14-Jan-2026 Visible light writes hidden fluorescent patterns for anti-counterfeiting KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. A new type of polymer material that can be patterned using gentle visible light, creating stable hidden images visible only under UV light. The method uses dynamic diselenide bonds and a swelling switch to enable rapid, precise patterning without damaging the material. Journal Supramolecular Materials Funder National Natural Science Foundation of China, XPLORER PRIZE, Beijing Out-standing Young Scientist Program
14-Jan-2026 Snowflakes just got metal: Researchers discover emergence phenomenon in metal nanocrystals Northern Arizona University In a new study from Northern Arizona University, a group of researchers discovered that when fabricated gold, copper and iron nanocrystals clump together during a lightning-fast chemical reaction, they form pentagonal constructs that strongly resemble natural snowflakes, a phenomenon that holds incredible implications for the future of nanotechnology. Journal Small
14-Jan-2026 An innovative new tool draws on emojis to improve consumer sentiment analysis American Marketing Association A new study introduces "NADE" (Natural Affect DEtection), which leverages the power of emojis to give companies unprecedented insight into consumer emotions. Journal Journal of Marketing
14-Jan-2026 New research shows museum design quietly determines what visitors see and what they miss Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences New research shows that museums' design decisions, often invisible to the visitor, play a decisive role in shaping attention, movement and discovery. Journal Management Science
14-Jan-2026 Study reveals protein linked to spread of pancreatic cancer through nerves Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo Brazilian research shows that stellate pancreatic cells produce periostin, remodeling tissue and facilitating tumor infiltration, a key mechanism of the aggressiveness and high mortality of the disease. Journal Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology Funder Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo
14-Jan-2026 Study: Access to parks linked with greater physical activity for some, but not all, residents University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau A two-year study of U.S. counties found that residents with adequate access to parks and recreational facilities slightly increased their physical activity levels, but the relationship was stronger in counties that had largely white, non-Hispanic populations and higher median incomes. Journal Leisure Sciences Funder University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
14-Jan-2026 FedCare: towards interactive diagnosis of federated learning systems Higher Education Press FedCare delivers the first visual pipeline that pinpoints, classifies and mitigates FL failures in real time, cutting convergence rounds and boosting accuracy across tested attacks without sacrificing privacy. Journal Frontiers of Computer Science
14-Jan-2026 DVRE: dominator-based variables reduction of encoding for model-based diagnosis Higher Education Press DVRE cuts MaxSAT encoding size offline and clauses online, delivering the fastest complete MBD on ISCAS-85 for both single- and multi-observation cases without extra data. Journal Frontiers of Computer Science
14-Jan-2026 Boosting recommendation performance by user intention aware visual feature pre-training Higher Education Press Research team debuts the first visual pre-training paradigm tailored for CTR prediction, lifting Taobao GMV by 0.88% (p < 0.01) via user-intent contrastive learning that mines interest-centric image signals. Journal Frontiers of Computer Science
14-Jan-2026 Multi-constraint reinforcement learning in complex robot environments Higher Education Press FPMCO decomposes multi-constraint RL into KL-projection sub-problems, achieving higher reward with lower computing than second-order rivals on the new SCIG robotics benchmark. Journal Frontiers of Computer Science
