Living wall systems, vertical structures where plants grow on building facades, are increasingly used to reduce energy demand, improve air quality, and bring nature into dense urban areas. A new laboratory study shows that a simple change to the growing substrate inside these walls could significantly improve their thermal performance. By adding biochar, a carbon-rich material made from plant waste, researchers found that living walls can provide better insulation while retaining moisture more efficiently.

The future of sleep science has arrived at Center for BrainHealth, with the January launch of the Sleep Innovation Laboratories. This multi-disciplinary research initiative is led by inaugural director Dr. Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and bioengineering at UT Dallas’ School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences and Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.

Serving as associate director of the Labs is Eti Ben Simon, PhD. Dr. Ben Simon is a neuroscientist and a sleep scientist, studying the neural mechanisms of sleep-dependent behavior in humans, specifically the emotional and social changes that take place as a result of sleep loss. Her pioneering research was the first to demonstrate the negative impact of sleep deprivation on prosocial altruism and identify its neural underpinnings using several neuroimaging tools. She previously served as a sleep researcher in the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley.

Australian researchers have uncovered a crucial new mechanism that helps explain how the heart’s major blood vessels form during early development, and how disruptions to this process can lead to serious congenital heart defects.

Deep learning is increasingly being used to emulate cloud and convection processes in climate models, offering a faster alternative to computationally intensive cloud-resolving simulations. However, because these processes unfold at kilometre scales or smaller — far below the resolution of global climate models — hybrid AI–physics approaches often become unstable when run over long time horizons. Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS)’s College of Design and Engineering (CDE), in collaboration with Tsinghua University, NVIDIA and the Centre for Climate Research Singapore, have traced a key instability to a moisture imbalance during condensation. They developed CondensNet, an adaptive, physics-constrained neural-network that can correct physically inconsistent behaviour. Integrated into a global climate model, it enables stable, accurate long-term simulations while running far faster than cloud-resolving approaches.

Plants grown for biofuel have the potential to power our travel industry, but an important fraction of their chemical power has remained stubbornly difficult to recover. New research from the DOE-funded Center for Advanced Biofuel and Bioproduct Innovation on the University of Illinois campus has demonstrated a way to preserve native lignin structure, a key component of plant matter for conversion to other valuable products, putting an improved pathway for biofuel and bioproduct production within reach.