dimensional metal-organic framework with defined Cu-S₄ active sites (denoted as Cu₃(THT)₂) for CO₂RR. Their work demonstrates for the first time that non-metallic sulfur centers adjacent to catalytic metal sites can effectively optimize the electronic structure of Cu sites and stabilize key *CO intermediates, thereby modulating product selectivity toward the eight-electron-transferred hydrocarbon CH₄.