Strong Northern Lights-like activity is the standout feature of today’s weather report, which is coming at you from a strange, extrasolar world, instead of a standard TV studio. That is thanks to astronomers from Trinity College Dublin, who used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to take a close look at the weather of a toasty nearby rogue planet, SIMP-0136.

The exquisite sensitivity of the instruments on board the space-based telescope enabled the team to see minute changes in brightness of the planet as it rotated, which were used to track changes in temperature, cloud cover and chemistry. 

Surprisingly, these observations also illuminated SIMP-0136’s strong auroral activity, similar to the Northern Lights here on Earth or the powerful aurora on Jupiter, which heat up its upper atmosphere.

This discovery paves the way for more cost-effective and efficient catalysts that could significantly lower the barriers to industrial-scale CO₂ conversion processes. The technology holds promise for contributing to the development of renewable energy sources, reducing reliance on fossil fuels, and mitigating the impacts of climate change. It may also inspire further research into other catalyst-support combinations, potentially leading to breakthroughs in various electrochemical applications.

Solid-state phosphorescent materials with stimulus-responsive properties have been widely developed for diverse applications. However, the task of generating excited states with long lifetimes in aqueous solution remains challenging due to the ultrafast deactivation of the triplet excitons and the difficulty in regulating stimulation sites in an aqueous environment.  Here, we present a microscale rigid framework engineering strategy that can be used to modulate the phosphorescence properties of carbon nanodots (CNDs). Ultrasound-responsive phosphorescent CNDs with a lifetime of 1.25 seconds in an aqueous solution were achieved. 

Producing ammonia – a valuable chemical compound used in many fields – takes enormous amounts of energy. Researchers at Tohoku University have found a more efficient option that converts harmful pollutants in water to ammonia.

Beneath our feet, an invisible world of electron exchanges quietly drives the chemistry that sustains ecosystems, controls water quality, and even determines the fate of pollutants. A new review published in Environmental and Biogeochemical Processes sheds light on how electrons travel through soils and sediments across surprisingly long distances—sometimes spanning centimeters to meters—reshaping our understanding of underground environments and offering new strategies for pollution cleanup.

A sticky, toxic by-product that has long plagued renewable energy production may soon become a valuable resource, according to a new review published in Biochar.

What if we told you that one of nature’s simplest materials—biochar, the black gold of sustainable tech—can do more than just soak up pollution? Spoiler: it can actually destroy it directly, like a microscopic superhero with an electric punch. And the best part? This isn’t sci-fi. It’s real science, just published on July 10, 2025, in Carbon Research—led by Dr. Yuan Gao from the Key Laboratory of Industrial Ecology and Environmental Engineering (Ministry of Education), School of Environmental Science and Technology at Dalian University of Technology, China. This team didn’t just study biochar—they redefined it.