Whether you’re a home gardener or an industrial farmer, you might be familiar with mulching films — plastic sheets laid over the soil to protect seedlings and promote crop growth. But like many other plastic materials, these films can release damaging microplastics and don’t have any insect-repelling power. So, a team reporting in ACS Agricultural Science & Technology has developed an alternative biodegradable mulching film that also naturally repels pests using citronella oil.

A joint research team from NIMS and Toyo Tanso has developed a carbon electrode that enables stable operation of a 1-Wh-class stacked lithium-air battery, achieving higher output, longer life and scalability simultaneously. The team created this electrode by combining manufacturing technology that Toyo Tanso developed for its “CNovel™” porous carbon product with proprietary technology NIMS developed to fabricate self-standing carbon membranes. This combination made it possible to scale up the battery cell size—a significant step toward practical, industrial-scale lithium-air batteries. The research was published online in Cell Reports Physical Science on September 18, 2025.

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, named an eight-member team drawn from US institutions as the winner of the 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for their project,  “Real-time Bayesian inference at extreme scale: A digital twin for tsunami early warning applied to the Cascadia subduction zone.” The ACM Gordon Bell Prize tracks the progress of parallel computing and rewards innovation in applying high-performance computing to challenges in science, engineering, and large-scale data analytics.