What if instead of taking a water or soil sample to the lab, you could take the lab to the sample? That’s what a team of researchers reporting in ACS Sensors did with a new nitrate-monitoring “lab-on-a-drone” system. The drone allows for easy, real-time water sampling and analysis in hard-to-reach areas like steep ditches or swampy lowlands. The technology could help farmers optimize their fertilizer use and prevent waterway pollution from excess nitrate runoff.

As global populations continue to grow, so does the need for nutritious food and efficient manufacturing processes. Current food production practices generate side streams that could be recycled. Researchers reporting in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry fed the side streams of carrot production to fungi, generating a sustainable source of protein. They incorporated the new protein into proof-of-concept vegan patties and sausages that testers ranked as tastier than food made from plant-based proteins.

Free-space optical communications (FSOC), which use lasers for high-speed data links between aircraft, spacecraft, and ground stations, are limited by size and power constraints. To overcome this, researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, proposed and experimentally validated a fiber-bundle-based architecture that could enable compact, multi-directional FSOC.

CatDRX is a generative AI framework developed at Institute of Science Tokyo, which enables the design of new chemical catalysts based on the specific chemical reactions in which they are used. The model learns from large reaction datasets and predicts how well a catalyst will perform, while also proposing new catalyst structures. Validated across various reaction types, CatDRX offers a promising strategy to accelerate catalyst discovery for a wide range of chemical and industrial processes.

Back-contact perovskite solar cells (BC-PSCs) represent a promising new alternative design to conventional solar cells, offering improved light absorption and higher power conversion efficiency. However, for addressing interfacial defects and recombination losses in BC-PSCs, advanced interface engineering techniques are required. Now, researchers have developed a novel bilayer tin oxide electron transport layer for BC-PSCs, which reduces recombination losses, promotes efficient charge transfer, and improves power conversion efficiency.

Sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) are emerging as a sustainable alternative to lithium-ion batteries, thanks to sodium’s abundance and low cost, but their true charging speed remains uncertain due to testing limitations. In a recent study, researchers used the diluted electrode method to shed light on hard carbon’s intrinsic fast-charging performance. Their measurements show that sodium inserts into hard carbon faster than lithium and that nanopore filling governs the overall rate, offering guidance for designing better SIBs.

From work meetings to first dates, it’s essential to adjust our behavior for success. In certain situations, it can even be a matter of life or death. So how do we switch our behavior when situations change? Published in Nature Communications, neuroscientists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) describe the neural basis of behavioral flexibility in mice, with insights which may help us understand a wide variety of diseases and disorders, from addiction to obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) to Parkinson’s disease.