Soil acidification threatens agricultural productivity across large areas of the world, but predicting how well biochar can restore acidic soils remains difficult. A new review suggests that artificial intelligence could help scientists move from trial-and-error applications toward more precise, mechanism-guided biochar management, provided that researchers improve the quality and biological relevance of the data used to train AI models.

Silver ions are widely used in industrial and antimicrobial applications, but their high mobility and toxicity can create serious risks when they enter aquatic environments. A new study published in Biochar shows that nano-biochar can rapidly convert dissolved silver ions into silver nanoparticles under carefully controlled alkaline conditions, revealing a key role for superoxide radicals in the process.

Advances in computing power helped scientists create a method for dating pottery purported to be ancient.

The method takes advantage of the fact that the firing and cooling of clay materials creates a virtual time stamp within their structures based on the orientation of Earth's magnetic field through time. 

Now that the method is established, the researchers intend to apply it to artifacts of debated authenticity in museums all over the world. 

New research is dismantling the long-standing myth of the "pristine" Amazon. A reconstruction of 10,000 years of Amazonian pyrogeography, based on 1,361 radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dates across 303 sites - including soil charcoal and burned archaeological material - shows that fire in the rainforest is almost exclusively a human-driven phenomenon, not a natural one. Over the last two millennia, human-ignited fire has driven vegetation change on a scale comparable to major climatic shifts, such as deglaciation or the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna. The research has been published in the open-access, peer-reviewed Frontiers of Biogeography journal.

A recent study published in the National Science Review reveals that the tradition of wrapping grains in leaves may date back as far as 2,200 years ago. Leaf-wrapped plant bundles unearthed at the Wuwangdun Site—believed to have served as funerary offerings—are now considered an early precursor to zongzi, the iconic traditional Chinese food enjoyed during the Dragon Boat Festival.

Fridges, A/C systems, and datacenters consume enormous amounts of electricity and the cooling demand is constantly on the rise. A team of research from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Tsukuba in Japan is now presenting a new approach substantiated by a prototype where heat assumes the role formerly taken by an electric motor. Two ultra-thin shape-memory films interact to convert thermal energy into mechanical work in a first step and finally into measurable cold. Their work opens up new possibilities for the future use of waste heat and solar energy for solid-state cooling. The results have been published in Nature Energy. (DOI: 10.1038/s41560-026-02122-6)