Scientists have developed a new machine learning approach that accurately predicted critical and difficult-to-compute properties of molten salts, materials with diverse nuclear energy applications. 

Comparing brains to understand how neurons connect and how these connections can vary between species or individuals is one of the great areas of research in neuroscience. Now, a research team from the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) has developed a probabilistic model that allows different complex networks to be aligned at the same time in order to find common patterns. This method, which has been published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, not only substantially improves on current methods, but also represents a revolutionary approach to the problem that will allow us in the near future to align networks of hundreds of thousands of neurons in an effective way, something that cannot be done at present.

With the rapid development of optical communications, quantum computing, and related fields, there is an increasing demand for high-performance integrated photonic devices. As a key component of next-generation integrated photonic systems, on-chip erbium-doped waveguide amplifiers have attracted widespread attention in recent years.

A recent study by The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) reveals a looming climate crisis: the world could face heightened risks of “precipitation whiplashes” – violent swings between extreme droughts and floods – as early as 2028. This research, led by Prof. LU Mengqian and Dr. CHENG Tat-Fan of HKUST’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, attributes the escalating risk to climate-driven intensification of Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) events. This large-scale pattern of tropical intraseasonal climate variability is now propagating faster due to global warming.

Parental egg-care in fish traps them in an evolutionary dead-end through the loss of the chorion-hardening system, find scientists from the Institute of Science Tokyo. Fish have diverse egg-caring strategies that have independently emerged multiple times across lineages. Comparative whole genome analysis of 240 fish species revealed a strong correlation between loss of the chorion-hardening system and parental egg-care, revealing the mechanisms behind the evolutionary bias that restricts egg-caring fish from becoming non-egg-carers.

The molecular arrangement of thalidomide in its crystalline form significantly influences its behavior at high temperatures. Comparative analysis of its different crystal forms revealed distinct differences in thermal expansion and molecular motion, driven by symmetry. These findings highlight the critical role of crystal packing in determining solid-state properties and provide a valuable framework for enhancing the stability and performance of pharmaceuticals through targeted crystal engineering strategies.