A team of scientists led by Academician Professor Xiang Zhang, President and Vice-Chancellor of The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Chair of Engineering and Physics, has made a major breakthrough by using a natural magnetic material called CrSBr to achieve negative refraction — without the need for complicated artificial structures. This discovery opens the door to ultra-compact lenses, super-high-resolution microscopes, and reconfigurable optical devices that can be controlled with magnets.

A new study co-led by the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) now provided an answer. Published in Nature Communications, the research reveals that Alfvén waves — plasma waves travelling along Earth’s magnetic field lines — act like an invisible power source, fueling the stunning auroral displays we see in the sky.

Insulated joint systems are crucial for safe railway operation, but are susceptible to faults. The newly developed insulated joint is intended to extend service life and reduce maintenance and repair costs.

For planning animal conservation measures, it is vital to know where endangered species live and how they interact. Ecologists are successfully using tracking technology to learn about the movements of individual animals. Yet, leveraging this knowledge to understand how entire populations change in space and time, including long-term persistence and survival chances in a given area, remains a long-standing open question in ecology. A major step toward answering this question was now achieved through a collaboration between researchers from São Paulo State University (UNESP, Brazil) and the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR): The scientists introduced a new theoretical framework that shows how individual animal movements and their home ranges shape population dynamics across space and time (Ecology Letters, DOI: 10.1111/ele.70269).

Hydrogen plays an important role in society’s energy transition. For the technology to be used on a broad scale, effective hydrogen sensors are required to prevent the formation of flammable oxyhydrogen gas when hydrogen is mixed with air. Now, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, can present a compact sensor that can be manufactured on a large scale and is well suited to the humid environments where hydrogen is to be found. Unlike today’s sensors, the new sensor performs better the more humid it gets. “The performance of a hydrogen gas sensor can vary dramatically from environment to environment, and humidity is an important factor. An issue today is that many sensors become slower or perform less effectively in humid environments. When we tested our new sensor concept, we discovered that the more we increased the humidity, the stronger the response to hydrogen became. It took us a while to really understand how this could be possible,“ says Chalmers doctoral student Athanasios Theodoridis, who is the lead author of the article in the journal ACS Sensors.

Osaka Metropolitan University researchers discovered that the concentration of beneficial supersulfides increases significantly during the fermentation process of natto.

Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology’s (SMART) Mens, Manus & Machina (M3S) interdisciplinary research group, and National University of Singapore (NUS), alongside collaborators from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore), have developed an AI control system that enables soft robotic arms to learn a wide repertoire of motions and tasks once, then adjust to new scenarios on the fly without needing retraining or sacrificing functionality.