The increasing frequency of once-in-a-decade agricultural and ecological drought has underscored the urgency of studying hydrological changes. A research team from the Department of Land Surveying and Geo-informatics of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has collaborated with international experts to analyse the estimated changes in land water storage over the past 40 years by utilising space geodetic observation technology and global hydrological change data. This innovative method has revealed a rapid depletion in global soil moisture, resulting in a significant amount of water flowing into the oceans, leading to a rise in sea levels. The research provides new insights into the driving factors behind the alarming reduction in terrestrial water storage and rise in sea levels. The findings have been published in the international journal Science.

Here, researchers from Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, CAS, fabricated customized micropatterns consisting of hydrogel core-shell nanoparticles via the femtosecond laser maskless optical projection lithography (Fs-MOPL) technique for the first time.

Their work offers an approach to fabricating hydrogel core-shell nanoparticles without high temperature or multiple steps.

Mississippi State Professor of Physics Dipangkar Dutta is a principal investigator on a groundbreaking experiment—revealing “symmetry” in physics doesn’t always behave as scientists once believed—recently published in the prestigious journal Physics Letters B.

When you pull something—like a rubber band—you expect it to get longer. But what if it did the opposite? What if it suddenly shrunk instead? In a study published on April 14 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers from AMOLF and ARCNL have made this possible. They created structures that snap inward when pulled outward. This surprising behavior defies conventional understanding of materials and opens up exciting applications in soft robotics, smart devices, and vibration control systems.  

Despite being a promising and efficient methodology for producing green hydrogen as a novel energy vector, anion exchange membrane water electrolyzers (AEMWEs) have yet to achieve significant commercial success. This is primarily due to the sluggish and complex oxygen evolution reaction (OER) at the anode, which remains the main bottleneck for this technology. To enhance the OER kinetics with minimum overpotentials, scarce and overpriced noble metal-based electrocatalysts are largely utilized, making the AEMWEs practically unaffordable. Recently, amorphous NiFe mixed oxides with variable Ni/Fe ratios have been synthesized using a simple and affordable sol–gel method, successfully enhancing both the OER activity and operational durability in AEMWEs. This work was published in Industrial Chemistry & Materials in March 2025.

Over time, stress and anxiety can build to a point where life’s challenges become overwhelming and cause physical effects. Now, in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, researchers report a dental floss pick with a built-in sensor that could monitor stress as part of a daily routine. The device, which accurately senses levels of the stress hormone cortisol in minutes, could help users recognize when it’s time to get help.

A study published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry presents a new family of candidate compounds for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and pain, which have shown promising effects in animal models. Researchers of the University of Barcelona led a multidisciplinary team that designed, synthetized and pharmacologically validated these molecules that modulate a therapeutic target which has been little studied, the imidazoline I2 receptors, which are altered in many diseases without efficient pharmacological treatments. According to the researchers, the new compound has the “necessary characteristics to progress in pre-clinical phases and to be positioned as a potential anti-Alzheimer’s drug or analgesic with a novel mechanism of action”.