A new review from Hasanuddin University highlights how chitosan and alginate-based composite beads could be the next-generation solution for sustainable wastewater remediation. By combining naturally derived biopolymers with functional additives, these composite beads demonstrate improved adsorption capacity, mechanical stability, reusability, and stronger pollutant binding. The review outlines a roadmap for advancing such composites into stimuli-responsive smart materials and extending their applications beyond water treatment to circular bioeconomy, smart agriculture, and even precision medicine.

Histone variants help establish DNA methylation at transposons (jumping genes) while preventing this epigenetic modification from spreading to essential genes in plants, reveals a study from Institute of Science Tokyo. By revealing how these chromosome-associated proteins guide the formation of precise epigenomic patterns, the findings provide new insights into the selective silencing of transposons, laying the groundwork for future epigenome-editing technologies for crop improvement and disease research.

Designing Latent Heat Thermal Energy Storage (LHTES) systems requires time-consuming and computationally expensive computational fluid dynamics simulations. To overcome this bottleneck, a new study presents a hybrid physics-informed neural network (PINN) framework trained on a sparse ground-truth dataset. Together with a genetic algorithm-based multi-objective design optimization, this PINN framework enables rapid, autonomous exploration of the continuous LHTES design space and thermohydraulic trade-offs. This approach serves as a crucial tool for developing next-generation LHTES systems.