New research reveals that natural soil minerals critically control the fate of lead locked into chloropyromorphite—a stable mineral formed during phosphorus-based lead remediation. Negatively charged clay minerals enhance its mobility, while positively charged iron minerals promote rapid settling, highlighting the need for site-specific risk assessments.

Optical neural networks capable of executing large-scale operations in parallel at the speed of light play an ever more prominent role in energy-efficient artificial intelligence. Towards this goal, scientists in China, inspired by the human brain, invented a backpropagation-free framework (B-ONN) for local learning. The technique will open new avenues for deploying physically robust, large-scale optical computing systems in real-world edge devices and green infrastructures.

- Professor Sarah Yunmi Lee’s research team in KAIST’s Department of Chemistry developed a strategy to balance radical generation and catalyst regeneration.

- Uses even substances that previously did not react easily, synthesizing target compounds under mild conditions such as room temperature

- Expected to be applied to developing new catalysts for building complex molecules used in pharmaceuticals, bioactive substances, etc.

A research team from the School of Physics at Renmin University of China has developed PhononBench, a large-scale phonon-based benchmark for evaluating the dynamical stability of AI-generated crystal materials. By combining the MatterSim-v1 universal machine-learning interatomic potential with Phonopy, the study enables high-throughput phonon-spectrum calculations for more than 130,000 AI-generated crystal structures. The benchmark systematically evaluates the dynamical stability of crystals generated by different AI models, identifies 32,995 MatterSim-labeled dynamically stable crystal structures under a strict phonon-frequency criterion, and provides a web-based platform for rapid phonon-spectrum calculation and dynamical-stability assessment.

Researchers from the Institute of Coal Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, have identified the nickel dimer (Ni₂) play vital role inCO₂ methanation. Encapsulated in MFI zeolite with MnOₓ promotion at only ~0.86% Ni loading, the catalyst achieves ~76% CO₂ conversion, ~98% CH₄ selectivity and CH₄ space time yield of ~450 mol·mol Ni^-1·h^-1 at 400°C.

Smoke from African agricultural fires brightens clouds over the southeast Atlantic—but new research from scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science shows that the same weather pattern carrying the smoke also thins and reduces cloud cover, effectively offsetting its cooling effect.

UCLA helped launch a complementary approach to computing in which richly connected, self-organized networks of nanowires or nanoparticles act as hardware-based neural networks.

Inspired by the brain, this approach is well-suited for processing complex data quickly and energy-efficiently.

A forward-looking article in Nature Reviews Physics explores these self-organized networks and their potential to complement cloud computing by handling sensor data locally in applications such as smart devices, autonomous vehicles, industrial robots and satellites.