Kyushu University researchers have developed an AI-based method to measure how closely corporate disclosures match the ESG issues that matter financially to each industry. Applied to Japan’s food and beverage sector, it showed that companies place greater emphasis on social-related topics, while environmental disclosure remains relatively limited. Priorities also shifted as reporting requirements changed. The study offers insights for investors, firms, and standard setters seeking to evaluate and design effective sustainability reporting regimes.

A breakthrough at the University of Missouri could lead to new therapies for people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other motor neuron diseases.

The grant will enable researchers to develop next-generation cryptographic protocols to protect sensitive communications and digital systems against future threats from quantum computers. The work aims to strengthen digital security as quantum technology advances, developing more efficient and scalable tools for safeguarding information and supporting complex security applications.

In solids, different types of excitations can affect each other. Using a new experimental technique at the X-ray free-electron laser SwissFEL, a team at Paul Scherrer Institute PSI has now been able to uncover the interplay between electronic, magnetic, and lattice excitations. This understanding is important for learning how spin excitations can be controlled for future information technology. The results have been published in the journal Nature Communications. 

Drainage networks that carry rainwater toward rivers play an important role in floods, but their extent is often difficult to represent in flood models. Researchers from Tokyo University of Science simulated the 2023 flood in Japan's Ichinomiya River Basin using seven drainage network configurations to determine how far upstream channels should be modeled. The findings show that flood models can lose accuracy when drainage networks are either oversimplified or represented in excessive detail.

A Johns Hopkins Medicine-led research team has received an award of up to $52.1 million over four years from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), part of the Department of Health and Human Services, to better understand the rules that decide what shape a protein takes — and how those rules could support the identification of earlier diagnostics and therapeutic targets when proteins fold the wrong way. The team will start this work, which will be publicly shared through open-access resources, by studying Parkinson’s disease and Ewing sarcoma, a rare cancer of bone and soft tissue in children and young adults.

Improving X-ray imaging under photon-starved conditions could enable lower-dose and higher-resolution imaging for medical diagnosis, security inspection, and industrial testing. Researchers from Chongqing University, the 26th Institute of CETC, and Stevens Institute of Technology developed a scalable photonic crystal scintillator using Marangoni effect-driven interfacial self-assembly. The approach increased average light output by 4.64-fold and improved the X-ray imaging signal-to-noise ratio by 13 dB while maintaining spatial resolution better than 25 μm.